The Chris Moeller Archives

The Psychopathology of Bob Hartley

It’s largely acknowledged that the Newhart show on CBS-- the Bob Newhart-starring series set in rural Vermont during the 1980's, not the one from the ‘70s set in Chicago-- executed one of the greatest, if not the greatest, final episode in television history. In the final scene of the series’ marvelous eight-year run, Bob’s character-- author, TV host, and innkeeper Dick Loudon-- is struck by an errant golf ball while standing in the doorway of his country inn, then awakes to find himself in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, his wife from his earlier series The Bob Newhart Show, which itself ran six seasons ('72 to '78). It’s revealed that the entire second series has been a dream by psychologist Bob Hartley after he had eaten Japanese food for dinner.

There is something near pandemonium when the light is turned on and the studio audience recognizes the set piece for the bedroom of the Hartleys' Chicago high-rise apartment. The Hartleys were famously, and interestingly here, one of the first fictional married couples depicted on television to actually share a bed. And incidentally, the dream must have been one that occurred during the run of the first series, not after, because Bob and Emily Hartley, lest we forget, move to Seattle in the final episode of The Bob Newhart Show. In any case, it works.

As I said, the critical acknowledgement of this finale’s sheer greatness is widespread. It’s almost a reflexive answer for anyone and everyone to name this as one of the great series send-offs. And yet, the praise, in my estimation, has never been effusive enough. What this final reveal also did, and needs to be recognized, was add an entire new layer to the show. First, Bob Hartley was not a dentist or an airline pilot (like his buddies Jerry and Howard), he was a psychologist. As part of his professional career, he would have studied dream theory, most notably that of Sigmund Freud, who believed that dreams provide insight into our hidden desires and emotions. Bob was certainly a person that had repressed a few things. We all are that. Bob’s parents, played by Martha Scott and Barnard Hughes (each in multiple episodes), were not depicted as the warmest of parents, and even Bob Newhart’s observational comedy, upon which both series were based, was rooted in an ethic of Midwestern manners, aloofness, and repression (“Illinois-nice?”). There was more handshaking than hugging in the house where Newhart grew up, at least according to the comedy persona of Bob’s friend, Don Rickles. One of Bob’s co-stars in the second series, Julia Duffy, says in a DVD "extra" that she would tease Bob incessantly about sex off-camera, knowing how uncomfortable he was with the topic.

Freud believed that every dream topic, regardless of content, represented a release in sexual tension, and the last joke of the bedroom scene, and of the entire series, is Bob telling Emily that she “should wear more sweaters.” This is the show’s writers having some fun with Freud’s theory as “Dick’s” wife in the second series, a character played by Mary Frann, became known for her unique, one-might-say-in-retrospect gaudy sweaters. Frann and her character Joanna were statuesque, big-haired blondes, while Emily Hartley, played by Suzanne Pleshette, was a short-haired brunette. But there's more to it: basically every woman in the second series was a blonde and a contrast to Pleshette-- most notably Duffy, but also her cousin Lesley, played by Jennifer Holmes during the series’ first season, and even plus-size Kathy Kinney, who played for laughs the randy town librarian Miss Goddard. Was this wish gratification in respect to hair color, a repressed sexual scenario of Bob's childhood? I wonder what Dr. Freud would say.

Besides its finale, Newhart is probably best remembered for its gradual descent (or ascent?) into surrealism. The first season (’82-’83), the only one in either series shot on video instead of film, was something very akin to the preceding show, a very even-tempered, mature, and adult-oriented comedy-- clever and entertaining, but very much grounded in real situations. It also had that touch of understated melancholy that was so prominent in such late ‘70s and early '80s sitcoms as Taxi and Barney Miller, and even the early-Shelley Long seasons of Cheers. In fact, Newhart was created by Barry Kemp, who had written 14 episodes of Taxi (only three men-- Ken Estin, Glen Charles, and Les Charles-- wrote more). By season five of Newhart, David Mirkin had settled in as show runner, and Mirkin is the man that would, in short time, jump to creating arguably the master surrealist live-action sitcom of all-time-- Get a Life, starring Chris Elliott. By season eight, anything goes. The local TV station, upon which "Dick" hosts the humorously dull conversation series “Vermont Today,” has been sold to the newly-born heir to a vast financial fortune with the station's employees forced to bow to her will, the slow-witted and middle-aged caretaker of the inn has joined a street gang (called the Vermont Hooligans) that rumbles in an alley of their small town with another street gang comprised of middle-aged men, while a peculiar set of brothers from the forest, Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, are discovered to be friends with Johnny Carson.

The most vivid dreams occur during the REM cycle of sleep, which typically lasts two hours, and many Americans consider eight hours to be the optimum amount of sleep each night. In an act of perfect symmetry, Newhart was on the air eight years and the last two were the ones during which the series distinctly showed its surrealist bent. (Newhart, along with Northern Exposure, which debuted on CBS within two months of the Newhart finale, are perhaps the only long-running shows in history in which each season would be better than the one that preceded it.) A parade of featured performers from The Bob Newhart Show made guest appearances on Newhart, and once we recognize that this is a dream, this changes our relationship to these characters. Or more accurately, it changes how we see Bob responding to these characters. It's important to be clear at this point: the writers of Newhart were not working towards the surprise ending for eight years. The ambition was not that large. There’s some dispute as to who actually came up with the idea to end the series with Bob in bed with Suzanne Pleshette. The star gives the credit to his wife Ginnie, but at least a few writers maintain that the plot formulated in the writer’s room. What is not in dispute, however, is when the idea came about-- during the summer that preceded the final season.

Already by then, Dr. Hartley’s most neurotic patient in Chicago, Elliot Carlin, played by Jack Riley in 49 of the 142 TBNS episodes, appears in Vermont and a female psychiatrist makes reference to the “quack” that has treated him for years in Chicago. Audiences in the 1980's laughed because they recognized this as a call back to the two actors' previous on-air relationship, but inside of the dream concept, it adds a layer of humor when we discover that Dr. Hartley is tortured by Mr. Carlin even in his sleep. Similarly-- and this incident takes place in season eight, the actor who plays Bob and Emily’s next-door neighbor Howard, Bill Daily, shows up at the Stratford Inn and eventually buys the house next door because he wants to be best friends with "Dick." This episode is really playing on the audience’s memory of the first series, and it’s the one I recommend watching most of all if you want to get a naked glimpse into the subconscious of Bob Hartley. The episode is entitled “Good Neighbor Sam.” It aired January 29th, 1990, and it takes place, chronologically, very deep into Bob's REM cycle. Only nine half-hour episodes separate it from the moment that Bob will awaken. The crescendo of the episode is all of the men in town claiming to be-- and competing with each other to be-- “Dick’s” best friend. "Dick" even resolves the argument by laying some psychology on them about being their own best friend.

Of course, one of those fellows, handyman George Utley, is played by Tom Poston, who had played Bob’s best friend from college, Cliff Murdock (AKA “The Peeper”), in five episodes of TBNS. Though the two actors, Pleshette and Poston, would eventually marry each other years after both series had ended (did you all know that happened?), the conceit in the series was that Emily couldn't tolerate “The Peeper,” who had never matured beyond his college experience and was always pulling Bob helplessly into his sophomoric shenanigans. It would make sense then, wouldn’t it, if, in Bob’s dream, he lives with a different-looking but equally-beautiful woman, and his college buddy lives right there with them in the same house? It is referenced at one point that the Cliff Murdock character, who is always seen visiting the Hartleys in Chicago, makes his home in…yes, that’s right… no, I’m not making this up… Vermont. Now there’s no evidence that Kemp was even aware of this throwaway line from years earlier-- in another series that he never worked on-- when he chose to set his series in that same locale. That is simply TV magic.

As I said at the beginning, the series has always been praised for its inspired conclusion, but I don't feel it's fully appreciated. It wasn’t just a funny gag. The inspiration of that reveal subsequently demands a full re-watching of the 183 Newhart episodes that preceded it, and for that matter, the 142 episodes of The Bob Newhart Show before that. Until March of this year, it was still impossible to see the entirety of the latter series in DVD format, but now everything is out there. I encourage all of you to seek these out, and I also want you to correct people when you hear them, as I did in the first paragraph, refer to the second series as the one that took place in Vermont. That's not accurate. Technically, they both took place in Chicago.

More than a quarter century after the fact, I also detect a troubling lack of academic study on the topic. More recent groundbreaking series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are subjected to a heavy dose of deconstruction, but Newhart deserves to be among those that are being carefully-dissected. In truth, it often gets dismissed as a mere afterthought even to the first series. That should be a non-starter. I want to read professional theories about the metaphor of the three woodsmen-- that trio of parentless brothers that bag their food in the forest and possess only two names between them. I want to study the meaning of the congenital liar in "Dick's" subconscious that informs much of the first two seasons only to disappear, then to contemplate the shallow yuppie that speaks increasingly and inexplicably in alliteration, next to decipher each one of the dimwitted townspeople against which Bob’s alter ego labors as an island of sanity, and finally to comprehend the psychosexual symbolism of all those blondes.

posted by CM @ 9:40 PM