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
Maude (TV series) program (during the heyday of topical sitcoms, which its presence helped to create), when it was regularly one of the top-ten highest-rated American television programs in any given week. In Great Britain, "Maude" was not shown nationally, although it was shown (beginning in 1975) in the ITV regions of Westward, Border, Tyne Tees, Anglia, Yorkshire, Granada and Channel. Satellite station Sky One ran the series in the early/mid 1990s. In the fifth season, "Maude" unexpectedly plunged from #4 to #31 in the Nielsen ratings as its lead-ins "Rhoda" and "Phyllis" began to struggle. In 1978, late in the sixth season,