The Mary Tyler Moore Show is iconic. Its opening credit sequence could be one of the most quintessential in television history. While the setting changed between each season, Mary’s final toss of her blue beret remained a constant through the show’s seven seasons.
This year we decided to recreate Mary’s hat toss for our New Year’s card. While this tribute was inspired in part by our fangirl status, we thought about our past year, and we felt connected to this story. It spoke to how we got through 2020 and are looking forward to the future.
The lyrics of the first season’s opening sequence begin with “How will you make it on your own?” and end with “You might just make it after all.” When the pandemic hit, we left our offices, and canceled and untangled our highly anticipated events with our beloved partners. We felt lost and alone. The world was uncertain, our industry was upside-down, and even our personal lives were uprooted. Our first all-staff Zoom meeting post-lock-down was all about our fears, outlook, and how we might just make it as a team.
One week later, our amazing friends at Twitch reached out with a proposal. Could we help them put on a 12-hour LiveAid inspired show in just ten days? While we weren’t yet virtual event experts, we also knew we would need to transform ourselves to make it in the quaren-times. We wanted to be a part of this historical moment that Twitch was creating, to support those affected by the pandemic, and prove to the world–and ourselves–that we could make this work. Which, if you think about it, [we sure have] is not that different from how another broadcast groundbreaker, CBS, gave Mary Tyler Moore a show about being a single woman in a time where that was rare. And just like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, this event was not only a hit, but shook up the whole industry.
After StreamAid, our perspective changed just like the lyrics in The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s opening theme changed for the second season, opening with “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” and concluding with a more definitive “You’re gonna make it after all.” We saw how our partners trusted us, how our skill set was not boxed into live events, and how our team showed up. We knew that, while it was going to be HARD, we were gonna make it after all. After 14 virtual events, reaching millions of attendees, here we are. We made it. And we plan to keep on making it – working on virtual, hybrid, and safe IRL events alongside our incredible teams, clients, and partners.
To conclude this year of struggles, uncertainty, growth, and change, we mailed everyone on our team blue berets, masked up, set our self-timers, and took our own iconic hat throwing pictures. We not only said goodbye to 2020, but hello to the future and everything it has in store for us. We did it to remind the world, and ourselves, that we’re gonna make it after all!
