In 1976, Dick Van Dyke had a weekly variety show on NBC that not nearly enough people watched. It went on the air on September 20 and the last of its eleven episodes aired on December 30. I wrote about it in this post earlier this year but I'll save you the trouble of clicking your way to that page. Here's the relevant part of it…
It was produced by the team of Bob Einstein and Allan Blye and it got generally good reviews but I don't think the network gave it much of a chance, plus it was in a rough time slot. It aired at 8 PM on Thursday evenings opposite The Waltons on CBS and Welcome Back, Kotter on ABC at the peak of those two shows' popularity.
I was working on Kotter at the time and everyone on our show liked Van Dyke and Company. We'd sometimes take a break during Thursday night rewrite meetings — which could last into the wee hours of the morning — to watch not our show but Mr. Van Dyke's. His show won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series that year…unfortunately, after it was yanked off the air. It's only barely remembered and when it is, that's usually because Andy Kaufman was a semi-regular — his first real presence in prime-time.
A few years later with its ratings at a disastrous low, NBC hired the famed programmer Fred Silverman away from ABC to try and reprogram the network and raise its viewership. A month or three into his command, I was in a meeting with Silverman and he was rattling off some of the reasons why NBC had dug itself into such a deep hole. There were quite a few reasons but a big one was, he felt, that his predecessors had been too quick to cancel certain shows. These were good shows, he said…and if they'd been given more time, he believed they'd have found viewers (or vice-versa). I remember him saying, "They certainly would have done better than whatever the guys before me replaced them with."
He named four shows which, he said, should not have been canceled. I remember the names of three of them: Baa Baa Black Sheep, Sirota's Court…and Van Dyke and Company. His predecessors, he insisted, were too cowardly — the descriptor he used was "chickenshit" — and panicked. And there was some talk about shows which networks almost canceled when the early ratings were disappointing — M*A*S*H being the textbook example — but which turned out to be huge hits.
I should also mention one other thing that I thought hurt Mr. Van Dyke's show. It was mostly or wholly taped without a live audience and then they dubbed in the worst "canned laughter" I've ever heard on a TV program. I honestly believe that if they'd given the series a better time slot, stuck with it for a while and it had had more of a "live" feel, it would have run a long time. Much of the material was very clever and Dick was superb on it.
Here's a little less than a half-hour of clips from the show featuring Dick dancing a lot and interacting with guest stars like Mary Tyler Moore, John Denver and Tom Smothers. There are also bits in there with Andy Kaufman and Bob Einstein, and that's Chuck McCann playing Oliver Hardy…
And here's another of my favorite episodes of my favorite TV show…