Remembering One of TV's Greatest Finales
Fans of "Lost" are dying to see how the writers and producers end the series this Sunday. That got us thinking about what could be the most creative series-ender ever which aired 20 years ago tonight on CBS.
When Bob Newhart needed a way to send his second TV sitcom off into the sunset, he did what any other comic genius would do: he asked his wife.
"Actually it was my wife's idea, the whole thing about waking up in bed with Suzie," Bob Newhart said.
Ginny Newhart's stroke of brilliance was for Bob to wake up next to Suzanne Pleshette - aka Emily Hartley - Bob's former TV wife from his first sitcom "The Bob Newhart Show." This final scene reduced the entire eight-year run of "Newhart" to nothing but a dream.
CBS News Anchor Katie Couric reports it was a risky idea. The episode was shrouded in secrecy, complete with a phony script about his character's date with destiny.
In the phony script, Newhart's character is hit in the head with a golf ball, and sent to Heaven. God is played by George Burns. Newhart said they never intended to shoot that scene. It was strictly a red herring to mislead the tabloids.
Even the cast and crew were kept in the dark, as the late Suzanne Pleshette recalled in a 2006 interview with the Archive of American Television.
"They hid me in a trailer for six hours, with no phone," Pleshette said. "You don't do that to a woman like me. No shopping, no phone, what are you kidding?"
But when it came time to shoot, who would have thought that Bob and Emily Hartley's own headboard from the old show would give them away.
"They pulled the floater and revealed the bedroom set. And it started to get applause," Newhart said. "I mean they were applauding the set before they knew that Suzie and I were in bed!"
"A lot of series have tried to pull something like this off and they're not always successful," said Karen Herman, Director of the Archive of American Television. "But he was able to pull this one off and is in the top five of series finales. And probably will be forever."
Read Karen Herman's Newhart Blog
The last "Newhart" is widely considered the best series finale of all time - a national TV treasure like the 80-year-old Newhart himself.