CBS Adds New ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ TV Special A Week After New ‘I Love Lucy’ Christmas Special
CBS has added a Dick Van Dyke Show special to its holiday line-up featuring two back-to-back episodes of the classic TV show in a colorized format. CBS is clearly hoping that lightning strikes twice with The Dick Van Dyke Show – Now in Living Color! TV special after years of successful programming of re-airing episodes of I Love Lucy. Last year the network gave The Andy Griffith Show the same treatment, but it didn’t have the same success that the Lucy specials have had each year.
The Dick Van Dyke Show special will feature two of the show’s most popular episodes. The first half of the hour will feature the 1963 episode “That’s My Boy?” where Rob and Laura Petrie (Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore) reminisce about years earlier when they had thought they had brought home the wrong baby from the hospital. Then, the second half of the new special will feature 1965’s award-winning episode “Coast to Coast Big Mouth” where Laura accidentally blurts out on national TV that Rob’s boss and host of the fictional Alan Brady Show wears a toupee. “Coast to Coast Big Mouth” ranked No. 8 on TV Guide’s list of the “100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time” and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 1966.
The new special will air on December 10, Sunday, at 8:00 p.m. a week after CBS’ traditional airing of the I Love Lucy Christmas Special, which airs on Friday, December 2, also at 8:00 p.m. Carl Reiner, who played the role of Alan Brady on the show, personally oversaw the colorization of the two episodes.
The Dick Van Dyke Show originally aired on CBS from October 3, 1961, through June 1, 1966, and was filmed at Desilu Studios, which was owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The show starred Van Dyke as Rob Petrie, Mary Tyler Moore as his wife Laura, Larry Mathews as their son Richie, Morey Amsterdam as the office clown Maurice “Buddy” Sorrell, Rose Marie as Sally Rogers, Richard Deacon as office manager and worry wort Melvin Cooley, Ann Morgan Guilbert as neighbor Millie Helper, and Jerry Paris as Millie’s husband Jerry. Though Van Dyke was considered the star of the show, it was in fact a classic ensemble show.
The Dick Van Dyke Show wasn’t as successful as I Love Lucy at first and it failed to make it to the Top 30 in the Nielsen ratings in its first year, but people knew that the show had potential. CBS had intended to cancel the series after its initial run, but Procter & Gamble saved the day by threatening to pull all of the company’s advertising from CBS. After a summer of reruns of the series, the show made it into the top 10 by the third episode of the second season of the following year which was helped by the show’s new lead in, The Beverly Hillbillies.
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The Dick Van Dyke Show was nominated for 25 Emmy Awards and won 15 for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy (1962, 1963, 1964, 1966); Outstanding Directional Achievement in Comedy (1963, 1964); Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of Humor (1963, 1964, 1965); Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Series: Dick Van Dyke (1964, 1965, 1966); Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Series: Mary Tyler Moore (1964, 1966); and Outstanding Comedy Series (1966).
[Featured Image by AP Images]
