Mary Tyler Moore pivotal one-hour musical special called "Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman", Moore and husband Grant Tinker successfully pitched a sitcom centered on Moore to CBS. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" is a half-hour newsroom sitcom featuring Ed Asner as her gruff boss Lou Grant. Moore's show proved so popular that three other regular characters, Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern, Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom and Ed Asner as Lou Grant were also spun off into their own series. The premise of the single working woman's life, alternating during the program between work and home, became a television staple. After
Lou Grant (TV series) in a Drama Series" four of the five years the series ran; Walden, Kelsey, and Adams all received multiple nominations for supporting Emmys. Ed Asner served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, in which capacity during the 1980s he opposed U.S. policy in Central America, working closely with Medical Aid for El Salvador. The sudden cancellation of "Lou Grant" in 1982 was the subject of much controversy. The show had high ratings, the level of which should have justified its ongoing presence in primetime (it was in the ACNielsen top ten throughout its final month on the