Mary Hartman Meets a Gay Couple

Gayest Episode Ever

Society & Culture, Tv & Film

4.8 • 568 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2025

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, in a first-ever solo episode, Drew talks you through not just one episode of the cult series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman instead the whole of the show's art for its two gay characters, Ed and Howard. What's remarkable about this nuanced portrayal of a same-sex couple is that by virtue of airing before the AIDS crisis, the showrunners didn't need to make these two characters angel gays. They're as neurotic and complex as any of the straight characters on the show, which means it's an example of a progressive representation back in 1976.

If you want to see Ed and Howard (and everyone else) in action, check out the supercut of their whole story on Patreon. It's free for everyone, so even people who aren't pledging can watch it. There is not another place online where you can easily watch Ed and Howard's whole story.

But also check out Matt Baume's 2020 video on why this show's gay storyline still matters.

We have episode transcripts courtesy of Sarah Neal. Our logo was designed by Rob Wilson. This episode's art was designed by Ian O'Phelan.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Mary Hartman!
0:10.0	Mary Hartman!
0:12.0	Safe handers!
0:15.0	Tonight from Fernwood, Furnwood tonight!
0:20.0	30 minutes of very remarkable entertainment coming to you live.
0:24.3	Completely silent.
0:27.6	A human was needed in the neighborhood, so the Lord made woman, and it was good.
0:33.2	Hello and welcome to gayest episode ever, the podcast where we discuss the LGBT-themed episodes of classics sitcoms. I'm Trimacky. And I'm all you're getting for a discussion of the cult series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. You'll have none of Glenn Lakin's trademark sunshiney optimism to balance out my moldering sarcasm. Why is this a solo episode, you might be asking? Well, actually, I have a few reasons for that. Number one, Glenn is out of town. He went to Palm Springs without me again. And I guess this is my revenge, doing work that he'll get credit and money for, regardless. That doesn't work out very well. But number two, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is a very weird show. And for the purposes of making my life slightly easier in the editing of this podcast, I'm just going to refer to it as Mary Hartman is a very weird show. And for the purposes of making my life slightly easier in the
1:11.2	editing of this podcast, I'm just going to refer to it as Mary Hartman. The title does repeat her name
1:16.3	twice. I'll explain why later. The first half of this show's run does feature an interesting
1:21.6	gay storyline that focuses on one of the first same-sex couples in TV history to be recurring
1:26.5	and be given substantial depth as characters. But because of the nature of the show, there's not a single episode that we can focus on. I'm going to tell you the couple's story in full. If you go to our Patreon page, you can watch a supercut of the couple's story. I put almost all their key scenes together, and I'm calling it the Ballad of Howard and Ed.
1:44.6	So I can post it there for free.
1:45.6	So even if you're not supporting us on Patreon, you can watch this just as like a study aid
1:50.9	to learn more about a TV series that I suspect a lot of our viewers do not have access to.
1:55.9	To my knowledge, no one else has really done this.
1:58.8	The closest anyone has done so far is that Matt Baum put out a video about Ed and Howard a few years ago. And it's like a tight eight-minute presentation. This is two hours of scenes because Mary Hartman scenes run on for minutes at a time. But I just wanted to be the first person to collect almost the entire run of these characters
2:17.9	into one place so people could see how they're developed, see how they're grown, and see how
2:22.6	they emerge as interesting gay characters back in 1976 when people really weren't doing this
2:27.3	kind of thing on TV. In this episode, I won't be explaining every single scene I included in the
2:32.0	supercut. And if I'm being super honest, I might go through and trim up that supercut before this goes live on the main feed.
2:37.6	Most of the scenes speak more or less for themselves, but all the clips I'll be using in the episode do appear in the supercut.
	...

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