This is the sixth post of a series. The previous posts are:

#1: The Howdy Doody Show
#2: 77 Sunset Strip
#3: The Edge of Night
#4: The Defenders
#5: 
#6: The Dick Van Dyke Show
#7: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
#8: 
#9: 
#10: 

I’m not sure just when I started watching The Dick Van Dyke Show. I’m sure it wasn’t during the first season.

I remember seeing the TV Guide article entitled “What’s a Dick Van Dyke?” in its December 9, 1961 issue, but that wasn’t enough to pique my curiosity. Perhaps I was a loyal viewer of whatever was on opposite it. In any case in January it moved to a 9:30 PM time slot and that was past my 9:00 PM bedtime in those days, so I couldn’t’ve watched it even if I wanted to.

I remember my aunt Jane mentioned seeing the episode where Rob gets hypnotized and how hilarious it was. That was the season two episode six “My Husband Is Not a Drunk” show, which was first aired on October 31, 1962. So I presumably started watching it some time after that.

By that time I had pushed my bedtime to 9:30 because I remember watching its lead-in show during its second season, The Beverly Hillbillies, from the first episode, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to extend it another half hour. (It’s hard to imagine two more different shows, isn’t it?)

Whenever it was that I started, I know that it became must watch TV forever thereafter.

There’s really only one problem with my memories of it. Once it went off the air after five seasons, it went into syndication, and I must have seen nearly every episode multiple times in syndication over the next several years, so that has pretty much wiped out my memory of the first time I saw any given episode.

Oh, well.

There’s a reason that it gets my vote as one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. If you’ve ever watched it, I’m sure you’ll agree.

And if you haven’t, I can only suggest rectifying that deficiency ASAP.

As Dan Castellaneta has written:

Actually, I don’t even think of The Dick Van Dyke Show as a single TV show but a bunch of great shows, all packed into one neat package. It was as good a sitcom as has ever been made, but it was also a great musical-variety show, a really funny sketch show—walnuts, anyone?—and a character comedy that could be surprisingly poignant. In a single half hour, The Dick Van Dyke Show managed to incorporate just about every style of entertainment that TV had to offer.

Here is where you can find The Dick Van Dyke Show streaming.

Currently you are able to watch “The Dick Van Dyke Show” streaming on fuboTV, Peacock, Crackle, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads, Pure Flix, Classix or for free with ads on The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Redbox, Pluto TV, Freevee, Xumo Play, Amazon Prime Video with Ads. It is also possible to buy “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as download on Amazon Video.

I think you can also find full episodes on YouTube. So there are plenty of places to see it.

I wanted to include a highlight of one of the funniest scenes, but which one to choose?

How about the show where Laura reveals that Alan Brady is bald? “Coast to Coast Big Mouth”

Perhaps the episode where Rob and Laura’s night out on the town is ruined when Laura gets her big toe stuck in the spigot of the hotel room’s bathtub? Mary Tyler Moore spent almost the entire episode offscreen and all you hear is her voice, but you get to imagine her naked in the bathtub. “Never Bathe on Saturday”

Or the aforementioned hypnosis episode? “My Husband Is Not a Drunk”

The famous scene from “It May Look Like a Walnut”? 

Or the one where Laura just can’t control her curiosity and has to open the mysterious package that just arrived for Rob? It shows that MTM was good at physical comedy, too. “The Curious Thing About Women”

But I settled on my personal favorite from the third season. It’s a farcical flashback episode entitled “That’s My Boy??” where Rob was convinced that he and Laura had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. The evidence just seemed to keep piling up because the hospital staff had kept confusing Laura Petrie’s room 208 with a Mrs. Peters in 203, so eventually Rob gave Mr. and Mrs. Peters a call and asked them to come over to straighten it all out. The scene became a sitcom classic.

Starting with the second season, two different opening titles were filmed, one where Rob tripped over the ottoman and one where he managed to avoid tripping. These were randomly alternated to give the audience a bit of a guessing game, is he or isn’t he, each week. With the third season, yet a third opening was added which can be identified by the difference in costumes. 

Here’s a video I made years ago showing all three openings. It is by far the most popular video I’ve ever made.

 

 

Vince Waldron has written The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, which is about as comprehensive a guide to the show as is ever likely to be produced.

 

He talks about Carl Reiner’s initial vision for the show:

Once he put his mind to it, Reiner had little trouble populating his proposed series with a colorful cast of characters drawn largely from people in his own life. The show would revolve around Robert Petrie, a TV writer who lives in New Rochelle with his wife, Laura, and their six-year-old son, Ritchie, much as Reiner had lived in that Westchester County suburb during his years as a writer and performer on Your Show of Shows, with his own wife and real-life son, who—like Reiner’s firstborn TV creation—was also named Robert. In the original script for his proposed series, Reiner’s alter ego works for a self-centered variety show star named Alan Sturdy, a character that many of the writer’s friends would recognize as a comic exaggeration of Reiner’s own longtime TV boss, Sid Caesar. Robert Petrie’s cowriters, Buddy Sorrell and Sally Rogers, also had real-life counterparts. “Sally was a combination of Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond,” Reiner has said—referring to, respectively, the lone female staff writer on Your Show of Shows and Diamond, a Caesar’s Hour writer and sometime actress who would find her greatest fame playing the flinty bailiff Selma Hacker on Night Court in the 1980s—“and Buddy was Mel Brooks.”

The original pilot, entitled “Head of the Family”, starred Reiner as Robert Petrie.

But nobody bought the pilot.

Sheldon Leonard got on board as executive producer/director and he convinced Carl Reiner that his talents were put to best use behind the scenes as creator/writer/producer. He suggested getting a relatively unknown actor who was currently wowing Broadway audiences in Bye Bye Birdie to play the lead.

And soon they cast Rose Marie who suggested Morey Amsterdam. And they found Larry Matthews to play the son. 

But with only one week to go before the scheduled shooting of the new pilot, they still hadn’t found the “girl” to play the role of the wife.

Leonard and Reiner flew in an actress from New York for an audition but she proved to be not right, so the two of them went to Danny Thomas who was bankrolling the pilot. They found him in a barber’s chair having his white hair dyed and they informed him how they had just wasted some of his money.

“Oh,” the star replied, unfazed. As the makeup man continued his diligent labors, Thomas fell silent for a few very agonizing seconds, lost in thought. Finally, just as Leonard and Reiner were about to turn for the door, Thomas sat up with a start. “You know,” he announced, “there was a girl who auditioned for me a couple months ago—she read for the daughter on my show. I didn’t use her, and I don’t remember her name. But, boy, did she read terrific!”

His curiosity piqued, Reiner listened with interest as Leonard joined Thomas in trying to remember the name of the mystery actress who had just become a front-runner in the Laura Petrie sweepstakes.

“I just remembered something else,” declared Thomas. “The girl we’re looking for had three names!”

“Wait a minute,” said Leonard, suddenly recalling a clue of his own. “Wasn’t she the one with the legs?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Thomas, “that was her!” And then, noticing the slightly confused look on Reiner’s face, Thomas quickly explained this latest clue in their little mystery. A few months before she came in to read for them, Thomas recalled, the girl they were now seeking had created quite a stir in the role of Sam, the curvaceous receptionist whose legs were the most outstanding feature of the Richard Diamond, Private Detective show. “So now we knew that she had great legs,” says Reiner. “And three names. But that was all we had to go by.”

By the way, the reason Mary Tyler Moore didn’t get the part of Danny Thomas’s daughter was because of her nose. Thomas just didn’t think anyone would believe anyone with her nose could be his offspring.

They found Mary Tyler Moore (who had done a lot of modeling work, see the photo below) in time to film the pilot, but another problem arose. Dick Van Dyke was still wowing them on Broadway and he could only be released for one week to film the pilot. Meanwhile, his understudy Charles Nelson Reilly filled in for him that week. But Van Dyke was so nervous that entire week that he developed fever blisters on his lip. The makeup artists tried their best to cover them up, but you can still see them in some of the scenes, including that closeup at the top of this page.

By the way, did you know that Morey Amsterdam wrote lyrics to the show’s theme music? They’re pretty good, too. Here’s Dick Van Dyke singing them.

Despite moving the show to the later time slot in the first season in the hopes that it would attract a more sophisticated audience, the ratings remained anemic. CBS network president James Aubrey, who had never liked the show to begin with as he didn’t care for the premise of a TV program about TV writers because he didn’t think it would appeal to the public, felt vindicated and planned to cancel the show. At the same time Proctor and Gamble, which had sponsored the show during the first season, decided to drop its sponsorship, so it seemed that one season was all that The Dick Van Dyke Show was going to get. Vince Waldron’s book The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book explains how the show was saved by the efforts of its executive producer Sheldon Leonard.

 

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