Remembering Bob Newhart: Comedy’s Ultimate Straight Man

In the annals of broadcast and streaming TV, there have been stunning series finales, stunningly divisive series finales, and then there was the 1990 finale of Newhart , which still stands out as perhaps the most brilliantly funny, surprising and softly satirical of them all.

The Newhart finale would’ve broken the Internet if we’d all had access to it back then.

But to his credit, Bob Newhart, who died on July 18, 2024 at 94 , never took full credit for what TV Guide would later rank as one of the biggest moments in TV history.

“The last episode was my wife’s idea,” Newhart said in a career retrospective interview with the Television Academy in the late 2000s and uploaded to YouTube in 2010. He recalled his frustrations at how CBS had moved his sitcom’s Monday night time-slot around following season four, from 9:30 p.m. to almost every other half-hour.

“We were at a Christmas party and Suzie was there (Suzanne Pleshette), and Ginnie (who preceded him in death in 2023) and I were waiting in line…and I said, honey, I think this is going to be the last year of the show. This sixth year,” Newhart recalled. “And she said, ‘If this is the last, you ought to make it a dream sequence, because the whole year of Dallas (1985-86) was a dream sequence, and St. Elsewhere ended in a dream sequence (in May 1988),’ and she said, ‘You ought to wake up in bed with Suzie and describe this dream, this nightmare you had about owning an inn in Vermont.’ And I said, ‘Whoa. What a great idea. Sensational idea.’”

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He agreed to extend Newhart to an eighth season, and took the idea of re-enacting a scene from his 1982 NBC sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show , to his CBS writers, “and they fleshed it out with the Japanese buying the town.” In the show, Dick (Newhart) and his TV wife Joanna (Mary Frann) are the only Vermont holdouts, finding their Stratford Inn eventually surrounded by a golf course and resort, and during a chaotic scene, a golf ball somehow whizzes through the Inn and hits Newhart in the noggin. When he comes to, he’s in bed back in The Bob Newhart Show with his previous TV wife, Emily (Pleshette).

“Actually, that (bedroom) scene never appeared in the script. Because we knew that the tabloids would get a hold of it,” he clarified. “So we put a scene in there where I get hit in the head with a golf ball, I go up to heaven, I have this conversation with God, who’s George Burns. Which we never intended to shoot. We never contacted George Burns.” But the tabloids took the bait.

As for filming that scene?

“The writers knew of course, because they had to write it. I told the cast that morning. We rehearsed all day. Final day, the crew went to dinner, and they came back, and we said ‘We’ve added a scene. So, camera A goes here, B goes here, C goes there.’ Just, there’s your shot, there’s your shot, and there’s your shot, and just when we pull the floater which hides the set from the audience, just start your cameras, and just keep — no matter what happens — just keep going. We brought Suzie in from two sound stages over, brought her, snuck her in. We put the floater in there. And they pulled the floater away and the audience recognizes the bedroom set. And they start applauding. They started applauding even before they saw Suzie and myself.”

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Which took Newhart pleasantly by surprise.

“We were apprehensive. We didn’t know how it’d be received, because St. Elsewhere was received negatively. Because the people were saying we devoted all of our time to this show and cared about these people and now you’re telling us it’s a dream? But then when we got the audience reaction we said, that’s it, no, that’s it. We’ve got to go with that.”

Newhart got away with what St. Elsewhere and Dallas could not because of the nostalgic tongue-in-cheek callback to his previous hit sitcom. And of course, the gambit paid off so well that publications would later cite the finale surprise as big a TV moment as Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon, The Beatles making their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show , Lucille Ball’s TV birth to “Little Ricky” on I Love Lucy , and the funeral of JFK. It was big enough that Newhart re-enacted another play on the scene with Pleshette when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 1995, and the finales of both Breaking Bad and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson later doffed their caps at Newhart by filming tributes to the scene.

“I’m not sure it ranked there, but I certainly heard about it a lot,” Newhart said. “That’s rarified company to be in.”

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But the truth is, Bob Newhart always occupied some of the most rarefied air in comedy.

Bursting onto the scene direct from his day job as an ad copywriter in Chicago, Newhart’s debut album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart , not only topped the Billboard charts for weeks in 1960 but also prompted him to win the Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Album of the Year. Not best in comedy. Best in all of recorded music!

He’d win a Comedy Album Grammy for his follow-up album, and go on to great success with awards and plaudits for the first three TV shows bearing variations on his name, from the Peabody Award in 1962 to the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2002, four decades later. It’s somewhat crazy to know he only won an Emmy come 2013.

But throughout his entire career, from the very beginning when he broke through by fielding imaginary phone calls, to his later-in-life supporting roles on the big screen in Elf or the small screen in The Big Bang Theory , Newhart’s career was marked by his ability to work with the craziest of characters. His seemingly deadpan demeanor in the face of their wackiness allowed them to shine at their best, too.

Just a few days ago, stories surfaced about how Will Ferrell’s antics on Elf drove the late James Caan crazy. But Ferrell never needed to explain himself to Newhart. Nobody did. Which made him the best onscreen father, mentor or scene partner you could ever hope for. Newhart knew how to play with the wildest of them, whether they were fictional woodsman named Larry, Darryl and Darryl, or his real-life best-friend, the late legendary insult comic Don Rickles.

Bye, Bob. Rest in peace.

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