Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is an American satirical soap opera that aired in daily weeknight syndication from January 1976 to July 1977. The series follows the titular Mary Hartman, an Ohio housewife attempting to cope with various bizarre and violent incidents occurring around her. The series was produced by Norman Lear, directed by Joan Darling, Jim Drake, Nessa Hyams, and Giovanna Nigro, and starred Louise Lasser, Greg Mullavey, Dody Goodman, Norman Alden, Mary Kay Place, Graham Jarvis, Debralee Scott, and Victor Kilian. The series writers were Gail Parent and Ann Marcus. Developed by Lear with the intention of examining the effects of consumerism on the American housewife, the series premiered in January 1976, and was filmed at KTLA Studios in Los Angeles. The show's title, featuring the title character's name stated twice, is a reference to Lear's observation that dialogue within soap operas tended to be repeated. In 2004 and 2007, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was ranked #21 and #26 on "TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever." TV Guide ranked the death of Coach Leroy Fedders, who drowns in a bowl of Mary's chicken soup in the first season, #97 on its list of the 100 Greatest T.V. Moments of All Time. Premise Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman follows the titular character through increasingly complex and compounding life events and scenarios often reflective of the changing social fabric of America in the 1970s. Some of the character's key traits, unusual but prescient for the times, include her initially numbed-out response to both external and emotional conflicts, her indecisiveness and her potential to suddenly snap out of one state of mind and swing to its opposite. Moral quandaries frequently seem on the verge of vanishing into apathy, until she is reminded of her love for her family and the need to keep them together. The show's elaborate plots and tongue-in-cheek melodrama lampooned the soap opera format much as Soap and Twin Peaks would later do. In its first episode, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman introduced the Lombardi family of five, all of whom, along with their two goats and eight chickens, had been murdered by young Davey Jessup, an event witnessed by both Mary's daughter, Heather, and the "Fernwood Flasher", who turned out to be Mary's grandfather, Raymond Larkin. Other characters on the show also died in bizarre ways, including by being electrocuted in the bathtub (Jimmy Joe Jeeter), by drowning in chicken