Here are the climactic final minutes of the 17th episode of the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show entitled “The Curious Thing About Women”. The story is about Rob basing a sketch on Laura’s habit of opening his mail and depicting her as a ridiculous snoop, so that even their neighbors are laughing at her. The next day Millie and Jerry come by to apologize.
You’ll probably find that episode on many fans ten best lists, including Carl Reiner, the creator of the show.
Which is strange because Reiner has confessed he was somewhat lukewarm on that episode due to its depiction of Laura as a standard sitcom style snooping wife. He was aiming for something a bit more realistic with his show, but he wasn’t able to write all the scripts himself. That script was written by Frank Tarloff—under the pen name David Adler.
As Carl Reiner told Vince Waldron in The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book:
“I didn’t love the fact that we made Mary so silly that she had to open the package,” says Reiner, who confesses that his biggest problem with Tarloff’s script was that he simply couldn’t imagine his own wife—or anyone else’s, for that matter—behaving as Laura Petrie does in the episode. “I made Laura a little sillier than my wife,” explains Reiner, “but I was still basing things on Estelle. And I never liked that show particularly, because that wasn’t my wife.”
Still, the show was funny, and it brought out a facet of Mary Tyler Moore that hadn’t been on display previously: her gift for physical comedy.
Waldron continues:
The fact that “The Curious Thing About Women” calls to mind the basic mechanics of an I Love Lucy episode was no coincidence. As it happens, Tarloff’s script was actually based on a similar plotline that the writer first composed for the Joan Davis sitcom I Married Joan, which itself was little more than an I Love Lucy knock-off that ran for three seasons in the early fifties. “Curiosity”—which was the title of the script that Tarloff penned for the Davis show—was first telecast on December 3, 1952. The TV Guide synopsis for the Davis episode—which was coauthored by Tarloff, Arthur Stander, and Phil Sharp—reveals a striking similarity to Tarloff’s later Van Dyke Show script. “Joan’s husband forbids her to open his mail,” reads the blurb. “She follows his order until the next day, when a large parcel arrives.”
Tarloff’s mild act of self-plagarism was hardly uncommon in an era when situation-comedy writers routinely dusted off scripts from as far back as radio in their search for fresh springboards. Ironically, in later years, Tarloff would retain little memory of writing either version of his durable storyline. Speaking of “The Curious Thing About Women” some years later, Tarloff confessed, “I saw it about six months ago, and I didn’t even remember that I’d written it until I saw my name on it at the end.”
Despite his reservations about the episode’s lack of fidelity to his reality, Reiner was not about to take a pass on a script with such obvious comic potential. “I mean, I couldn’t say no to it,” he acknowledges, “because I needed a show to do.” Long after the dust has settled, the producer admits that he has no regrets. “It was a very successful show,” admits Reiner. “And very funny. But it always bothered me that I would never have come up with that premise. That show was written by another person—it was somebody else’s reality. And I didn’t like that.”
And yet years later he included it on his list of ten favorite episodes. It might not be realistic, but it does that matter?
Here for comparison is the the original I Married Joan episode:
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