Lou Grant

Lou Grant is a rare example of a dramatic hour-long series spun off from a sitcom, transforming Ed Asner's comedic character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show into a more diplomatic, sober newspaper editor.

Creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns decided to make the spinoff a realistic one-hour drama instead of another 30-minute sitcom, a choice influenced by the 1976 film All the President's Men and its depiction of how a major newspaper operates.

Gene Reynolds, who was simultaneously producing M*A*S*H, joined as co-creator and executive producer; he had previously worked with Brooks and Burns on the series Room 222, and Lou Grant made occasional references to Walt Whitman High School, the setting of that earlier show.

The only character to cross over from The Mary Tyler Moore Show besides Lou Grant himself was veteran journalist Flo Meredith, played by Eileen Heckart in three episodes, who had once had a fling with Lou.

The character of publisher Margaret Jones Pynchon, played by Nancy Marchand, was loosely based on a composite of real-life newspaper executives Dorothy Chandler of the Los Angeles Times and Katharine Graham of The Washington Post.

Ed Asner became the first person to win a Primetime Emmy for both Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for portraying the same character, Lou Grant.

The show's 1982 cancellation was controversial: Ed Asner, who served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild and publicly opposed U.S. policy in Central America, believed his political activism caused the cancellation, while CBS attributed it to declining ratings, which had dropped from an average 19.6 rating to 16.6 in the final season.