Newhart, Bob Newhart’s second CBS sitcom, ran for eight seasons and 184 episodes from 1982-1990, neatly surpassing the run of his first CBS sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show, which ran from six seasons and 142 episodes from 1972-1978. But the second show always lived in the shadow of the first. The Bob Newhart Show was viewed as a key piece of a new Golden Age of TV comedy in the Seventies — a whipsmart ensemble sitcom perfectly tailored to the sane man in an insane world sensibility of its eponymous star, who died today at age 94. Newhart eventually won its own fans, but only after several years of extensive creative tinkering and cast changes. And even at its peak, it was considered a very good followup to a masterpiece.
Eventually, Newhart — with a massive assist from his wife Ginnie — figured out how to turn this situation to the newer show’s advantage, and in the process created the single best joke any sitcom has ever used to say goodbye.
Much of the Newhart series finale, “The Last Newhart,” involves a consortium of Japanese businessmen buying the small Vermont town where Newhart’s author Dick Loudon and his wife Joanna (Mary Frann) ran a small inn, in a scheme to turn the place into a golf resort. Near the end, Dick gets hit in the head with an errant golf ball, collapses, and wakes up… in Dr. Bob Hartley’s bedroom set from The Bob Newhart Show, lying next to Bob’s wife Emily, played once again by Suzanne Pleshette:
It is an incredible joke, deployed expertly. This was at a time before The Simpsons, Community, and other series would turn self-referential humor into a sitcom staple. And Newhart’s comedy brand was all about human behavior, not meta jokes. Near the start of that clip, you can hear a few cackles from members of the studio audience who recognize the Hartley’s bedroom, but even they aren’t prepared for Pleshette to emerge from underneath the covers, bantering with Newhart like no time had passed since they last acted together.
The idea behind it, Newhart later explained, came from his wife Ginnie, a few years earlier in the run of Newhart. Relations between the show and CBS were strained at that time, and Newhart assumed it would be ending soon. At a party, he and Ginnie ran into Pleshette. Ginnie observed that Dallas that had infamously revealed an entire season — and the death of a major character — to be a dream sequence, and that the series finale of St. Elsewhere revealed that show to have been a fantasy in the mind of the main character’s autistic son(*). Though both of those plot twists were divisive at best at the time, she looked at her husband and his former TV wife and told him, “You ought to wake up in bed with Suzie and describe this dream you had of owning this inn in Vermont.”
(*) The late comic book writer Dwayne McDuffie once observed that, because St. Elsewhere had featured characters from other TV shows, and also had seen a few of its characters appear elsewhere, all of those shows — as well as all of the shows on which characters from those shows had appeared — were also part of what he dubbed “The Tommy Westphall Universe.” Among the hospital drama’s recurring characters was Elliott Carlin, a former patient of Dr. Bob Hartley’s. So this means that all of Newhart was a dream inside the mind of a character on a show that was a dream in the mind of Tommy Westphall. As you were.
Her instincts were correct, and finally allowed Newhart to outshine its predecessor. The last Bob Newhart Show episode, where Bob and Emily prepare to leave Chicago for a new professional opportunity, is a good episode of a Hall of Fame show, but it’s never mentioned whenever people discuss the greatest series finales ever. Whereas any discussion of the best concluding episodes of all time has to mention “The Last Newhart” early and often.
