Dick Van Dyke Show Funny Shoe Box

'The Dick Van Dyke Show' Invented Television 60 Years Ago Today

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You never know which TV shows are going to change the medium forever. Mad Men, The Office, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, Cheers—all of them had inauspicious starts long before they were placed in the upper echelon of the television canon. And the further away we get from a show's original run, the further removed we are from its original context. Obviously Breaking Bad is one of the greatest dramas of all time—but it's easy to forget that it didn't become a cultural touchstone until people started bingeing the first three seasons hit Netflix.

For a show like The Dick Van Dyke Show, which debuted 60 years ago today, you need a time machine in order to really understand how big of a deal the show was and remains. Well, maybe not a time machine; a Newspapers.com account will do just fine. If you did have a time machine and told a TV viewer in October 1961 that this new show starring a Broadway personality, a couple of vaudeville holdovers, and the dancing elf from some appliance commercials (Google "Happy Hotpoint") would change television forever, they'd look at you like you were crazy. And not just because you're a time-traveler, either.

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Honestly, today's TV audience probably doesn't get why The Dick Van Dyke Show was so revolutionary. Watch it today and it seems like the archetypal black and white sitcom, so representative of an entire era that it was painstakingly recreated on WandaVision's premiere episode. Again, context is key to understanding what The Dick Van Dyke Show was responding to.

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First, the top three TV shows of the 1961 to 1962 TV season were westerns. Remember TV westerns? Uh, unless you're a Baby Boomer, no, you don't! The genre dominated primetime in the '50s and '60s (there are even more westerns in the '61-'62 top 30), but westerns almost completely disappeared as the '70s gave way to the '80s, '90s, etc. My fellow Millennials: imagine if three versions of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman–all of them starring a macho cowboy instead of Jane Seymour—were the top three shows on television. A show like Friends would seem pretty bizarre by comparison, right?

But The Dick Van Dyke Show wasn't odd because it didn't have horses. Sitcoms were generally horse-free in 1961, although it should be noted that Mr. Ed debuted that year too. It was odd because—well, look at the top-rated sitcoms of the season: newcomer Hazel, a show about a live-in maid; The Andy Griffith Show, a sweet-natured ode to good ol' Southern living; and The Danny Thomas Show, a straightforward 1950s family sitcom that was still going strong in the new decade.

To compare: The Dick Van Dyke Show put the flappable straight man in its center, not a big kooky character; the show followed that straight man, Rob Petrie, on his commute from New Rochelle to New York City where he worked as a comedy writer, which is a far cry from anything seen on rural comedies; and The Dick Van Dyke Show split its time between the workplace and the family—and this show was rarely concerned with what Rob and Laura's kid was up to. Oh—and there were no horses!

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But even more than its city setting and parent-focused depiction of family, The Dick Van Dyke Show was just… real. Early '60s sitcoms still had the glossy sheen of the 1950s on them. Daddy worked somewhere, mom did housework in high heels and a fully beat mug, and the kids drove the comedy with their precocious shenanigans. Everyone was beautiful, every problem was solved, everything was fine.

The Dick Van Dyke Show was very much not that. We saw where dad worked, mom wore pants (much to the network's initial discomfort), and while there were plenty of shenanigans, they were almost always kicked up by the full-grown adults. A lot of the crisp and clean comedies on TV at the time reserved all of the jokes and/or all of the dignity for the title character, leaving the rest of the cast just kinda… there. But every character on The Dick Van Dyke Show felt not only like a fully-realized human being, but completely capable of carrying entire storylines.

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There is a realistic ease and lived-in chemistry in every line of dialogue. It's interesting: the performers on those 1950s family sitcoms, most of which weren't filmed before a live studio audience, feel like they're mugging it up for someone offscreen; the cast of The Dick Van Dyke Show, a show actually filmed before an audience, all feel like they're talking to each other. The Dick Van Dyke Show felt like a true ensemble; Van Dyke, Moore, Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie, Richard Deacon—they could all sing and dance and act and land a joke. They were, without a doubt, the best TV ensemble since I Love Lucy debuted 10 years prior.

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And, just like The Office, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, Cheers, etc., The Dick Van Dyke Show was not a hit at first. The ratings for the first season didn't even put it in the top 30 most-watched programs. The Los Angeles Times' TV reporter Cecil Smith wrote almost two weeks before The Dick Van Dyke Show's debut that it was already "so highly regarded that it is considered a hit before it even reaches the air." It makes sense that a bunch of Hollywood insiders, the people in the trenches of turning out shows like Car 54, Where Are You?, would get what series creator/writer Carl Reiner was going for. Critics, on the other hand, were mixed when their reviews ran on October 4, 1961.

"Dick Van Dyke is a clever entertainer who deserves a TV show. Agreed. But why does the show have to be a limp situation comedy?… [The show] seemed like a left-over Danny Thomas Show" – Fred Danzig, Ventura County Star-Free Press

"It looks as if there's a new TV family around for the audience to clasp warmly to its collective bosom… It is slight and rather trite as far as plot goes—the usual suburban stuff about sitters and head colds—but it is bright and has an air." – Cynthia Lowery, Associated Press

"Dick Van Dyke is a funny man… Las night he premiered his new situation comedy, and it was breezy, fast and funny." – Bill Fiset, Oakland Tribune

How could they know? They'd seen one episode which, yeah, did focus on suburban stuff. They'd yet to see the farcical genius of "Obnoxious, Offensive, Egomaniac, Etc." or "The Ghost of A. Chantz." They hadn't experienced the airtight comedy of "Who Owes Who What?" or "The Plots Thicken." They saw some old school song and dance in the pilot, but that's nothing compared to the absolute joy of "The Alan Brady Show Presents."

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And critics hadn't seen "Coast to Coast Big Mouth" or "Never Bathe on Saturday," so they had no clue that that appliance elf was a completely unique comedy powerhouse—although they'd witness Mary Tyler Moore's star light up just a few days later in Episode 2, "My Blonde-Haired Brunette." Critics in 1961 would never have predicted that this "left-over Danny Thomas Show" would devote a whole episode to a pitch-perfect Twilight Zone riff that would conclude with Mary Tyler Moore bodysurfing out of a closet on a tidal wave of walnuts.

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The point of all this is: The Dick Van Dyke Show's uneventful debut completely changed what television could look like. It could be casual, cool, frantic, weird, sexy, grounded, and fantastic—sometimes all at once! What The Dick Van Dyke Show did for television, we now take for granted. We're used to TV couples having palpable chemistry, for ensembles to be stacked, for formats to be broken and reassembled as something unexpected. We're used to seeing working women and kids that aren't all that bright. Now we accept all of these traits as just what television is—but they seem absolutely wild when you look at all the westerns and squeaky-clean family comedies that were on-air in October 1961. It doesn't feel like a stretch to say that not only is today The Dick Van Dyke Show's 60th anniversary, it's television-as-we-know-it's 60th anniversary.

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Source: https://decider.com/2021/10/03/the-dick-van-dyke-show-60-anniversary/

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