Best Ever
Sitcom?

Dick Loudon’s reaction shots made the show. Bob Newhart had perfected the slow blink, the delayed take, the slight tilt of head that communicated profound bewilderment without breaking composure. His first series—The Bob Newhart Show, 1972-1978—had surrounded his Chicago psychologist with neurotics whose problems he absorbed with professional patience. Newhart, which ran from 1982 to 1990, raised the stakes: instead of patients, he got an entire town of eccentrics, and instead of professional distance, he got the Vermont inn he was trying to run with his wife Joanna.

The premise sounds conventional: city couple buys country property, encounters rural characters. But Newhart understood that the comedy wasn’t in culture clash—it was in the specific nature of Dick Loudon’s straightness. He’s not a comic reactor in the usual sitcom sense, mugging and double-taking. He’s genuinely trying to understand, genuinely attempting to apply logic to situations that don’t reward logic. When the three woodsmen Larry, Darryl, and Darryl first introduce themselves—“Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl”—Dick’s response isn’t played for laughs. He simply processes this information and moves on, because what else can you do?

The ensemble around Newhart assembled gradually across the first seasons, the writers discovering which characters generated the most productive friction with Dick’s reasonableness. Mary Frann’s Joanna provided the grounded partnership that let Dick’s reactions land—she shared his bemusement but expressed it more directly, creating a married-couple dynamic that felt collaborative rather than combative. Tom Poston’s George Utley, the handyman whose incompetence approached the metaphysical, offered gentle absurdism. Julia Duffy’s Stephanie Vanderkellen, the wealthy maid who found actual work beneath her, brought a sharper satirical edge.

But Larry, Darryl, and Darryl—William Sanderson, Tony Papenfuss, and John Voldstad—became the show’s signature. The bit never varied: Larry spoke, the Darryls remained silent, and whatever Larry said would be strange enough to justify a family that had apparently run out of names. The comedy was in the commitment. Sanderson played Larry with absolute sincerity, as though nothing about his situation struck him as unusual. The Darryls’ silence wasn’t played as joke; they simply didn’t speak, and the show never explained why. Dick’s acceptance of these people as neighbors—not friends exactly, but neighbors, part of the landscape—modeled the show’s larger approach to its world.

Newhart premiered in the fall of 1982, the same season as Cheers and Family Ties, part of a general sitcom resurgence after the form had seemed exhausted in the late seventies. It never achieved Cheers’ cultural dominance or critical prestige, settling instead into reliable success—top twenty ratings, Emmy nominations, the kind of show that people watched weekly without necessarily discussing. This might have been its fate: a solid, professional, ultimately forgettable entry in the sitcom canon.

Then came the finale.

On May 21, 1990, Dick Loudon takes a golf ball to the head, loses consciousness, and wakes up in a bedroom that isn’t his. The room is dark. He reaches for the lamp. And in the bed next to him is Suzanne Pleshette—Emily Hartley, his wife from The Bob Newhart Show, which had ended twelve years earlier. “Honey, wake up. You won’t believe the dream I just had.”

The audience’s recognition builds through the shot—the bedroom set is identical to the one from the original series. By the time Pleshette speaks, delivering the line “You should wear more sweaters,” the laughter has become something else: a collective acknowledgment that television had just done something it had never done before. Eight seasons of Newhart weren’t a sequel; they were a dream Bob Hartley had about running an inn in Vermont. Every character, every storyline, every Larry-Darryl-and-Darryl—all processed through the sleeping mind of a Chicago psychologist who’d ended his own series in 1978.

The finale was Newhart’s idea, kept secret from almost everyone until taping. It works because Newhart had been good enough to earn retrospective reframing—the town’s surreal quality suddenly has an explanation, Dick Loudon’s patient reasonableness makes sense as Bob Hartley’s dream-self, the whole thing coheres in a way nobody expected. Other shows have attempted similar gambits since; none have landed with the same force. Newhart played straight for eight years, then delivered the ultimate punchline.

That’s the Newhart method: absorb the absurdity, maintain composure, wait for your moment. The moment came. The slow blink was worth it.

Decide for Yourself:

• The complete series DVD set compiles all eight seasons, including the finale that justified the whole enterprise.
• Pairing with The Bob Newhart Show complete series provides essential context—you need to know Bob and Emily Hartley to fully appreciate the finale’s impact.
• Newhart’s memoir I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! offers the comedian’s perspective on both series, including the genesis of the finale.