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"Fly the Unfriendly Skies," "Tracy Grammar School, I'll Lick You Yet," "Tennis, Emily?," "Mom, I L-L-Love You," "Goodnight Nancy," "Come Live with Me," "Father Knows Worst," "Don't Go to Bed Mad," "P-I-L-O-T," "Anything Happen While I Was Gone?," "I Want to Be Alone," "Bob and Emily and Howard and Carol and Jerry," "I Owe It All to You… But Not That Much," "His Busiest Season," "Let's Get Away From it Almost," "The Crash of 29 Years Old," "The Man with the Golden Wrist," "The Two Loves of Dr. Hartley," "Not With My Sister You Don't," "A Home is Not Necessarily a House," "Emily, I'm Home… Emily?," "You Can Win 'Em All," "Bum Voyage," "Who's Been Sleeping on My Couch?"
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Watching old movies, even when they're bad, is like watching our collective hopes and dreams speaking to each other as they drift into history. But watching old television, even when it's good, is like trying to decipher the messages from a distant and very stuffy alien race. I wanted so badly to rise to the level of "The Bob Newhart Show", because Newhart himself is very funny in a non-classical way. Alas, his show is strait-jacketed by an outdated format that current TV viewers (let alone moviegoers) will find utterly incompatible with anything that came after. Despite its self-image as being above the pack in intelligence, it's incredibly limited, to the point that you look at the cinema of the same era and wonder how they could ever be temporally linked.
The format is extremely simple and replicated across seemingly millions of sitcoms from the '70s and '80s. There's the ultra-normal anchor–in this case Newhart's psychologist character Bob Hartley–who's got two sets (an apartment and an office) and is generally the centre of the action in both of them. Orbiting around Bob's nucleus is wife Emily (Suzanne Pleshette), the voice of reason if he gets snippy or unreasonable and a sounding-board for his exposition. Above this inner orbit fly the freaks: a) neighbour Howard Borden (Bill Daly), a divorced flight navigator with a tendency towards womanizing; b) orthodontist and equally swinging single Dr. Jerry Robinson (Peter Bonerz); and Carol Kester (Marcia Wallace), the receptionist for Bob and Dr. Jerry with a sideline in long lunches.
Enter freak. Introduce problem. Sort out. Roll credits.
Formats, of course, can be extremely provocative for creative personnel with a talent for colouring outside of the lines. But here there's no real variation going on: The format can't be recontextualized by a subversive intelligence, because that would destroy the warm, safe feeling it provides. The whole point of a sitcom like this is to create a central hearth and home, establish it as terra firma, then demonstrate the mad chaos that evolves outside its door. You get to taste the allegedly sweet foolishness of two mad bachelors and a flighty secretary before returning to the comfort of a reasonable wife and a place to crash.
"The Bob Newhart Show" also falls victim to the laziness with which television was produced in the '70s. Though Newhart's presence has always been subtle and low-key, everything else about the show itself is broad and simplified: the acting, especially by Pleshette, is big and loud and nuance-free; the shooting is aggressively frontal to accommodate a studio-audience; and the production design is determined to sink into pleasant non-attention. Topicality is restricted to referencing the ascendant sexual revolution, but in a mild way that doesn't really broach the subject. Even Bob's group-therapy patients, who should by all rights walk away with the program, are slapped together with one trait apiece that renders their neuroses cute, gentrified, or–absurd for a program revolving around a psychologist–utterly inconsequential to the action.
Inconsequentiality is, of course, the main selling point of the series: Unlike the soapy subplots that run rampant on today's programs, the whole line of "The Bob Newhart Show" is that it returns to zero by the end of the half-hour. Nobody has real intrigues that would provide season-long arcs, nobody has a problem that can't be solved in 26 minutes–the final minute of the episode is there to negate everything we just saw, thus reassuring us that all is well and tomorrow is another day. In this sense, Newhart's "button-down" persona is perfectly deployed, as he's the straight mild presence to which everything else aspires–and he's the most aesthetic thing on the program. It's hard to watch from the vantage point of "Seinfeld" (or worse, the UK "The Office"), feeling less like a classic cultural artefact than like something produced by Von Daniken's primitive Egyptians prior to the arrival of the aliens who built the pyramids. If you're looking to be less anxious, this is the program for you: you'll be so relaxed, you'll fall into a coma.
THE DVD
Fox issues "The Bob Newhart Show" on three flipper discs in two wafer cases. (Eight episodes per disc, four per side.) Given the limited source material (flat sitcom lighting, tinny sound intended for single-speaker broadcast), the transfers don't look too bad. Still, the full-frame image is consistently muddy and oversaturated, with moiré problems arising every time somebody wears a patterned outfit. The Dolby 2.0 mono audio is distinctly lacking in sharpness, though this is probably as high-fidelity as the show is ever going to sound. There are no extras.
26 minutes/episode; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; 3 DVD-9s; Region One; Fox
