Television veteran Bob Newhart plays Dick Loudon, a New York based how-to book writer transplanted to small-town Vermont where he and his wife Joanna buy a quaint old inn.
They get by with a small staff: a handyman (perennial second banana Tom Poston, in a role he played in one note for eight years, and always delightfully); and a maid, Leslie, a rich girl trying to learn how poor people lived and practicing before going to the winter olympics.
Unfortunately, Leslie was perfect, and perfection isn't funny. Nor wOlympics. Imperfect neighbor, Kirk the owner of the Minuteman Cafe. Leslie (Jennifer Holmes) was replaced after the first season by her cousin Stephanie, who wasn't perfect but thought she was, and that was funny! Leslie disappeared without being mentioned again, or missed. Stephanie was spoiled, self-absorbed, shallow, and invariably funny. Perhaps its because lovely Julia Duffy was ten years older than the character, and had learned her craft kicking around in soaps and lesser shows for a decade before landing this part. Duffy always played Stephanie to perfection.
And Stephanie's reason for being there made more sense. In a first season one-shot episode, Stephanie was forced into a marriage by her rich parents. In the second season she divorced her husband (after a weekend marriage) and was cut off from her fortune. The Loudon's inn was the only place she thought she could get a job and easily shirk work. In the first season she and Kirk have a fling in her one episode and her response to Kirk in their initial Season 2 meeting absolutely sets her character and is devastatingly funny. Watch those 2 episodes back to back.
A growing presence in season two was Michael Harris (Peter Scolari) a small-station television producer who was shallow and self-centered and perfect match for Stephanie, giving her another reason for her to hang around Vermont. Scolari is hilarious and winning, though he may be a trifle grating on repeated viewings (I always thought he was great).
In the third season Kirk is gone and the Minuteman Cafe is sold to Larry and his brothers Darryl, as their business "Anything For A Buck" isn't doing so well.
Their increasingly bizarre behavior is odd even by the standards of small-town Vermont. And sit-coms. Larry and the Darryls raise "Newhart" to rarefied levels of surreal comedy. They are simply wonderful.
By the third season, all the wheels were in place: Dick and Joanna (who was not as funny as she might have been--check out the "stunt casting" of a Gabor in "Green Acres" who became a positive boon for that show when her Hungarian weirdness actually suited Hooterville). Michael and Stephanie. Larry and the Darrys. George. And Jim and Chester, the show's Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, one of whom became mayor and the other being inveterately--and often insidiously--cheerful. Other glorious characters came and went over the course of the series, as people do in dreams, but this was the core.
By the fourth season, the show became unapologetically surreal, always a big aid to a comedy that means to be funny. "Newhart" occasionally borrowed elements from "Green Acres" plots; and Alvy Moore, Mr. Kimble from "GA", made a brief appearance in one seventh season show. But "Newhart" was its own bird, and from the fourth season on, it flew.
It was sad when they decided to let "Newhart" go (they say it was because they wanted to go out on top, but the ratings were sliding dramatically). However, the last show became one of the classic moments in television history, raising "Newhart" from a great comedy to a TV landmark.
Shows like this are generally unpopular with critics, who seem to distrust (1) putting laughs before some sort of social commentary, and (2) anything with a touch of the rural (probably because they're all city people who think nothing important ever goes on in that limbo between NYC and LA. They never got They incredibly popular "The Beverly Hillbillies" and some have ranked "Green Acres" The worst sitcom ever. But Bob Newhart, despite his gentle comedy, is one of their boys.
If you like your comedy wacky, with colorful characters, with its own logic (a la "Green Acres"), and without lots of social commentary preaching to you what you should think, "Newhart" is worth watching.
One caveat: unlike 'the great 1960s sitcoms that were done on sound stages with canned laughter and where the characters could drive cars and trucks and tractors, "Newhat" is filmed in front of a live audience and characters' comings and goings are often too stagey. And the live audience is often annoying, as canned laughter was on a truly funny sit-com
Oh: some people complain that as the series progresses the inn has fewer, if any, guests. But the inn is a bed-and-breakfast, a place travelers stop at briefly before moving on. I've been stranded at B-and-Bs for more than one day and I can promise you that from breakfast, when most people check out until evening, when people begin checking in again, you might never see a soul. So that part, at least, rings true. In fact, I was once at a B and B in TN where the proprietor's wife was hospitalized and even he wasn't there all day. They didn't have a George or Stephanie living in and for an entire day I had the whole place to myself!
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