The Dinner Party

Phyllis Lindstrom discovers her dermatologist husband Lars is having an affair with the star of WJM-TV's "Happy Homemaker Show," and demands Mary's help in saving her marriage.

Mary dates a much younger man – despite the advice of friends. Should the fact that the woman is seven years older than the man keep them from having a happy relationship? Mary Richards doesn't think so, and she ignores advice from her friends and co-worker to the contrary.

Lou Grant unhappily tells Mary Richards and the newsroom gang that he and his wife, Edie, are having marital problems and have been seeing a marriage counselor who has suggested a trial separation.

When Mary complains to Lou that she wants more responsibility in the newsroom, he is only too happy to give her the responsibility of hiring a new sports announcer – if she will fire the present one.

A phone call from his long-lost father, who had abandoned him as a baby, throws unflappable anchorman Ted Baxter into an emotional turmoil.

Jerry Van Dyke guest stars as one of Mary's ex-boyfriends, who gets a job in the newsroom with a desk right across the room from Mary and tries to turn the old romance on again.

Lou has not had a date since his wife Edie left him, but he has an important banquet coming up, and Mary promises to find him a date.

Rhoda has good news: she's madly in love with someone who shared her lunch table. And bad news: the man she loves owns the store she works in, and she has no idea how he feels about her.

Rhoda and Mary fly to New York for the wedding of Rhoda's younger sister, but the credibility gap between Rhoda and her mother almost turns the happy event into a disaster.

A Congresswoman with whom Mary worked on a news show accepts Mary's very casual invitation to dinner and suggests that it be the next evening.

Since being separated from his wife, Lou has grown accustomed to having dinner every night at Mary's apartment. Though she doesn't want to meddle, Mary is determined to try to get them back together – if only for the sake of her own sanity.

Ted quits his job at WJM to pursue a political career after Phyllis convinces him that he’d make an ideal city councilman.

Murray Slaughter's teenage daughter needs a job, and Lou Grant wants Mary to hire someone to make coffee and help out with typing and filing, so Mary thinks the problem is solved – but she's wrong.

Georgette visits boyfriend Ted Baxter at WJM-TV, only to find him kissing another woman in his dressing room; so she decides to become a nun.

Mary learns it's Lou's birthday and decides to surprise him with a party. What she doesn't learn until too late is that Lou hates birthdays and surprise parties.

Mary starts to have doubts about WJM’s relatively small-time operations when she begins dating the anchorman from Minneapolis’s top-rated station and finds herself doubling as a spy.

Mary and Rhoda are thrilled with the opportunity to produce a new show for WJM, until they learn that the show must star Ted and Sue Ann, who quickly make things difficult.

Mary's neighbor Phyllis, who now has a real-estate license and is hungry for clients. She zeroes in on Lou Grant as a likely prospect to sell his house.

It looks like Mary's friendship with Rhoda is going down the drain after Rhoda makes what Mary thinks is an unkind remark.

Mary writes a humorous obituary as a joke, but when it’s mistakenly read on the air, she’s suspended from the newsroom.

Ted Baxter always dreamed that some day he'd meet his idol, famous newscaster Walter Cronkite, and that the meeting would lead to his own fame and fortune in New York. Well, Baxter does meet Cronkite – but the occasion is not as auspicious in reality as it is in Ted's dream.

Lou and Rhoda begin dating casually, and everyone—especially Mary—wonders just how serious the relationship is getting.

When Ted Baxter learns that Mary is attending a night-school class in creative writing, he enrolls in the same course and insists on being introduced to the class.

Mary spends every night for a week at a singles bar, researching material for a special news show, and gets an eyebrow-lifting view of the swinging-singles scene.