The Dick Van Dyke Show

By Joanne Morreale

The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS 1961–66) was a uniquely self-reflexive sitcom that drew on vaudevillian tropes at a time when vaudeville-based comedy variety was disappearing from television. At the same time, it reflected the liberal politics of the Kennedy era and gave equal time to home and work as it ushered in a new image of the sitcom family. In The Dick Van Dyke Show, author Joanne Morreale analyzes the series’ innovative form and content that altered the terrain of the television sitcom.

Morreale begins by finding the roots of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the vaudeville-based comedy variety show and the “showbiz” sitcom, even as it brought notable updates to the form. She also considers how the series reflects the social context of Kennedy’s New Frontier and its impact on the television industry, as The Dick Van Dyke Show responded to criticisms of television as mass entertainment. She goes on to examine the series as an early example of quality television that also pointed to the complex narrative of today, examining the show’s progressive representations of race, ethnicity, and gender that influenced the content of later sitcoms. Morreale concludes by considering The Dick Van Dyke Show’s afterlife, suggesting that the various reappearances of the characters and the show itself demonstrates television’s “transseriality.”

Fans of The Dick Van Dyke Show and readers interested in American television and cultural history will appreciate this insightful reading of the series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814340325

Joanne Morreale

Joanne Morreale is associate professor of media and screen studies at Northeastern University.

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INTRODUCTION

I remember exactly when it happened—it was on 96th Street by the East River in NY. I was driving my car downtown from New Rochelle, wondering what ground do I stand on that no one else stands on? I thought, I am an actor and a writer who worked on the Sid Caesar shows. That’s a different milieu: the home life of a television show writer.

Carl Reiner, quoted in Weissman and Sanders, 1

From this initial seed came The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66, CBS). A comedy about television writers known for its sharp writing and strong ensemble acting, it regularly appears in lists of the top television shows of all time. Over the course of its run, it was nominated for twenty-five Primetime Emmys and won fifteen, in categories for writing, directing, acting, and outstanding achievement in comedy. The show has rarely been off the air since 1961, and contemporary audiences remain familiar with the program because it is available on DVD, on cable stations, or on streaming sites such as Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube. In this book, I consider The Dick Van Dyke Show as an iconic cultural text and a television milestone that draws on the past, shapes it to fit the present, and inspires many programs that follow. It marks an important transitional moment in American television and culture: it appeared at a moment when comedy-variety shows were disappearing and sitcoms were becoming predominant television forms, when Eisenhower-era politics were being supplanted by Kennedy’s New Frontier, and when the postwar generation of the fifties was becoming a newly affluent, upwardly mobile middle class. In the course of addressing its cultural milieu, The Dick Van Dyke Show altered the form and content of the sitcom genre. Although it has been off the air since 1966, it made an indelible mark on television and continues to exert an influence. In this book, I underscore its contributions to both television history and cultural discourse.

Origins of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66)

The Dick Van Dyke Show was one of the first television programs with a hyphenate: a writer-producer who exerted creative control.¹ Carl Reiner wrote and produced The Dick Van Dyke Show, initially titled Head of the Family, based on his experience as a writer for Sid Caesar’s comedy-variety show, Your Show of Shows (1950–54), as well as his personal biography. Reiner, like many upwardly mobile writers and comedians based in New York, had grown up in a working-class Jewish family in the Bronx. He began working as a sewing machine repairman at sixteen but decided to become an actor after enrolling in a drama class. He managed to secure bit parts doing theater, but found more regular work performing sketch comedy at a Borscht Belt resort in the Catskills. It was there that he met his wife Estelle, a painter, and married her in 1943. When World War II broke out, Reiner was drafted and stationed at Camp Crowder, Missouri, which would become the setting for Rob Petrie’s military service in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reiner was eventually transferred to a base in Hawaii, where he performed in revues and became skilled in comic improvisation. When he returned to New York after the war, he began to seek comedic roles, eventually leading to a part in a Broadway musical comedy revue. Based on this experience, in 1950 he was hired as a supporting actor on Sid Caesar’s then-innovative comedy-variety series Your Show of Shows, which combined elements of sketch comedy and musical revue. In order to break up the monotony of long rehearsals, he sat in the writers’ room and eventually began to contribute ideas. He worked among notable talents, including Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, Mel Tolkin, and Neil Simon, although his contributions were unattributed (Waldron 10). When Your Show of Shows was cancelled in 1954, Caesar adapted with a sketch comedy show, Caesar’s Hour (1954–57) with Reiner on staff as both actor and writer. Reiner also played himself on Caesar’s final television show, Sid Caesar Invites You (1958), which lasted only five months.

In accord with demographic shifts from the city to newly built suburbs in the fifties, Reiner commuted into Manhattan while he lived in New Rochelle. As Gerard Jones notes, by 1953 one out of five Americans lived in the suburbs, and the number kept growing (88). Like many first-generation children of immigrants, Reiner was assimilating and moving into the middle class, which provided him with writing material. In 1958, he published a fictionalized version of his autobiography, Enter Laughing, which describes the main character’s struggle to become a successful actor despite his family’s pressure to work in the millinery business.² He planned a sequel to the book, but when his agent Harvey Kalcheim suggested that he find a sitcom to star in as his next career move, he decided to write his own instead. The result, then titled Head of the Family, began where Enter Laughing left off. Reiner’s idea was to depict his experience as a television writer who had established upscale, culturally assimilated domesticity in the suburbs. After years of receiving no credit for his writing contributions, he made his main character head writer of a comedy team.

Opening credits of Head of the Family, starring Carl Reiner.

Reiner wrote the pilot and additional twelve episodes of Head of the Family before he had financing or a sponsor. While these episodes were later modified by executive producers Sheldon Leonard and Danny Thomas, as well as the team of writers who eventually assisted Reiner, they provided what Reiner termed, a nucleus, a bible, for anybody who would help write it after that (Weissman and Sanders 2). As David Marc remarked, the paradigms of Reiner’s life: ethnicity and assimilation, urbanity and suburbanity, presentationalism and representationalism, became the mythic resources from which the show would be refined (1989, 93). Reiner remained producer and head writer of the series from its inception up until its final two seasons. Cowriters and story editors Bill Persky and Sam Denoff were his primary assistants, along with a small cadre of other writers such as John Whedon, Garry Marshall, and Jerry Belson. Even then, Reiner wrote the scripts for every episode; though he lost some control over the last twelve episodes when he left to act in the film The Russians Are Coming, he wrote drafts of the final episodes before he left. Despite the collaborative nature of the writing process, Bill Persky noted, Every show has one source from which everything emanates—very often it’s the star, but in this case, it was clearly Carl (Weissman and Sanders 39).

Reiner initially planned to star as the fictional Rob Petrie, the head television writer for a comedy-variety show called The Alan Sturdy Show. According to David Marc, Sturdy was an Anglicized version of the Yiddish word shtarker which meant big bruiser, and was based on Sid Caesar (1989, 91). (When actor Morey Amsterdam later pointed out that Alan Sturdy sounded like Alan’s dirty, it was renamed The Alan Brady Show.) But the character was not just based on Sid Caesar. Reiner asserted that the character was an amalgam of all of the comedians I had heard about. Jackie Gleason never spoke to his writers and he had the scripts thrown under the door at the hotel and he wouldn’t rehearse. . . . Milton Berle who was everything on his show had that whistle, that high level of dictatorship (1998, 5). Head of the Family also drew from Reiner’s home and work life: both Rob Petrie and Carl Reiner lived in New Rochelle, worked in Manhattan; and were writers for a comedy-variety show. Reiner’s wife Estelle had given up her painting career when she married, and they had two children; in Reiner’s fictional version, Rob Petrie was married to a former dancer and they had a son, Ritchie. The Reiners lived at 48 Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle, and their alter egos the Petries lived at 148. What I was doing, Reiner said, was examining my life and putting it down on paper (Weissman and Sanders 2). Like Sid Caesar, who said that comedy writing portrayed truth with a curlicue (France), Reiner believed that stories should be credible, and many of the storylines came from actual incidents that occurred in his life, and later, from Dick Van Dyke’s life or the lives of his writers. Reiner observed, Good writing always reflects the times. Good writing is people realizing who they are, what they’re about, what their relationships are, and writing about them (Faye).

Reiner’s agent Harvey Kalcheim took his scripts to actor Peter Lawford, who was trying to establish himself as a television producer. Lawford showed them to his then father in law, Joseph Kennedy, who agreed to finance production of the pilot. Head of the Family aired on CBS on July 19, 1960 as part of a summer comedy anthology, but it did not secure a sponsor. Reiner decided to move on, but Kalcheim persisted and sent the scripts to another of his clients, television producer Sheldon Leonard. Leonard, executive producer of Make Room for Daddy (1953–57) (renamed The Danny Thomas Show after its first three seasons), was looking for new sitcoms for Thomas’s production company. After reviewing the scripts, Leonard told Reiner that he thought he could get the program on CBS’s fall schedule, provided he rewrap the package, which meant recasting all of the characters, including the role of Rob Petrie (Zurawik 53). According to Leonard, Barbara Brixton, who played Laura Petrie, was too glamorous for a television wife, and the supporting characters added nothing. Moreover, Reiner’s style as a sketch comedy actor, which required a great deal of exaggeration, didn’t fit comfortably into American living rooms and bedrooms (Reiner 1996, 1).

However, David Marc suggests that Leonard may also have feared that Reiner would be perceived as too Jewish for middle America (1989, 98). Despite the fact that Rob Petrie was not written as an explicitly Jewish character, Gerard Jones suggests, "his name, his looks, his character’s New York showbiz background . . . Head of the Family was clearly a story of Jewish assimilation and exurban flight (143). Reiner also concurred with Marc’s assessment, Look, it wasn’t a big secret. In those days, there were just a lot of important network and agency people who thought that way. . . . The funny part is, that version [Head of the Family] wouldn’t have succeeded. Dick was better as me. If they’d said in the first place not ‘he’s too Jewish’ but rather ‘he’s not talented enough,’ it would’ve been fine. That I could buy" (Zurawik 53).

In a move that was unusual at the time, Leonard hired Reiner to produce as well as write the show, perhaps to compensate for losing the role of Rob Petrie. While producers were then considered management and thus often at odds with writers, Reiner’s dual role as writer-producer allowed him to maintain creative control of the series. Yet, despite the show being based on his life, when Reiner recast the series, both contenders for the role of Rob Petrie were, notably, non-ethnic Midwesterners. The then little-known actor Dick Van Dyke beat out Johnny Carson to win the role.

Dick Van Dyke had been trying to break into television for years, with roles as emcee on several short-lived talk and game shows and guest appearances on several variety shows. CBS awarded him a seven-year contract in 1954, and in 1955 made him anchor of The CBS Morning Show alongside Walter Cronkite, but the show was canceled after six months. The following year he hosted the CBS Cartoon Theater (1956), which was also quickly canceled. He made a few unsold pilots for television series, and in 1958 CBS released him from his contract. According to Dick Van Dyke, CBS vice president of programming Oscar Katz said, The kid just doesn’t have it (Van Dyke 2011, 54). But he continued to make television appearances, twice playing Sgt. Bilko’s cousin on The Phil Silvers Show (1955–59) and performing a weekly pantomime on The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom (1957–60), and he also auditioned for theater. In