The recent DVD re-release of Newhart Season One (a series for which I carry very fond childhood memories) , struck a nostalgic chord, given the recent deaths of co-star Tom Poston and his off-camera wife, series finale-capper Suzanne Pleshette, and coincided rather neatly with the 25th anniversary of the program’s first year. It inspired me to begin working my way through this three-disc set over the past week, and in re-watching the old episodes, I continually felt amazed by the degree to which American situation comedies have matured, developed, and expanded the scope of their ambitions over the past few decades. Watching this three-camera sitcom after years away is akin to opening a time capsule of early ’80s Reaganite pop culture – and occasionally, but far from often, a pleasurable experience.

For this editor, Bob Newhart will ere retain his footing as a national icon (his genial, bone-dry cynicism and one-sided telephone shtick make him infinitely more charming and engaging than, say, George Burns or the insufferable, shameless Bob Hope). You’ll never hear a negative word out of me about Newhart himself – not after listening repeatedly to his brilliant recording The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, award winner for Best Album at the 1961 Grammys, and watching beloved episodes of the first Bob Newhart Show. But the comic’s sophomore series, in its debut season (October 1982 – April 1983), feels in retrospect fairly pedestrian, and at times downright somnambulistic – a fossil from the Stone Age. Avid television viewers will invariably remember this as the season that introduced us to the Stratford Inn, innkeepers Dick and Joanna Loudon (Newhart and the late Mary Frann), Minuteman Café proprietor Kirk Devane (Steven Kampmann), co-ed maid Leslie Vanderkellen (Jennifer Holmes) and dimwitted albeit loveable handyman George Utley (Poston).

As The Office, 30 Rock and animated sitcoms such as The Family Guy have since proven, American audiences are indeed intelligent enough to latch onto humor sans the advantage of live or canned laughter. One cannot blame Newhart for failing to break the mold (the absence of a laugh track wouldn’t have flown back in 1982); even so, the studio audience reactions here feel overmodulated and a little jarring. But more striking is the degree to which this sitcom clings aggressively to ancient formula humor. Consider, if you will, the wide array of options presented us: 1) Character A delivers a sincere, heartfelt line; Character B undercuts it with a wise-ass remark. 2) Character A delivers a sincere, heartfelt line and then undercuts it himself or herself with a wise-ass remark. 3) Character A delivers a sincere, heartfelt line; Character B undercuts it with a wise-ass facial expression (an option used ad infinitum for Newhart himself). Equally striking is the way in which the series breaks most consistent narrative threads from episode to episode. For example: in one episode, travel-writer Dick speaks at length of beginning authorship on a book entitled Captivating Kansas; two episodes later, he’s already finished researching and writing that tome and is neck-deep in the middle of The Many Moods of Minnesota. In one episode, George Utley runs into his “old flame” (Rue McClanahan, fresh from Maude stardom) and she’s never heard from or spoken of again.

A program like The Office is refreshing for eking out the opposite strategy in every area: it sustains, develops, and hones its narrative threads, even generating a little bit of suspense (will Jim and Pam ever become a couple?) to anchor the drama – so that watching the episodes a-chronologically threatens to ruin the effect of character and narrative development. With a program such as Newhart (or, for that matter, Three’s Company, The Facts of Life, or any other early-1980s sitcom), one could drift in and out at any random point without missing a beat. Such was the convention of the time: cook up a one-sentence plot, weave a series of one liners around it, then resolve everything and start from scratch with the next episode. Every episode is self-contained. Looking at these old episodes, I could never quite get used to that. I also missed the tendency of recent sitcoms (such as The Office) to interweave subtle, deadpan humor and comic bits pulled from way out of left field, each of which (as one of my AMG colleagues has observed) is used not simply to set up and deliver a gag but to give us some glistening level of revelatory insight into a character – so that we believe we’re being led into an actual world with three-dimensional characters in lieu of miked cardboard cutouts used to deliver ancient one-liners.

Above all else, though, I felt incredulous – watching Newhart – about how fundamentally unlikeable one of the main characters is. As Kirk, a pathological liar with more than a passing yen for Holmes’s adorable Leslie, Kampmann aggressively grates on one’s nerves. Obviously series creator Barry Kemp wanted to trade off of the kind of quirky psychopathology that made Bob’s patients on The Bob Newhart Show (Elliot Carlin, et, al.) so popular. But Devane really takes the cake; he quickly grows so pushy and so obnoxious, with his tactless and unrequited romantic come-ons, that I kept hoping for Leslie (or one of the other characters) to punch him in the mouth. It says a great deal that in recent years, sitcoms can produce characters with behavior as rude and appalling as George Costanza, Elaine Benes, and Dwight ‘Beet Farm’ Schrute (each of whom really knocks Kirk out of the water with sheer insensitivity) and still make us, on some level, look forward to seeing them; exactly how they pull it off is another matter.

It is a sad comment indeed when the content of a program can never quite top its gorgeous and lyrical opening credits. Still, even watching it 25 years later, Newhart has its share of peerless moments. It arguably scores highest in its rare beats without laughter, when it gives its characters ample time and opportunity to show love and compassion to one another (consider, for example, the touching moment when Dick assists Leslie with a kind of paternal reassurance after a ski accident that he inadvertently caused). The series feels equally memorable on the occasions when Kemp and his scenarists really cut loose and up the irreverence quotient ten fold, traveling way out into hyperspace with supporting characters and situations so offbeat and outrageous that they consistently defy all expectations; it goes without saying that Larry, Darryl, and Darryl did much to redeem the series as a 2/3 silent, grungeball update of the Three Stooges (they appeared as early as episode two, “Mrs. Newton’s Body Lies a Mould’ring in the Grave“); a Season One subplot that finds the boys temporarily taking over The Minuteman Café (in which William Sanderson’s Larry offers to serve up a weasel that Darryl “clubbed on the way over”) earns a bigger laugh from that one line than almost anything else in the season. (Yes, it probably helped that I was watching it at 3am, and yes, I felt vindicated at the conclusion of the episode, when the weasel in the bag is eventually handed to an unwitting Kirk). One could make the argument, of course, that the most offbeat and eccentric characters of more recent sitcoms – such as Cosmo Kramer, for example, or Creed Bratton – owe much to Newhart for this reason, but bear in mind the inclusion of the sitcom “local eccentric” is a tradition as old as the format itself - one that pre-dates Larry, Darryl, and Darryl and Taxi’s Reverend Jim Ignatowski by several decades, and can even be traced back to Ed Norton of The Honeymooners.

In successive seasons, the program would travel further down the road of the offbeat, with unusual outings such as the wonderful “fantasy” episode in which Larry dreams that he’s subbing for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and George takes flight after eating a stack of hotcakes. But in Season One, this sitcom opted to play it safe and stick to the rules, which made it, at best, only fitfully funny and successful. In the final analysis, Newhart may still be watchable, but its season one incarnation hasn’t aged well. It lacked the courage to really push it over the edge from mildly affable to downright brilliant. Maybe that’s where Peter Scolari came in?