You’ve come a long way, baby

“If there’s anything worse than being single, it’s sitting around talking about being single,” said Mary Richards, the 30-year-old who had ditched a commitment-phobic swain and headed to Minneapolis to work as a single television news producer. That was in the first episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which aired in 1970.

For Mary, making it on her own may have been freeing, socially transgressive, practical, and even fun; but singlehood — as a way of life rather than unfortunate happenstance — certainly wasn’t anything to crow about.

Forty years later, the twentysomething girlfriend protagonists of MTV’s new reality show “Downtown Girls” seem to think that there is nothing better than sitting around and talking about being single.

It’s not that they don’t have responsibilities and concerns outside their love lives: the heroines work for Glamour.com and Atlantic Records, as boutique owners and law students. But their conversational repertoire — or at least the version captured and edited by producers — revolves entirely around their romantic status, their dating prospects, their oft-voiced assuredness that they have dated every man in Manhattan, their thoughts on the morality of flirting, “F-booking” (short for “Facebooking) hot guys and “figuring out a red zone for jealous.”

Singlehood isn’t a fate to which these women have been consigned; it isn’t a circumstance to make the best of. For the “Downtown Girls” — as for the stars of fellow MTV series such as “The City” and “The Hills” — singlehood is the fact of their lives that gives them an excuse to gossip, party, make out, have brunch, take pole-dancing classes, engage in a stupendously stupid “ex-swap” of their previous boyfriends, and, essentially, qualify to be the subjects of an MTV reality show.

The pop-cultural arc of the past four decades has certainly flattered unmarried women. Historically, on television as in life, defying social convention by pursuing a career before a husband, living on your own, or rejecting a potential mate for not being up to snuff was behavior that provoked leering attention (from bosses, salesmen, and Lenny & Squiggy) and parental disapproval. Rhoda Morganstern swore that her mother declared her a dried-up old spinster when she turned 21 without a husband, and Marlo Thomas’ free-living New York actress on “That Girl” in the ‘60s was the focus of her parents’ conventional suburban angst.

So destabilizing was the post-feminist preponderance of husband-spurning women on television (and, more troublingly, in the real world) that the choice of the fictional newswoman Murphy Brown to have a child while unmarried in 1992 earned her the wrath of an actual vice-presidential candidate.

Not a decade later, the bopping baby of Ally McBeal’s imagination provided a neat enough summation of the backlash-sentiments of that era that it landed her on the cover of Time magazine, above the gloating question: “Is Feminism Dead?”

But television’s contemporary single ladies have now, it seems, so effectively slipped the bonds of social censure that they don’t even offer much opportunity for sociopolitical interpretation. As the three single heroines of “Downtown Girls” cast pitying looks on two coupled friends whose romantic commitments keep them from fully participating in the “ex-swap” event, it is impossible to ignore the fact that single womanhood (of the economically, racially and sartorially privileged sort) has moved from being tragi-comic, shameful or groundbreaking to being frothy, glamorous, aspirational and ultimately pretty boring.

Of course, much of that froth was generated by “Sex and the City,” a show that employed a neat, if precarious, trick to convey its message of social rupture: using the strappy-sandaled materialism of boom-time Manhattan as a metaphor for other kinds of liberation available to independent women in the last third of the 20th century.

But in the hands of many of “Sex and the City’s” waxen imitators — including its reality-show daughters — consumerism is not a metaphor for the more interesting pleasures that independence makes available to young women, but instead its sole purpose and pleasure.

For the young women on “Downtown Girls” — a show whose spirit appears to be summed up by its opening credit mash-up of cobblestoned Meatpacking District streets, cracked designer sunglasses and a Louboutin heel — the brunches still include “SATC”-style fruity pink drinks, but the strong whap of cultural or social significance has burned off long ago.

And from one perspective, this shift is a testament to the degree to which the figure of the unattached professional woman has morphed from curious anomaly to an accepted norm in less than half a century. It’s a snapshot of the speed of social progress, progress that has taken place on actual (sometimes cobblestoned!) streets, as well as on television.

But perhaps some women who once enjoyed the power of defying expectation miss the frisson that came when their personal choices packed political punch. Perhaps in some non-MTV quarters there is a longing to return some of the meaning to single life and sexual liberation. Why else, after all, would Carrie Bradshaw and her pride of lionesses make their ill-advised cinematic trip to Abu Dhabi? Sure, it was to escape their once-dashing, now-downer Bigs and once-yearned-for, now-yammering children and pretend that they were all single together again. But maybe they were also straining to find a city in which they could once again feel the high of shattering expectations just by being their single, sexy, empowered selves.

Perhaps this impulse to rediscover a place where independent femininity still means something also struck the creators of “Hot in Cleveland.”

TV Land’s new, standard-issue, laugh-track sitcom (premiering Wednesday and starring faded TV legends Betty White, Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick) revolves around a pack of women from Los Angeles who crash-land in Cleveland. It turns out to be the Abu Dhabi of Ohio, a land where extended and unfettered single womanhood has not yet arrived.

In this Midwestern city — not so far in the cultural imagination from Mary Richards’ 1970 Minneapolis — the thin, fashionable, expertly coiffed women (a soap actress, an eyebrow expert and an inspirational author) find that their brand of femininity is still exotic, desirable. They can still make waves here, walk into a bar and turn every male head. “They’re looking at us,” says Bertinelli’s character in wonderment. “In L.A. they look past us.”

You can bet that these ladies will sit around and talk about being single. Occasionally, it turns out, a Manolo still longs to be more than a Manolo.

calendar@latimes.com