Ed Asner

Ed Asner's Lou Grant is the WJM growl that makes Mary Richards' Minneapolis newsroom feel like a job. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–1977) dressed a single working woman in wool and a hat toss; Asner supplied the boss who could be gruff without turning the hour into a scold. The desk still treats the series as the most elegant ensemble sitcom American television ever dressed. Lou is how the newsroom has manners, desire, and a funeral laugh in the same shop.

s01e01 is the hat as premiere thesis — a leading lady launched without a husband as gravity. s01e02 makes the clothing tag plot: how the world addresses a woman with a job and no ring. s04e01 walks Sue Ann in, desire as a smile that is also a weapon. Grant is the floor those hours need. The silhouette is Mary's; the temperature is Lou's.

Then the rare sitcom-to-drama hop: Lou Grant (CBS, 1977–1982) left Minneapolis laughs for a Los Angeles city desk. s01e01 opens that hop — journalism as hour-long craft, ink-stained prestige before the word prestige. s01e05 is the one-word title doing the city-desk dare. s03e12 keeps the L.A. paper covering its own town, still a newsroom, not a backlot cameo show.

On TV Flash he is 1970s workplace-sitcom bedrock who then made the growl an hour. We file Asner under competence as glamour's necessary opposite: the gravel that lets the smile file something real, and the city editor who proved the bark could survive the laugh track's departure.