Sean Daughtery posted a blurb on the Old-Time Radio Digest yesterday pertaining to CBS’ special, The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited, which was on last night. It’s a column by The Washington Post’s Tom Shales, a man whose opinions I generally take, to use the Latin, cumo graino salto. But he kind of raised my hackles with a piece that disses my favorite television sitcom of all time.

Yes, you should know that The Dick Van Dyke Show is my favorite TV sitcom. I watched it religiously in reruns as a tadpole, and even though I’ve seen every episode numerous times I continue to watch it again and again and again. (My addiction to this show was so great that I used to practice falling over the ottoman in our living room.) When I first heard that they were going to do this reunion special, my initial reaction was “Oh…I don’t think this is a good idea…” Especially since many of the principal players are now longer with us; I’m speaking of cast members Morey Amsterdam, Richard Deacon and Jerry Paris, to say nothing of the show’s producers, Sheldon Leonard and Danny Thomas. But then I said to myself, “Well…you know I’m going to have to watch it. I just have to.”

So I did. This morning, that is—I had to tape it last night. And perhaps I’m a little biased, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. I can agree with some of Shales’ comments; the show wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t without its rough edges—reunion shows rarely are. They exist primarily to allow us to try and grab a brief bit of nostalgia, plus they allow us to exclaim, “Boy, did s/he get old!” There are some who will echo the sentiment of Thomas Wolfe, namely, “You can’t go home again”—but then again, I always thought Look Homeward, Angel was dull as dishwater in the first place. (I also wish that they had done away with the “clip show” portion of the special; the last season of The Dick Van Dyke Show will be released to DVD very soon, and there’s very little reason to show a bunch of clips on these reunion things, since on DVD all of the episodes are practically at your fingertips.)

But it was great seeing the whole gang together again—Rob, Laura, Sally, Alan, Millie, and even Rob’s brother Stacy (played by his real-life brother, Jerry Van Dyke) and son Richie (who had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo at the beginning). The funniest moment for me was when it was revealed that Sally finally got married—to her nerdy boy friend Herman Glimscher, played by Vic & Sade’s Bill Idelson. (Although, deep down, everybody knew she was really married to Buddy—she just didn’t have the necessary papers.) When I was in college, I was on the College Bowl team and I once answered a question on Herman—everyone seemed impressed that I not only knew his first and last name, but the actor who played him. (Well, perhaps “impressed” isn’t the correct term—but I vaguely recall shouts of “He’s a freak!” as mothers pulled their children inside for safety. Something like that.)

Now, here’s the part of the Shales column that raised my blood pressure:

But how prominent a place does the Van Dyke show really have in sitcom history? A friend suggests it was a lone port of sophistication in a storm of especially silly '60s sitcoms. CBS was wading into the country rube phase instituted by the despised James T. Aubrey, infamous unto eternity as The Man Who Fired Jack Benny.

Van Dyke episodes about the world of network TV, set at what seemed a glamorously quixotic workplace, could be delightful -- smart and satirical. But the domestic, home-based shows look awfully standard now, and Moore herself said in an interview once that she had no affection for the role of Laura Petrie, a submissive and dependent wife known for her plaintive whine "Oh, Rob." Thus many episodes have aged severely.

The special is unfortunately likely to supply fodder for more David Letterman jokes about how elderly the CBS audience is; traditionally, the network "skews" toward viewers of, say, Letterman's own age. NBC just celebrated, to sickening excess, the retirement of Friends and its cast of cool kooky cutups, and now here comes CBS with a crew of creaky geezers pretending that 40 years ago is only yesterday.

That sounds cruel, and if we're lucky enough to live that long, geezerly futures await us all. But we won't all go on network TV to prance limply around the track.

Thomas, Thomas, Thomas…how does a person that short-sighted get to be a TV critic? (Wait—I think I just answered my own question.) The Dick Van Dyke Show occupies the prominence it does it sitcom history because it’s funny. Damn funny. I hate to use the word timeless, because sitcoms do age—name me one that doesn’t—but it is timeless, with memorable characters, hilarious and only-slightly-exaggerated situations, and witty, top-notch scripts. I’ve always thought of Rob Petrie as television’s first real dad—a man who wasn’t ashamed to admit that he didn’t have all the answers—and Laura Petrie was the foxy mom every kid wished he had. (I vociferously disagree with “submissive and dependent,” Tom—that’s June Cleaver you’re thinking of.)

Enjoying a classic comedy that still entertains me today does not make a geezer—I prefer most of the old stuff (The Honeymooners, The Phil Silvers Show, etc.) to what passes for comedy today. Shales sounds as if he should be writing for Entertainment Weakly (yes, that’s the way I spell it), a magazine who once notoriously opined that there’s nothing funny about Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or the Marx Brothers. (But then again, what can you expect from a staff consisting of people who haven’t seen any movies before 1975?) To Tom Shales and the rest of his like-minded ilk, I say, “A plague and pox on your houses!” (Well, I hated to do that—but he just made me mad!)
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