5 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’
The Dick Van Dyke Show is a gold-standard sitcom in the history of television … and it almost didn’t get off the ground. Series creator Carl Reiner’s original pilot, titled Head of the Family, featured a different cast, with Reiner playing Rob Petrie instead of Dick Van Dyke, and it didn’t inspire CBS to green-light a full season. Producer Sheldon Leonard reworked the idea into The Dick Van Dyke Show, with Van Dyke in the lead role, which wasn’t an instant slam-dunk, either; it was nearly canceled by CBS after a single season.
Luckily for fans, The Dick Van Dyke Show ran for five seasons between 1961 and 1966 and eventually found its audience, becoming a hit show now regarded as one of the greatest TV comedies of all time.
Van Dyke played Rob, head writer of a fictional variety show hosted by Reiner’s egotistical Alan Brady. A then-on-the-rise Mary Tyler Moore played Rob’s wife, Laura, and Larry Mathews played their adorable son, Ritchie. Ann Morgan Guilbert and Jerry Paris played the Petries’ neighbors, while Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie, and Richard Deacon memorably played Rob’s colleagues.
But The Dick Van Dyke Show was close to being something else —the The Johnny Carson Show, as you’ll discover below. Read on for fun facts about the classic sitcom…
1 Johnny Carson almost played Rob
Paul Wilson / ©NBC / courtesy Everett Collection
A year before he became the host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson was in contention to play Rob Petrie, as Steven D. Stark noted in the book Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today.
“For the lead, Leonard was torn between Johnny Carson, a popular daytime game-show host, and Dick Van Dyke, Broadway star of Bye Bye Birdie and an actor with a reputation for visual comedy,” Stark wrote, per MeTV. “Van Dyke — who had been under contract to CBS since 1955 — got the role, largely because he was less well-known than Carson and therefore would be more believable in the title role.”
2 Mary Tyler Moore wanted to skip her audition
Everett Collection
After a week of unsuccessful auditions, Moore got a call from her agent informing her that Reiner wanted her to try out for the role of Van Dyke’s onscreen wife, as she recalled on The View in 2004. At the time, however, Moore felt she couldn’t take any more rejection, so she declined to audition — initially.
“And [the agent] said, ‘You get over there now.’ And I did. And, oh, boy, that meeting with Carl was something,” Moore added on The View. “The audition was just to read a scene with him. But I’d had such a crush on him from Your Show of Shows and Sid Caesar and all of that, and I walked in, and I was just like [speaking gibberish].”
3 Reprising the role of Alan Brady in 1995 earned Carl Reiner an Emmy
Reiner won the 1995 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his reprise performance as Alan Brady on Mad About You. In the episode “The Alan Brady Show,” Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser) enlists Alan to narrate a documentary about the history of TV, and Alan agrees to do it as long as his show gets undue attention in the project.
4 An animated spinoff series almost made it to TV
In 2001, TV Land gave the green light to a pilot for The Alan Brady Show, a 2000s-set animated series about the behind-the-scenes exploits of Brady’s variety show, with Reiner executive-producing, scripting the pilot, and providing voiceover, as Animation World Network reported. Only the pilot made it to the air, however, debuting in as a TV special in 2003. (If you’re curious, clips are still floating around online.)
“I think they originally thought of bringing back a live variety show and said, naw, I don’t want to get back on television,” Reiner explained to VFXWorld in 2003. “And then they called a day or so later and said, how about an animated Alan Brady? Immediately, I said that sounded like something, and I don’t think it took more than a day or so to figure out that he’s been around for 50 years.”
5 Morey Amsterdam wrote lyrics for the instrumental theme song
Though the theme song on Dick Van Dyke Show was instrumental, Amsterdam came up with lyrics for the upbeat melody, as Van Dyke revealed at the 2003 TV Land Awards Show.
“So you think that you’ve got trouble? / Well, trouble’s a bubble / So tell old Mr. Trouble to get lost!” the lyrics go. “Why not hold your head up high and / Stop cryin’, start tryin’ / And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed. / When you find the joy of livin’ / Is lovin’ and givin’ / You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed. / A smile is just a frown that’s turned upside down / So smile, and that frown will defrost. / And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.”
Remind