Show Description:

The Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran from 1961 to 1966 on the CBS network, ushered in the golden age of the situation comedy (even more than I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners), poised as it was on the threshold between the comedy-variety star vehicles of the 1950s (frequently still grounded in vaudeville) and the neorealist socio-comedies of the early 1970s (whose mainstay Mary Tyler Moore carried its pedigree). It was among the first network series to electively bring itself to closure, in the manner of M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Cheers, and has proven one of the most resilient in syndication. And more than any other social document, it managed to operate largely contemporaneously with the New Frontier and the thousand days of the Kennedy presidency. The show was largely the autobiographical exegesis of Carl Reiner, whose previous tenure in workaday television had been with the legendary stable of writers surrounding Your Show of Shows and the Sid Caesar sketch vehicles of the mid-1950s. This same group went on to literally redefine American humor: on the Broadway stage (Neil Simon); dominating the high and low roads of screen comedy (Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, respectively); and in television, both early and late (Larry Gelbart, M*A*S*H). But first and foremost was Dick Van Dyke, based loosely on Reiner's 1958 novel Enter Laughing (he directed a tepid screen version in 1967), in which his Alan Brady is a thinly veiled Caesar.