The only possible personal relationship Mary would ever have with one of her co-workers. During initial planning of the series, Mary was supposed to have possibly had a relationship with Ted Baxter; this was prior to Ted Knight's hiring. This idea was quickly nixed, and the impetus for this episode was not that a relationship between Mary and Lou would ever have come to (long term) fruition, but as a 'what if', similar to Mary's Three Husbands (1977), which had preceded this.