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The Dick Van Dyke Show
1961 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Carl Reiner
The Dick Van Dyke Show centers around the work and home life of television comedy writer Rob Petrie. The plots generally revolve around problems at work, where Rob got into various comedic jams with fellow writers Buddy Sorrell, Sally Rogers and producer Mel Cooley.
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A few months ago I found The Dick Van Dyke Show free to watch on Youtube. I had seen a number of the episodes in passing over the years, but never really watched it. It's really quite a good show. Highly recommended, even if YouTube's viewing experience for TV series is sub-par.
Time is a great filter.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
The author blames the modern sitcom's remoteness from working and lower-middle class concerns with their creators' immunity from the recent recession. In place of everyday situations, we have shows set in "soundstages and writers’ rooms," the haunts of the out-of-touch in New York and LA. So you wind up with a show with this sort of genesis:
Our creator was once a prominent writer and performer on a comedy sketch show, which aired live every Saturday night from an NBC studio in New York. It ran for 90 minutes. After their time on the show came to an end, our creator decided to pitch a sitcom based on their experiences there. The lead character is the head writer on a comedy show, similarly produced in New York. They must balance their work in the writers' room and their personal life, though this turns out to be difficult. A pilot is made, and our creator plays the lead.
Modern viewers may recognize this as 30 Rock, but it is in fact The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is based not on SNL but on a direct ancestor, Your Show of Shows. Carl Reiner's performance in the pilot may have dissuaded executives from casting him in the commissioned series (hence Dick Van Dyke), while Tina Fey remained the lead in her own version. But otherwise the parallel rings a sight near perfect.
The author stumbles over himself insisting, however, that while The Dick Van Dyke Show did not give vent to working and lower-middle class concerns, it did at least feature characters who "had careers" and were definitely of a class. As if the same were not true of shows like 30 Rock (which is at times obsessed with class difference), or of Parks and Recreation and The Office. These do not depict realistic workspaces, but why place that demand on a sitcom? And why not place the same demand on, yes, The Honeymooners, Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and on and on. In all cases the demands of the form—and in almost all cases the demands of overly long tenures—stretched the premises and the rare attempts at realism very thin.
I think you can make an argument that the most popular comedies available right now—whether on TV or at the movie theaters—are unflinchingly escapist. (Though, as the article notes in its discussion of an episode each of Horace and Pete and Girls, this has not gone unnoticed or unremarked by all of the shows' writers. Still, these two are not the most popular things around by any stretch.) Similarly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were seen to traipse across exclusive resorts, high-class stages, ballroom floors, and Venice, in elaborate dresses and a "top hat, white tie, and tails"—all during the Great Depression. Sometimes hard circumstances produce a public clamoring for comment; sometimes the public just wants a reprieve.
As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.
Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.
Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).
No. I realized TV was what I would now call a "time sink" (didn't have a word for it then) when I was about 15, and stopped watching it. I've never owned a TV. I do sometimes watch old TV episodes on DVD though. I especially recommend Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Saint.