Editor Ira is back this week with another deep dive into the wide and wacky world of 1970s TV variety specials.

Sometimes life takes you down paths you don't expect. I never intended to publicly present myself as a subject-matter expert on 1970s TV specials, but the Friday Know-It-All is what happens while we're making other plans. I've already told you in this space about such televised '70s lunacy as superhero roasts, Telly Savalas tributes, and Karen Carpenter bringing peace to the galaxy. Seeing as it's Easter week, the journey continues today as I loop you in on the time Mary Tyler Moore fought Satan with the help of Cat Stevens and the king of Cajun fiddle rock.

Hollywood in the 1970s was a place of cultural identity crises, unbridled malaise, questionable taste, and prodigious cocaine. As it turns out, those are precisely the ingredients you need to make the weirdest thing with which Mary Tyler Moore would ever be associated — and I'm including the time she was a nun who teamed up with Dr. Elvis to stabilize the inner city via dubious psychological practices.

See, Moore was one of those actors who came up in musical theater and carried those song-and-dance dreams with her well into superstardom. She was near the peak of her powers in 1976. She'd been a beloved fixture in American households since "The Dick Van Dyke Show" hit the air 15 years earlier. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was a critically acclaimed ratings hit going strong in its sixth season, but Moore was planning on the following season being its last. She wanted her next project to be a variety show, and saw "Mary's Incredible Dream" as a potential test pilot.

In an era where being a one-hit wonder, game show personality, or 7/8ths of a sitcom family was more than enough to get you a musical TV showcase, Moore could have gotten CBS to put basically anything she wanted on the air. What Moore wanted to put on the air, as it turns out, was an elaborately staged re-telling of the Biblical book of Genesis as a 50-minute jukebox musical. "Mary's Incredible Dream," also advertised as "The Mary Tyler Moore Spectacular," is simply one of the weirdest things ever to get greenlit for network television. Moore herself described it as "a totally different concept from anything ever attempted on television," and as a musical that went "from song to dance to song and back again, telling a story of the eternal cycle of man."

While adapting the Bible as a mainstream TV musical might seem like a wild concept today, in 1976 it was following right along with the zeitgeist. The successes of "Jesus Christ Superstar," "Godspell," and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" had made hippie-Christian musicals a hot item, and "Hair" had confirmed that even stuffy theater audiences were ready to embrace the rock and roll aesthetic. Through that lens, Genesis was as reasonable an IP to adapt as any.

Moore's companions on this ambitious journey included one who made perfect sense (Broadway legend Ben Vereen, known for star turns in "Pippin" and the aforementioned "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar"), one who sort of made sense (brutally corny vocal jazz group The Manhattan Transfer, the '70s leading embodiment of Theater Kid Energy), and one who made the least sense possible (wild-eyed country music star Doug Kershaw, whose spirited fiddling style helped bring Cajun music to the mainstream).

That weird assemblage was cast in a series of musical skits depicting assorted events from early chapters of the Bible, scored with an unpredictable blend of old Broadway songs and contemporary rock hits. Following an introductory scene that establishes that everything we're about to see is unfolding in the troubled brain of an unconscious Mary Tyler Moore, we cut to a Busby Berkeley-style number where a white-clad cast dances to a song about faith, followed by a heavenly choir singing Beethoven. Satan/Ben, dressed like a glam Riddler with "666" emblazoned on his tuxedo jacket, gets cast out of Heaven by legendary conductor Arthur Fiedler and orchestrates the fall of Adam/Doug and Eve/Mary with 1920s show tunes while The Manhattan Transfer sings "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree." We're 10 minutes in at this point.

The really incredible thing about "Mary's Incredible Dream" is that it's objectively not a bad production. It's written by Jack Good, who previously worked on the music showcase "Shindig," as well as shows spotlighting The Beatles and The Monkees; and directed by Eugene McAvoy and Jaime Rogers, the respective set designer and choreographer of Elvis's 1968 "Comeback Special" and "The Sonny and Cher Show." As befits musical TV pros of that pedigree, the energy is high, the choreography is impressive, the sets and costumes are elaborate, and the ambition is off the charts.

Even if it's not technically bad, though, it is far too weird and manic for a general audience. It's a wall-to-wall cacophony of music and color, lurching between eras and genres without warning, often making only the barest effort to tie the songs into what's ostensibly one of the best-known narratives in history.

Things get curiouser and curiouser as the story goes on. Mary performs a bawdy "Cabaret" style song for a room full of soldiers while dressed like a fascist leprechaun dominatrix. Doug plays a ferocious, fiddle-driven rendition of "The Battle of New Orleans" while the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah writhe around him. Ben wears a devil-red, open-chested jumpsuit and rolls around the stage while screaming The Temptations' "Ball of Confusion." Mary surveys a God-flooded landscape and sings Cat Stevens' "Morning Has Broken" to the crashing waves. Passages of scripture periodically scroll across the screen like a stock ticker. All of the leads play the Devil at some point.

The weirdness and '70s-ness peaks around the 35-minute mark, when Mary and The Manhattan Transfer sing the doo-wop standard "Life Could Be a Dream" while superimposed over newsreel footage of Henry Kissinger. Up until now the show has been wholly apolitical, and it kind of still is — if there's a concrete statement to be found in slapping a nonsequiturial Kissinger into your coked-up Bible musical, I sure can't suss it out. Anyway, once we've witnessed that parade of madness, it seems only natural that we'd come around to one of the Manhattan Transfer dudes dressed as a Satanic Dracula singing "Sympathy for the Devil" to the damned. There's no such thing as too on-the-nose in the realm of Mary Tyler Moore's nightmares.

While I haven't been able to dig up many contemporary accounts of how "Mary's Incredible Dream" was received by audiences in 1976 (most of the documentation of this special is "look at this weird thing!" blog posts like the one you're reading), it aired once in a 10 p.m. January time slot on CBS and does not appear to have been repeated. Coupling that with the fact that it's never received any official video or streaming release in the subsequent five decades, it seems safe to say that it wasn't a runway hit. Any which way, I'm glad it exists as a snapshot of the only confluence of culture, era, and power dynamics that could have spawned it. Also drugs. Probably quite a lot of drugs in that snapshot too.

(Moore did get her variety show a couple of years later, incidentally. It was a critical and commercial failure, but it did help launch the careers of cast members Swoosie Kurtz, Michael Keaton, and David Letterman. I think we can count that as a success.)