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describes as a “heroic figure” for using his business acumen for artistic good, had made one crucial decision when his wife had signed with CBS: Moore and Tinker would form their own production company, called MTM Enterprises, to maintain some control of the show to which she’d hitch her fortunes. Of course, this meant funding their own production, making the series an awfully large gamble for its star. Her money, her reputation, and her future now depended on its success. Failing to make good would provide one more dramatic wallop to the star’s fragile state. But succeeding would make Moore not only a star, but a pioneer. At the time, female producers were rare. Putting Moore’s name on the new venture could still go either way—yes, she had some star power, but many men in the business still resisted the idea of women with real, executive power.
    Moore had given Tinker a few stipulations about what she wanted in her new show, Tinker now told his producers. She wanted to play someone close to herself, because she didn’t trust her acting skills to go much further. For the same reason, she also wanted to make it an ensemble show; even if it was named for her, as was typical for sitcoms of the time, she wanted to surround herself with great supporting actors. Allowing focus to routinely pull back from its marquee star would become the show’s first major innovation, and its hallmark.
    Brooks and Burns agreed to the job. Burns would have to postpone his movie-writing dreams yet again. He hoped this show was worth giving that up—and that it lived up to the faith Tinker had placed in them.

    This kind of project could catapult Brooks’s and Burns’s careers to the next level of greatness, even the Dick Van Dyke level of Emmy-winning prestige, or it could flop quite prominently. But the pressure didn’t endthere. As they brainstormed ideas, they also found themselves heading a production company, since Tinker didn’t want his name on it until the show was ready to go and he could leave his job at Fox.
    Tinker secured offices for Brooks and Burns, then turned them loose to do the rest of the work. They put in long hours, getting to their new office in the early morning Southern California sun and heading home well after dark. They hired the new production company’s accountant, as well as other employees. Most writers, even executive producers, did not take on this level of responsibility at a production company. But Brooks and Burns hardly knew any better. The arrangement, luckily, worked well, with Burns’s experience and pragmatism balancing Brooks’s visions of greatness.
    Among their first hires was their secretary, Pat Nardo, who’d recently relocated from New York. Back east, the twenty-nine-year-old had been working for Talent Associates, a production company known for its work on Broadway as well as its gritty TV drama, East Side/West Side, starring George C. Scott. When Nardo left high school ten years earlier, she’d been the only girl in her class who wasn’t engaged. Her friends had been in awe of her: “I don’t have your courage,” they said. “I want to know what I’m doing every Saturday night for the rest of my life.” When she started working at Talent Associates, she considered it the most exciting place to work in the world. There she got to be far more than a secretary, and she learned what went into high-quality producing. The company hired a fair number of women (which is to say, more than one), though Nardo suspected that was because women made less money and seemed less threatening to David Susskind, the prolific producer and talk show host who ran the place.
    In any case, the job allowed her a surprising amount of responsibility and adventure. Susskind would send her on last-minute trips with F. Lee Bailey—a lawyer famous at the time for defending Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was convicted, then later acquitted in a retrial, of killing his pregnant wife (and whose story became the