A few weeks back, I saw the new documentary about the legendary Rose Marie. "Wait For Your Laugh." I reviewed it here last Thursday with mucho accolades.
Meanwhile, one memory jag leads to another and I found myself very quickly immersed again in reruns of the "Dick Van Dyke Show." Now I've got the entire series on DVD, but I rarely drag that off the shelf. But I'm also now a Hulu subscriber and the series is two keystrokes away on my tablet.
And I am sucked in all over again.
Oddly, the show had also come up in conversation a few weeks ago when I was temporarily housing a young actor on our project. In my conversations with him, I became painfully aware of how the new generations are not finding this show. Or the folks in it. He shook his head when I mentioned both Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore.
"Who?"
D'oh.
As his punishment, I made him sit down and watch an episode which he found amusing. Actually and almost inexplicably, he laughed the most at neighbor Millie Halper played by the late Ann Morgan Guilbert.
As I have now climbed back into a "Dick Van Dyke Show" binge, I thought of the generations sadly unfamiliar with this program. And how important it was to me when I was a member of the so-called new generation.
"The Dick Van Dyke Show" made me feel like an adult. It made me smarter. It made me want to write. It made me laugh. And it made me funnier.
And I wasn't even a teenager yet.
Actually, while I watched it as a tyke, I didn't really get to appreciate it until it went into reruns after its initial network run. When it first aired, "The DVD Show" was on Wednesday nights, right after "The Beverly Hillbillies," another favorite that I watched religiously with my grandmother. But, after Jed and Granny went off, my grandmother didn't join me in watching Van Dyke and the gang. She would go off to do other things: wash the dentures, pull down the bedspread, or have a nip of Black Berry schnappes if she needed to settle her stomach. She didn't care for the Petries and I never knew why.
Until I finally got the show myself years later. Because, while there were tons of wonderful slapstick, "The DVD Show" was one you had to listen to. Carefully. Because it was rapid fire dialogue that might have gone a little too fast for my grandmother.
Hmm.
On my list of Top 25 Favorite TV Shows, we are heading into a very sitcom-populated territory, and, indeed, each and every one of them forms a lot of me today. Each one was just another writing class. And "The DVD Show," ranked at #16 on my list, was essentially Sitcom 101 for me.
There are some episodes that stand out for me more than others and I dip into the complete DVD set at least once a year to sample them anew. The one where Laura gets her toe stuck in the bathtub faucet. The walnut dream episode where Mary Tyler Moore comes sliding out of the closet. Or the show when Rob thinks he took the wrong baby home from the hospital. And the one where Laura, on national television, reveals that boss Alan Brady is bald. This is the one I screened for my young actor friend. Check out the chemistry in the closing scene of this episode. Brilliance on multiple levels.
There is one episode, however, that has never been seen by me again. It's the one where they throw a birthday party for little Ritchie. When I first saw it, I thought it was awful. Had there been a complete shift in writers? The energy was completely off. The acting was terrible. The live audience was replaced by canned laughter. I never could understand how this mess was actually part of this series.
Until years later. When I learned this particular episode was filmed on Tuesday, November 26, 1963. The day after the funeral for President John F. Kennedy.
Great television can be more than just entertaining. In this one case, it's a reflection of American history.
All of this because I saw a new documentary. Come on, kids, get with it. Check out "The Dick Van Dyke Show."
Dinner last night: Had a big lunch so just some popcorn at the movies.
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