Maude season 2

I had occasion to meet producer Norman Lear in the spring of 1978, when I was a freshman in college. He was coming to our university to give a brief lecture, and then a select group of students were joining him at a local restaurant for dinner. I have no memory of how those particular students were chosen, but as a lowly freshman, I was not among them. But this was at a time when my ambition was to write for television, so I was not about to miss the chance to meet Normal Lear — and having been raised on ‘60s sitcoms, I wasn’t going to let anything as trivial as the lack of an invite stop me. In true Lucy Carmichael fashion, I managed to convince the school newspaper that they needed to do a story on Lear’s visit, and even though I had never written for them before, I persuaded them that I was the one to do it. And then I made the case that part of covering his visit meant covering the dinner, so they snagged me an invite.

For all I’m hyping this story — like it’s actually going somewhere — I’m sorry to report that I remember nothing of Lear’s visit, except for two incidents. First, the irrelevant one. At evening’s end, I asked Lear for his autograph. He asked how he should sign it, and I suggested, jokingly, “To Tommy, whom I know I will employ someday.” And he proceeded to write, “To Tommy, whom I know I will employ someday — as dictated by Tommy,” which to this day, I find remarkable — that he was truly afraid that an autograph scribbled on the back of a textbook might qualify as some kind of binding document. (Hollywood, I realized for perhaps the first time, was a really strange town.) But the more pertinent after-dinner anecdote: I managed to strike up a conversation with Lear as a group of us were walking down Elm Street, and I brought up Maude (one of the few Lear shows I followed devotedly) and several of the writers whom I most admired. And when I was finished, Lear looked away from a moment, as if tallying his various shows in his head (which at that time included All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons and One Day at a Time), then turned back to announce that — of all his series — Maude was probably the best of the bunch.

Here’s what’s ironic about Lear’s pronouncement. Maude, the series he considered one of his best efforts — if not his very best — was, that very month, concluding its six-year run in ignominious fashion. Its ratings had dipped unexpectedly in Season 5, then fallen so precipitously in Season 6 that CBS kept bouncing it around the schedule, trying to find a timeslot where it would do the least damage. And although the forces that had guided the show during its glory years — the legendary writing team of Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf — had gone, it’s not like the quality of the final two seasons had dropped so dramatically as to warrant this kind of viewer defection. Audiences had simply tired of Maude Findlay — and were abandoning Maude. It left the airwaves with one of the shortest runs of Lear’s hit shows. All in the Family lasted 13 seasons; The Jeffersons managed 11, and One Day at a Time 9. Maude and Good Times expired after six, but Good Times was clearly damaged by all the cast defections. With Maude, everyone was still around — except the audience.

We think of the Lear sitcoms now as groundbreaking, which they were, but also as challenging and abrasive, which they weren’t. In some ways — despite the grittier videotaped look, despite the controversial topics and crasser language, despite the testier feel — they were as much comfort food as the other sitcoms of the era. They were just a different type of comfort food, and one that it didn’t take audiences long to develop an appetite for. The Jeffersons insisted that anyone (however dim) could succeed — and give their children a better life than they themselves had had. Good Times maintained that a family could weather any hardship as long as their core values were strong; One Day at a Time made much the same case for divorced mothers. In some ways, the Lear sitcoms — in their reliance on family values as an audience buffer — were as conservative as anything on the air. (The MTM shows, which insisted that friends were the new family, were — in their quiet way — more revolutionary.) Even All in the Family had easy appeal; there was something for everyone, whatever your age or political affiliation. In fact, you could argue that the “edgy” Lear sitcoms were just as geared towards audience identification and mass appeal as The Brady Bunch.

Except Maude. Maude was harder to make friends with. It doesn’t mean it was any less accomplished, but it helps explain its shorter run. Maude was designed as Archie Bunker’s opposite: a passionate liberal where he was a dogged conservative. But Maude’s liberalism, we were always reminded, was an attempt to counter her reactionary upbringing. To adopt values that didn’t always come easily. And that meant that Maude, more often than not, would end up — by episode’s end — admitting her discomfort or hypocrisy or powerlessness. And that wasn’t an easy pill to swallow. (As Bob Schiller put it, “Maude was a woman who had her feet in two generations. She was always trying to be ‘with it,’ and in trying to be ‘with it,’ she often got it wrong.”) Maude was, in fact, what Lear postured All in the Family to be: a satire of a political stance and philosophy. My own mother, who was basically Maude — raised in a conservative household but desperate to embrace the new ideologies and freedoms — couldn’t stand Maude, the series. She never admitted or understood why, but I did: it hit too close to home. And the critics noticed right away — like my mother, they couldn’t understand the source of their discomfort, but merely knew they were uncomfortable. In reviewing the series for TV Guide, Cleveland Amory complained that although it was funny when Maude would get caught up in one of her bleeding heart causes, inevitably taking things too far, it wasn’t funny when she ultimately admitted to her own failings. But of course, those moments were never designed to be funny. What Amory was battling was his own unease with the irony at the core of Maude’s character; he wanted a show where the lead character didn’t apologize for her liberal views — just as Archie never apologized for his conservative ones.

Schiller and Weiskopf were a brilliant writing team: smart and insightful. It’s not unreasonable to presume that they knew that Maude was a problematic series. (Yes, it debuted with the high ratings expected of an All in the Family spin-off — the characters had made two guest appearances on the parent show — but were those ratings sustainable?) And so Season 2 is about making Maude more viewer-friendly. It’s the rare sitcom season of that era that feels dynamic, where the characters and relationships and even the very premise seem to be shifting. It’s a transitional season, and by the time we’re six episodes into Season 3, the transformation is complete. And as a transitional season, one where the show is not only reinventing itself but pushing against the boundaries of ‘70s sitcoms, it feels somehow richer and deeper than the other seasons. But it also feels pricklier, more irritating. Most of the Lear sitcoms seem tame by today’s standards; Maude Season 2 doesn’t. It seems as angry and unsettling today as when it first aired. If anything, because most sitcoms now aren’t filmed on one set, but scattered across various locations, its sense of claustrophobic antagonism is even more pronounced and unsettling than it was 45 years ago. It’s 24 weeks of raised voices and sustained outrage: the watched pot that never stops boiling.

Schiller and Weiskopf commented once, with regard to Maude’s propensity for taking on social issues, “The show ended after six years because we ran out of problems.” It’s the kind of catchy turn of phrase you’d expect from veteran writers — it just happens to be untrue. Maude begins as an issue-driven show, just as All in the Family had. (Why meddle with success?) But by Season 3, there’s much less emphasis on issues to drive story-line. Schiller and Weiskopf, who joined the show — at Lear’s request — four or five episodes into Season 1, knew full well that there weren’t enough inflammatory topics to sustain a long run — and as noted, they clearly recognized the limitations of the premise: where the lead character, a bleeding heart liberal, is stuck admitting her failings week after week. So in Season 2, Maude begins to morph from an issue-driven comedy into a character-driven one. They don’t abandon the issues — at least not right away. (That would be too sudden a shift.) Instead, they turn them inward. It’s no longer “Maude throws a party for a black militant leader” or “Maude storms the local precinct to protest the criminalization of marijuana.” It’s “Maude and Walter argue over her decision to get a job” and “Carol calls out Maude on her sexual hypocrisy.” There are issues galore in Season 2: alcoholism, censorship, infidelity, unionization, race relations, even rape. But there are few guest stars required: most of the issues scale down to extended confrontations between the core characters. And more often than not, the issues aren’t there merely to reinforce character traits, but to generate new ones: to take fairly two-dimensional characters and develop them in ways you don’t expect.

But the challenge of taking an issue-oriented show and turning it into a character-driven one is that, during the transition — when the issues are still prominent, but they’re serving as platforms for further character exploration — you end up with the principals arguing about controversial topics. And that makes for one very loud series. And let’s not kid ourselves: Maude was already one very loud series. Nowadays, if friends tell you an old show is worth watching, you seek out the DVDs or a streaming site, and you binge it. Most of the Lear shows don’t benefit from binging: the decibel level is high, and stacked on top of each other, they’re headache-inducing — and none moreso than Maude. A lot of All in the Family is delivered in screaming matches, but Jean Stapleton’s Edith could always be counted on to undercut the animosity with something irrelevant or obtuse, or Sally Struthers’ Gloria would dissolve into one of her baby cries, defusing the tension. Maude didn’t have those buffers. At the start, there were three intelligent people living under one roof: Maude, her (fourth) husband Walter and her daughter Carol — none of them shy on opinions or willing to back down from a fight. And Maude Season 2 actually ups the decibel level.

Although it doesn’t start that way. It starts with a two-parter that represents not merely a series high in quality but a series low in volume. Schiller and Weiskopf wrote “Walter’s Problem,” it received the Writer’s Guild Award in 1974, and I’m quite prepared to make the case that it’s the series’ finest hour. Schiller and Weiskopf instantly unveil their plan for Season 2: fastening on an issue, then applying it to the core characters — and giving us a clearer appreciation of the characters by the way they address it. Here they take up Walter’s excessive drinking and rebrand it as alcoholism. No sitcom had even taken on alcoholism before, but Schiller and Weiskopf know exactly how to pitch it and how to sell it. They recognize that we’re preconditioned to view social drinking — and the humor that results from it — as the bread-and-butter of sitcom fare, and they play into that, right from the opening scene, in which Maude awakes groggy in her bed, having tied one on the night before, only to find her next-door neighbor Arthur (equally hungover) beside her. Walter enters, having passed out on the sofa downstairs:

Walter: Arthur, I’m not usually a suspicious person, but under the circumstances, I think I deserve an explanation.
Arthur: So do I. All right, Maudie, exactly what happened here last night?
Maude: Nothing! Arthur, if you and I were the last two people on earth, you and I would be the last two people on earth. And as for the rest of it, you’re the one who wound up in my bed, so start talking, buster.
Arthur: What? How dare you insinuate that a man of my caliber would covet his best friend’s wife. Nothing personal, Maudie, but I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.
Maude: Nothing personal, Arthur, but that’s the only way you could touch me.
Walter: Will you two cut it out? I still don’t know how you ended up in bed with my wife.
Arthur: It’s your fault, you know. You got me so loaded, I must’ve thought I was in my own house. I went upstairs, brushed my teeth, and flopped into bed.
Walter (horrified): You used my toothbrush, too?
Maude (outraged): What do you mean “too”?

Once the action moves downstairs, and Maude, Walter, and Arthur gets a glimpse of the shambles they’ve made of the living room, only then do Schiller and Weiskopf float the idea that Walter has a drinking problem. And they ease into it cleverly and carefully, by having Arthur, the doctor (and Walter’s best friend), make the diagnosis. And the way that he frames it convinces us that we’re not witnessing a character rewrite for the sake of exploring a social issue: “I thought you knew, Maudie — Walter doesn’t drink like you and I do.” Maude should have seen it, but didn’t; no wonder we missed it, too. But that said, even though the story-line, as it unfolds, confirms Arthur’s diagnosis, the way it’s pitched deliberately makes us disinclined to care. Walter may drink a lot, but he’s a charming drunk. He’s delightful as he cheats his way through a “no alcohol” lunch with Arthur, spiking his Shirley Temples on the sly. He’s amusing as he arrives home from work soused to the gills, and announces his presence with a dog whistle, a grin and a silly wave. (Schiller and Weiskopf know their actors well, and recognize that Bill Macy is never more engaging than when he’s doing his drunk routine.) And the slapstick that ensues — in which an inebriated Maude and Walter make a mess of their grandson’s birthday cake while trying to decorate it — is the sort of block comedy bit that’s a sitcom staple. The first half is all high spirits — so when Walter, at episode’s end, melts down in a drunken fury, screaming at his wife to show him some respect, then strikes her across the face, the moment is all the more shocking.

What’s remarkable is that the second half, which deals with the fallout from that blow (and Walter coming to terms with his drinking problem), is no less funny. Schiller and Weiskopf devote half the episode to running variations on a theme, as the other characters, one by one, get a look at Maude’s black eye. (”That is a pip, a real pip,” Arthur informs her: “How in the world did you get it?” “How did I get it?” Maude repeats, quick to improvise: “I was jumping rope without a bra.”) Even when Maude brings in an alcoholic priest to intervene, the laughs keep coming, as Walter continues drinking — until finally he unloads on Maude, drowning in perceived persecution and railing against the events of the past two days: “You don’t care about me. You don’t care if my business collapses. You turn Carol against me. You lock me in the closet like a common criminal. You’re all against me. Every one of you. Stop treating me like an alcoholic.” “But that’s what you are, Walter, an alcoholic!” Maude catches her breath, then calmly: “There. I said it.”

But Walter, still in denial, resumes shouting — until he’s interrupted by Carol. She and Philip are leaving. “It’s hardly the place for a child,” she calmly explains: “I’ll pick up the rest of our things tomorrow.” And that’s what it takes for Walter to admit he has a problem: losing Philip, the only one in the family who — to his mind — loves him unconditionally. “Come on, Reverend, let’s talk,” he concedes, admitting his life has become unmanageable. It doesn’t feel mawkish that this is what brings Walter to his senses. The story doesn’t glorify or sentimentalize the family unit; on the contrary, it makes it clear that Maude enabling Walter was part of the problem. Instead, it simply shines a new light on Walter, and amplifies how much it means to him, with no children of his own, to bond with — and earn the respect of — Maude’s grandson. (We’ll see more of that in Season 2.) It’s the ideal way to dramatize a social issue, by showing not only how it grows out of the relationships among the core characters, but also how those same relationships yield a resolution. (The writers, amusingly, then test the bond between Walter and Philip at season’s end, when Philip turns into such a pill that Walter recommends beating the tar out of him. There are no sacred cows in Season 2.)

With “Walter’s Problem” having set a ridiculously high standard, the staff writers — Schiller and Weiskopf, plus Budd Grossman and Alan J. Levitt — now focus on making the format more friendly, starting with the addition of Rue McClanahan to the cast. In Season 1, Maude’s key relationships had been with Walter and Carol. The mother-daughter bond was, in some ways, the most unconventional part of the series: the younger women living the tenets of feminism and the older woman desperately trying to embrace them — despite her upbringing, despite her innate prejudices. It made for novel television, and the way Carol advised and supported Maude through her various crises was not only effective but often touching. Carol, as Adrienne Barbeau played her, was a perfect (if surprising) audience surrogate. We hadn’t seen a lot of divorced Twenty-something moms on TV in 1972 (had we seen any?), but Barbeau had enormous warmth. (Marcia Rodd, who had played Carol in the All in the Family appearances, did not.) And she made the smart acting choice to step back and enjoy the foibles of the other characters; when someone cracked a joke, Carol laughed along with the audience. She appreciated the zingers just as we did. Barbeau was never stranded with one of those stony-faced expressions actors adopt while holding for a laugh (or in the case of Bea Arthur, the multiple double-takes to prolong it); unless she was the butt of the joke — or the focus of the scene — she gave her character permission to be distanced enough from the action to be charmed by it.

But the mother-daughter relationship was most effective when the show was issue oriented, and although I lament the underuse of Barbeau in later seasons, I guess I understand why the character of Carol wasn’t terribly useful to the writers. She was a working mother with an active social life — she couldn’t be present most of the time. And there had to be some reason for Maude’s chief foil, conservative neighbor Arthur Harmon, to keep dropping in. Not unreasonably, the writers decide that Maude could use a sounding board her own age, one who could ultimately be paired with Arthur. And McClanahan proves a ready-made solution; by the time the writers decide to add her to the cast in Season 2, she’s already appeared in a handful of episodes, as Maude’s close friend Vivian Cavender. In her final episode of Season 1, she and her husband announce that they’re divorcing; in the third episode of Season 2, she shows up at the Findlay household, newly single. In Season 1, she’d been as opinionated as Maude, with a gray hairdo that emphasized her maturity and command. That’s not what the producers need; they need balance. And so Vivian re-emerges in Season 2 minus the gray hair and shy a couple dozen IQ points. She’s now desperate and adrift, forever flustered — with a dithering quality that’s useful as a contrast to Maude. (Crucial to the reimagining of the show, Maude is no longer learning lessons from Carol; she’s instilling lessons in Vivian.) By episode 4, Vivian’s had a face lift and reentered the dating pool; in episode 9, she’s paired with Arthur.

Arthur and Vivian’s romance isn’t the only continuing element in Season 2. Perhaps recognizing that Adrienne Barbeau’s role was going to be severely reduced within a year, the writers give her own ongoing story-line (she’s essentially compartmentalized as compensation for being marginalized): a boyfriend who, in his very first appearance, becomes her fiancé. The character is a pediatrician named Chris, and the actor is Fred Grandy, and you won’t get any complaints from me about either. In 1973-74, I felt Grandy was a bit lightweight; now I realize that's precisely his purpose: to provide balance (like McClanahan). The show doesn't need another hothead; it needs a pacifier, a moderator. Grandy is good when he’s focal, and equally good when he’s not, and although the relationship comes out of nowhere (and heats up literally overnight), there’s a moment late in the season when Carol looks lovingly at Chris and says, “You’re very dear” — an odd turn of phrase for the character, but one Barbeau pulls off so winningly that you’re fully willing to invest in the coupling. And then Chris disappears after Season 2, with no explanation. He was basically there so that Barbeau had something to do before she had nothing to do — but Grandy assumes the spotlight with such charm and recedes into the background with such modesty that you don’t question his sudden appearance or disappearance. He’s only focal for three episodes, but appears in seven; he becomes part of the texture of the season.

Other ongoing elements? Walter being on the wagon is referenced quite a few times as the season proceeds — as is Vivian’s facelift. And in episode 6, Maude gets a job selling real estate (the de rigueur occupation for sitcom wives entering the workforce for the next two decades — and not unrealistically, as it was one of the few jobs that women of a certain age could get), and her new career generates two story-lines later in the season. This episode, “Maude Takes a Job,” written by one of the series’ steadiest freelancers, Pamela Chais, is among the season’s angrier episodes, an extended face-off between Maude and Walter that ends with her spray-painting his clothes as she feeds him breakfast. But it also features one of Bea Arthur’s very best performances; as Chais plots it, Maude’s joy at making her first sale is instantly tempered by her agony as she considers giving up her job to please her husband. It’s heartbreaking, and it speaks eloquently to the hard decisions second-generation feminists were facing at that time. And when Walter ultimately comes to realize that Maude’s self-worth is more important than him having dinner on the table when he gets home, it reflects well on him. As forward-thinking as Walter is in most areas, we understand that in terms of traditional gender roles, he’s fighting years of preconditioning, and we appreciate his willingness to change.

(In a similar fashion, when Maude, in the following episode, invites Carol’s boyfriend to spend the night rather than make the long drive home, then freaks out when Carol sets him up in her bedroom, we think the episode is going to be about Maude’s sexual hypocrisy. But it turns out that Carol didn’t want him there either; she just felt awkward, once her mother had invited him to stay, setting him up in the guest room. The episode becomes about Carol’s conservative streak — which she freely admits she gets from her mother — and it serves to add new, unexpected colors to her character.)

The first ten episodes of Season 2 are not only the strongest in the show’s run, but the canniest — and the most propulsive. You feel that the characters are growing, and being refined and paired in unexpected ways — Season 2 keeps pushing against the episodic nature of ‘70s sitcoms — and then there’s the most marvelous of intermissions, as the full cast gets to shine in a salute to burlesque that Maude is staging as a fundraiser for the local library. It’s an episode written by an old pro, Woody Kling, who’d been scripting variety shows since Milton Berle: a cornucopia of gags and sketches performed by a troupe that knows exactly how to make the most of them. The episode commences at the dress rehearsal, as Carol and Walter rehearse their first sketch: her as a belly dancer, bare-midriffed, and him in his red-checked coat and oversized polka-dotted tie. As Carol struts her way on stage, a drummer punctuates every bump, grind and punchline:

Walter: Hey, there, baby. They call me Cuddles.
Carol: Oh, I’ve heard about you. I’ve heard about you and your love-making.
Walter: Eh, it’s nothing.
Carol: That’s what I heard. (Ba-dum) You know, you’re kind of cute. (Grinding) You can meet me round the corner in a half an hour. (Bump)
Maude (marching on stage): Carol, come on, honey: can’t you put a little more pizzazz in it? I mean, this is a tribute to burlesque, not The Waltons. (Demonstrating) You can meet me round the corner in a half an hour. (Bump)
Walter (to Maude): You do that once more, and I’ll meet you in five minutes.
Arthur (marching on stage): Hold it! Hold it! I’ve been sitting out here watching this rehearsal for two hours now, and I’ve kept quiet as long as I can. This is not the sort of thing one expects to see in a high-school auditorium.
Maude: What do you mean? Arthur, what sort of thing?
Arthur: This sort of thing. (Demonstrating) You can meet me round the corner in a half an hour. (Bump)
Walter: Our date’s off, Maude. I’m meeting him.

Walter leers. Carol laughs. “Maude’s Musical” has it all. The car sketch, with Carol and Vivian as a couple of nasal-voiced, purse-swinging floozies, and Walter and Arthur as the hep cats pursuing them in their cardboard-cutout automobile. (Vivian: “They don’t look half bad.” Carol: “I’ll take the half that looks good.”) The schoolmarm sketch, with Maude (even more) heavily bosomed, trying to instill some discipline in an unruly classroom. (“Our teacher sure is hoity-toity.” “She may be hoity, but she’ll never see toity again!”) Maude and Florida in a song-and-dance to “Me and My Shadow,” with Maude — awash in her usual liberal guilt — insistent that she play the shadow. And Bea Arthur bringing down the house with a solo rendition of “Hard Hearted Hannah.” (And interwoven with the festivities, of course, is an issue: here, Arthur — appalled by the skimpy costumes and double entendres — trying to censor the proceedings, and referencing a recent Supreme Court decision to bolster his case. And again, the way the issue shakes down is unexpected: not Arthur’s objections, but Maude’s defense of a form of entertainment that — through those skimpy costumes and double entendres — exploited women. It’s the kind of thing you could have imagined Maude in Season 1 railing against herself, in her faux outrage. But here she’s refreshingly respectful of the history of burlesque as entertainment — and of the talent involved in its creation. Besides, when defending Carol’s right to wear skimpy outfits, she insists: “Why not? She’s got a great body, inherited from her mother.” Her pride is infectious.) It’s a joyous episode: a cast and creative team celebrating a series that’s cooking on all burners.

The pace relaxes a bit after “Maude’s Musical,” and the episodes that follow aren’t as uniformly strong. (There are quite a few more efforts by freelancers, although, to be fair, they’re good freelancers: Bernie Kahn, Lila Garrett, John Rappaport, plus the team of Lloyd Turner and Gordon Mitchell.) But the relationships continue to advance, and the issues keep coming: enriching and reassessing the core characters. Maude discovers that Walter has appointed a trustee to handle his estate in the event of his death, and engages in a long con to get him to see reason. (It’s so rare that Maude has a real “win” that the audience cheers at the end — and loudly.) Arthur and Vivian get engaged, in an episode that forces Maude and Walter to revisit the mistakes they themselves made in their first months of marriage. Maude puts a downpayment on a house for Carol and Chris — right across the street — forcing Maude and Carol to re-examine their codependency. And near the end of the season, Esther Rolle moves on to her own spinoff. Florida says goodbye to the Findlays on February 5, 1974, and three days later, Good Times premieres. (In Season 2, even offscreen events are timed like clockwork.) “Florida’s Goodbye,” like all of the episodes in Season 2, refuses to use sentimentality as a crutch. On Florida’s last day at work — her husband Henry has gotten a promotion, meaning she can afford to stay home and look after her own household — she and Maude indulge in the usual platitudes. They’ll probably see each other more now, they insist, than they did when Florida was working for the Findlays.

But they can’t keep up the pretense:

Florida: Life’s not really like that, is it?
Maude: No. I don’t guess it is.
Florida: I mean, it ain’t likely that I’ll be seeing you again soon — or even ever.

Florida’s level-headedness has proven crucial to the early success of Maude; amidst all the chaos and cacophony of the Findlay household, she could always be counted on to keep a cool head, and to maintain a certain dignity. (In one of Season 2’s best outings, Florida’s husband catches her flirting with the furnace repairmen, and threatens to leave her. Florida defuses the situation by apologizing, but in doing so, ignites a battle among all the other characters, about male-female double standards.) With Arthur and Vivian’s wedding in episode 19, and Florida’s departure in episode 20, the transformation of the series is nearly complete. In episode 22, Arthur and Vivian return from their honeymoon to find Walter steaming over an investment Arthur suggested he make, one that cost him $3700. It’s a well-written entry by a writer I don’t particularly care for, Elliot Shoenman. (He went on to write nine more Maude episodes and to become a writing producer on The Cosby Show and Home Improvement, so what do I know?) Part of its excellence stems from the variations Schoenmen runs: what starts as Walter vs. Arthur quickly morphs into the Findlays vs. the Harmons, then the men vs. the women, then Maude vs. Vivian. These are all variations we’ve seen on countless other shows, but not on Maude. And although there are serious issues at the episode’s core — issues of finances and trust — the treatment is decidedly not serious: it’s more about enjoying the interplay, relishing the wisecracks and the comebacks, and seeing how it all shakes down. Through the course of Season 2, Maude has morphed into something much more familiar, less intimidating, and arguably better positioned to sustain a lengthy run: the two-couples format, that popular sitcom trope that Schiller and Weiskopf have been successfully scripting since I Love Lucy.

There’s just one step left in the full transformation of Maude. Four episodes into Season 3, Hermione Baddeley joins the cast as new housekeeper Mrs. Naugatuck, and although her first appearance suggests that she’ll function as a sparring partner for Maude — she’s resistant to the changing role of women, viewing Walter as “the master of the house” — she’s mostly there, as it turns out, for bawdy comic relief. More and more, the series, which in Season 2 had been a singular mix of issue-driven controversy and character-driven comedy, turns to situation-driven antics. Episode 5 finds Walter and Arthur, on a fishing trip to Vermont, getting pulled over and jailed for speeding. There are as many contrivances as in a typical Sherwood Schwartz or Garry Marshall vehicle: the policeman finds a joint in their van, which they’d borrowed from a never-before and never-again referenced nephew; Maude and Vivian are so busy binge-eating in their husbands’ absence that, when Walter and Arthur telephone them to send bail money, they don’t take them seriously. And in the following episode, Maude and Vivian go into comic-rivalry mode when they discover an old mutual boyfriend is coming to town; as they’re putting on airs and getting soused at lunch, so is Mrs. Naugatuck, who mistakes the living room closet for her bedroom, and shuts herself in with a bottle of scotch. (Try to imagine Florida Evans doing that.)

And that’s what the series has become by Season 3: it’s domineering Maude and dithering Vivian, testy Walter and stuffy Arthur. And Mrs. Naugatuck, that loquacious lush. (Carol, meanwhile, who represented the easy embrace of feminism and liberal values that her mother could never achieve, is given less and less airtime — and with Maude’s flaws less exposed, it no doubt becomes an easier show for some to swallow.) With Schiller and Weiskopf still in charge, Maude remains a worthwhile series (the aforementioned “old boyfriend” episode, by Pamela Chais, is a riot), and the characters benefit from all the work that the actors and writers put into Season 2. But the tone of the show is markedly different. And ironically, of course, despite the changes in format and flavor to make Maude a more audience-friendly series, viewers still tire of it after two more seasons — and after an additional two, it’s gone.

So was the reimagining of Maude worth it? It couldn’t have kept juggling issues week after week, but were the writers justified in moving so forcefully towards the familiar and the farcical? One Season 2 episode suggests they were. It’s “The Wallet,” the one episode that anticipates the tone of the upcoming four seasons. It starts with the hoariest of sitcom contrivances, as Maude finds incriminating evidence about Walter in his wallet, whereas in point of fact he’s merely removed that incriminating evidence from the wallet of another man, who also happens to be named Walter. (I kid you not). As a result, Maude becomes convinced that Walter is having an affair. Cautioned by Carol not to overreact, Maude proceeds to do just that and rushes to confront Walter’s mistress in her Manhattan apartment. Bea Arthur doesn’t just go dramatic, she goes so over-the-top you’d swear she’s channeling Vera Charles from Mame (which she’d just finished filming). But then, the dialogue practically goads her on: “Let me tell you something, toots,“ she announces to the mistress, like some MGM grande dame, ”There’s something you should know about me. I am not Joan Crawford coming to plead with Sandra Dee to leave Walter Pidgeon alone.”

It’s the only Maude story by Max Hodge, who was a TV veteran of a dozen series, and the teleplay is co-credited to Levitt and Grossman, suggesting they did more than the typical story editor polish. But it’s hard to imagine what any of them were thinking. It feels wildly out of place as a Season 2 episode, although maybe that’s precisely the point: to test the waters for where the show is heading in Season 3 and beyond. At the end of “The Wallet,” as if we’ve suddenly regressed to an early I Love Lucy episode, Walter and Arthur — determined to prove that women can’t control their impulses as well as men — pull a childish prank on Maude. And she falls for it. There’s nothing about the way she falls for it that’s consistent with the mature character we’ve watched deepen and develop for two years — but imbuing her, momentarily, with a crippling naivety is essential to the pay-off, so that’s what happens. The audience roars with laughter, and you kind of hate them for it, because it’s pretty much a betrayal of the characters — as well as the tone and ambition of the season. But it wouldn’t be out of place at all in the four seasons to come. If anything, the way the audience whoops it up is probably the best indicator that Schiller and Weiskopf’s decision to reinvent Maude as a more viewer-friendly vehicle was a sound one. (Who knows: without the change in tone, Maude might have expired even sooner.) The audience loves the familiarity, the contrivances and the outrageousness.

But this can’t be the episode Norman Lear was reflecting on when he proclaimed Maude the best of his series. Nor is it likely he was thinking of Mrs. Naugatuck doing a comic tango (with a rose between her teeth, and a partner half her age) in Season 3, or Arthur investing in flashlight slippers in Season 4. Or the visit from Maude’s cousin (who thinks he’s a superhero) in Season 5, or Maude seeing a UFO in Season 6. But he might well have been thinking of the rest of Season 2, in which Maude is as audacious and ambitious as any of his series, and which — in its use of social issues to deepen and redefine its characters — is pretty much a sitcom season unlike any other.

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