Broadcast television was a new-fangled medium when Cloris Leachman made her debut there.
She was a panelist on Hold It Please, a Saturday night audience participation quiz show that ran exactly three episodes on CBS in May of 1949.
Now, well into the eighth decade of a career that's brought her multiple Emmys, an Academy Award and just a generally warm reputation, Leachman is an early pioneer in another emerging medium: short-form streaming video dramas.
She stars in The Eleventh, a drama now being streamed on Feeln, the SVOD (subscription video on demand) service of Hallmark.
The Eleventh rolls out weekly in short episodes, less than half the length of traditional TV dramas. If that sounds experimental and out of the mainstream, you'd never know it from the cast.
Besides Leachman, it features Ed Asner, her long-time colleague from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Florence Henderson, which reunites two veterans of the old Love Boat. It also features Christopher Atkins and Tracy Nelson.
Leachman doesn't think the non-traditional format will discourage viewers. In fact, she thinks that these days it may entice new ones.
"It's a different way to tell a story," she says. "People's attention span isn't what it was, so when you can tell a story and get people intrigued in under a half-hour, I think you are doing something great."
Not that moving out of traditional forms is always easy.
"Change is hard," she says. "But I wouldn't be here today, at 90 years old, if I wasn't able to adapt."
The Eleventh revolves around Janine (Ren Harris), above, a girl who tries to understand and then mend a long family rift. Her mother, who recently died, had been estranged from her grandmother Margaret, played by Leachman.
It's an adult story with a dark side, involving tragic misunderstandings that created unnecessary separations and underscore the ways in which parents and children can unintentionally wound each other.
That said, it's also a Hallmark production. It has nothing that any member of any family, young or old, could not watch.
Leachman says the friction and misunderstandings are simply part of ordinary life. "Of course" every family has its difficult relationships, she says.
She also says she doesn't sense any upswing in the demand for positive, uplifting stories.
"Same as always," she says, and she speaks from some experience, having played pretty much every kind of show and character in hundreds of movies, television and stage shows.
Her longest recent role was the slightly batty, but endearing Maw Maw on Fox's Raising Hope. To earlier generations she was the overly inquisitive landlady Phyllis Lindstrom on Mary Tyler Moore and its spinoff Phyllis, while movie fans might best remember her as the lonely Ruth Popper in The Last Picture Show, for which she won an Oscar.
She says she's kept some of the friendships she made along that path. "Ed Asner just called me up and told me he loved me," she says.
As for what most stands out for her, she says it's The Last Picture Show, above.
But she also cites The Woman Who Willed a Miracle, an ABC After-School Special from 1983 in which she played May Lemke.
"It involved a baby and I was entirely responsible for its life," she says. "I knew what to do every second."
[Access Feeln TV at www.feeln.com.]