Mary Richards-Cronin returns to New York City after spending four months in Europe (“Italy, mostly,” she tells a cabdriver) following the death of her Congressman husband, Steven Cronin, in a rock-climbing accident.
Rhoda Morgenstern-Rousseau also returns to her native New York to make a fresh start as a photographer after having lived in Paris for several years, where she has recently divorced her second husband, Jean-Pierre Rousseau.
The old friends visit Manhattan together and share the events of their lives over the intervening years; Mary then invites Rhoda, just returned to New York, to stay with her in her duplex apartment.
Mary finds a job as a segment producer for WNYT in New York, where she works under the station founder, Jonah Seimeier, who is little more than half Mary's age, and comes into conflict with the ethics of a vain anchor/field reporter, Cecile Andrews; Rhoda finds work as a fashion photographer's assistant, where, in addition to “schlepping", she mothers the young models and begins to take on more responsibility in the studio, as well as to exhibit her own photography independently; Rose suddenly quits school to try her hand at stand-up comedy, with a poor initial reception; and Meredith breaks off from her boyfriend.
[3] Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times opined that Mary and Rhoda felt like "a hologram with no center... the tone here is much less witty than wistful, and re-bottling magic is difficult, perhaps even impossible, especially 25 or so years afterward."
In a lukewarm review, Barbara Vancheri of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote: "As far as reunion movies go, it's not embarrassing - Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper look fabulous - but it's also not up to the heady standards set by the 1970s series.".
[5] David Bianculli of the New York Daily News felt that "At its best, though, it's no better than good ... dramatic moments strain too obviously for sentimentality, and comic ones sometimes work too hard to be noticed, like an overly loud relative at a dinner party.