Bye, Bob

When people wax rhapsodic about the greatness of Bob Newhart — which is a thing that happens often, albeit not half as often as it should — they tend to focus on his standup records and/or his run on The Bob Newhart Show (1972-'78). My gateway to Bob's brilliance was Newhart, the 1982-'90 sitcom that featured its titular star as an innkeeper in a small Vermont town where he was perpetually beset and beleaguered by an assortment of backwoods weirdos whose eccentricities made each and every one of them a natural foil for his absolutely lethal comedic timing as arguably the greatest straight man in television history.

I watched and loved Newhart as a (strange) teenager who had (perhaps excessively) rose-colored memories of my early youth in extreme upstate New Jersey, and who yearned to escape the concrete suburbia of the Bay Area and get back to the Northeastern woods. The show's absurd/idyllic setting was enough to convince me that Vermont was where I needed to end up someday, and for a long time, that was the plan; it was only through a series of happy coincidences that I ended up in New Hampshire, which is far more libertarian than I'd like, but still wonderfully woodsy.

Anyway, the point is that it all started with Bob, and a sitcom that stood out like a sore thumb during the near-decade it helped anchor the CBS lineup. I mean, Henry Mancini was responsible for the theme song, which played over opening credits that used B-roll footage from On Golden Pond. And it shot on film! Class all the way around from what was once known as the Tiffany Network.

Ironically, On Golden Pond was filmed in New Hampshire, so the verdant beauty I so admired during those opening credits was actually captured less than two hours from where I live now. But still. Who wouldn't want to settle down in a place like that?

If and when people discuss The Bob Newhart Show's lesser-loved sibling, they're usually talking about the brilliant finale, in which the town is basically purchased by Japanese real estate developers who build a golf course outside the inn, which leads to Newhart's character being bonked on the head with a golf ball and passing out. When the next scene begins, we see him waking up in bed next to his wife... only now he's his Bob Newhart Show character again, saying he just had the weirdest dream.

There are countless reasons to celebrate this creative masterstroke, but the seasons leading up to those moments also contained some of the best TV of their time, and if you haven't watched Newhart, I strongly urge you to repent. The whole thing is streaming on Amazon Prime Video if you've got a Prime account. (Along with Northern Exposure, which I've blabbered about at length in this space.)

Bob Newhart left us today at the age of 94, and there is absolutely no shortage of professionally written obituaries that a person can turn to if they're looking for official, comprehensive overviews of his career. I can't offer that here, at least not if I want to say anything about how much the man meant to me today. But in all honesty, I shouldn't be the person to write something like that — I only watched my first full episodes of The Bob Newhart Show last year, and while I definitely purchased my share of Newhart comedy albums, I wasn't a hardcore connoisseur of his stand-up material. I also couldn't hang with the sitcoms he starred in post-Newhart, even though they always looked great on paper. I mean, George and Leo? Newhart and Judd Hirsch and Jason Bateman? Come on.

I digress. The point is really this: The man's comedy meant a lot to me. It meant a lot to me for a very specific reason, and that's anchored to a very specific moment in time, but it's never worn off — Newhart has been one of my all-time favorite shows since it was still on the air, and I think it's safe to say, at this point, that that will never change. When it comes to most celebrity deaths, I honestly could not care less, and in this particular case, I probably couldn't say I'm genuinely sad — 94 years is a hell of a run! — but I'm still thinking of Bob Newhart this evening, and thanking him not only for the laughs, but for inadvertently handing me some life goals that I've more or less fulfilled. Bye, Bob. You'll be missed.