Goodbye to Mary Tyler Moore, Who Inspired the Working Single Girl in American TV

If you’ve seen 30 Rock and read just about everything on the show, you’d have caught the many references to The Mary Tyler Moore Show — also about a 30-something single woman Mary ( Like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon), working in television under a curmudgeonly but loveable boss and trying to manage a clueless star.

But that’s not the only show that it inspired: Oprah Winfrey reportedly re-created the show’s set, Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman also said that the last episode influenced her finale, besides finding top mentions in pop culture (Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, Saturday Night Live) and inspiring spin-offs (Phyllis, Rhoda).

For 25 years, the show held the record for the most number of Emmys won.

Mary was played by Mary Tyler Moore, who passed away on Wednesday at 80. Her family revealed that she suffered from cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia. The New York Times, in a lovely tribute, writes that she incarnated the modern women on television and that her “witty and graceful performances” on two television shows in the 1960s and ’70s “helped define a new vision of American womanhood” – the first never-married working woman on American television.

Her portrayal of Mary and later her activism made Moore an undeniable feminist icon.