Bob Newhart followed his first series Dr. Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show becoming an Inn Keeper in Vermont.
Much like his previous series, Dick Louden (Newhart) manages to make his ensemble into stars. This series had a lot more cast member than the previous one. It starts so slow with its sleepy theme song & great country scenery that you could almost go to sleep. Mary Frann (Dick's wife) & others would then wake you up.
Instead, many woke up to more genius. Larry, Daryl & Daryl even got jobs doing commercials after this show went off, they became so famous. It is amazing between this & his previous series how much Bob Newhart became a part of everyone's TV viewing lives.
This series ended on a high when (spoiler) in the last episode they tied it back directly to The Bob Newhart Show. Between the downtown setting of the first show & the country setting of this show, Bob Newhart never missed a beat. Newhart is not considered a classic series. It did have a classic ending episode. There are several reasons that only the ending show really made any impact.
The first season maid before Julia Duffy. Jennifer Holmes is the forgotten lady. The series writing was so uneven that they replaced her because she was not funny. Trouble is with the script she was given the first year, even Duffy would have failed. It is hard to be funny when there is no script for her written to be funny.
Steven Kampmann character of Kirk Devane only lasted one season longer. His suffered the same problem. The character was written so unlikeable that he had no appeal to the audience. He could not really be funny with this handicap. The character just came off as being a jerk.
With those 2 handicaps to start, why the series did last so long had to do with the fact that Newhart as Dick Louden still had ratings appeal due to previous shows like his own that preceded it. This series actually comes off as a total mirror reversal of his character from the previous series. Usually every time he opens his mouth to give anyone advice on this show, it backfires. That alone kept it above the ratings basement. Dick Louden could have written a How To book about creating a tv sit-com and done better than some of this.
Then the army of different writers kept coming up with different strange characters and stories to keep it going. The best ones were Larry, Darryl & Darryl showed up in the second episode of season 1. At first they were only used in random select episodes the first 2 years. Then in season 3 they became much more used due to their replacing Kirk Devane as the owners of the Minuteman Cafe. From there in the later seasons, they became major characters to put Dick Louden in his place, very often.
Mary Frann's Joanna is known for her sweaters. What isn't known is why her hair kept the same style for much of the series, which really did not compliment her. As the series went along, she started wearing tighter and tighter clothes, especially when Julia Duffy was sporting her baby bump. I can only guess why this was done.
The town where the Stratford Inn is never gets identified. It is just one of many loose ends that fits the ending so well.
Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari are totally self-absorbed yuppie characters that fit the insulting image that generation was given by the media in this era. Tom Poston's George Uttley handman character works though he is not exactly the most exciting one. He does win a lot of battles of wits with Dick Louden.
Newhart might actually be the most politically incorrect sitcom of it's time. There are several broad insults of women and others during the series that now would be considered taboo by a generation of people who have been raised by the media to believe that "words and symbols" are harmful and erasing them from the National Conscience will fix the problems. Sadly, the National Media has made all of this a bigger problem instead of vice-versa.
The more I have reviewed this old series, the more I realize that the only way it could logically have ended is by Newhart waking up from a bad dream in his bed next to Emily (spoiler) his wife from his previous series. If it had ended any other way, the loose ends and problems with the scripts would make no sense. Some of the last season episodes go totally off a cliff.
There were a couple of folks from the prior show who pop into this series at certain points. Mr. Carlin (Jack Riley) makes one of the better ones as he was excellent in the prior series. Bill Daly who was an airline employee in the old series pops in too.
The opening credits were borrowed from On Golden Pond. Henry Mancini's theme music might have been borrowed from an elevator. Compared to Pink Panther or Peter Gunn, this one plays like a sleep fest.
As a whole, the series could have been much better. It seems early on episodes scripts might have been rushed in from the brainstorming tv writers' room and as it goes along, they keep looking for ways to fix issues the rushing has caused.
4 out of 7 found this helpful