Love is all around for Moore on ''70s'

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LOS ANGELES -- Mary Tyler Moore is on the set, playing a 1970s professional woman who works at a TV station in the Upper Midwest.

But it's not her '70s show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It's That '70s Show -- which happens to have inherited the soundstage of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Got it?

Moore returned to the scene of her classic TV comedy last fall to shoot three episodes of That '70s Show. Her first episode runs Thursday (Fox, 8 p.m. ET/PT).

Moore, 69, plays Christine St. George, a local daytime TV host who hires Jackie Burkhart (Mila Kunis) to be her assistant at What's Up Wisconsin? Surface parallels to her MTM character, Mary Richards of WJM in Minneapolis, are obvious, but there's a big difference.

While Richards was "ladylike and wholesome and welcoming, this woman's just the opposite," says Moore, who likes playing against type. "Christine St. George is a very self-centered woman, a tad psychotic."

'70s Show writers and producers had fun with the connection to Moore's TV past. St. George has a single rose on her desk, as Richards did. Gavin MacLeod, who co-starred as news writer Murray, guests in one episode. (St. George fires him because he's always writing stories about Minnesota.)

In one scene, Jackie asks St. George what she thinks of a hat. "I say, 'I'll show you what I think of it,' and I hurl it to the sky with such venom,'" Moore says.

Moore says she already was a fan of That '70s Show, which will finish its eight-season run with its 200th episode on May 18. (Moore's show ran seven seasons, from 1970 to 1977.)

Working with a legend -- there's a plaque on the soundstage wall commemorating Moore's sitcom -- was easy and comfortable, '70s regulars say.

"She will try anything. She's very gung-ho," says Kunis, 22, who grew up watching MTM on Nick at Nite.

Things might have gotten too comfortable for Debra Jo Rupp, '70s mom Kitty Forman, who watched Moore's comedy during her college years. "One day I needed to ask her something during a scene, and I went, 'Mair,'" as Rhoda or Murray or Ted might have, Rupp says. "I was horrified. I went, 'Oh, my God. That's too intimate.' But she let it roll right off her."

Moore notes the changes made in the soundstage over the years: Sets are in different places; new audience bleachers have been built. Sitcoms are shot differently, with an extra camera. And she marvels at technological advances such as new editing tools.

But for all the changes, "there's an aura here," she says.

Moore, who lives with her husband, physician Robert Levine, in New York, doesn't miss the week-in, week-out grind of a TV series. Most of her recent work has been in movies, and she still works closely with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

But she still gets a thrill performing in front of a studio audience. "It's the sound of laughter," she says. "That's what I miss more than anything."

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