Shark Bytes

Actually,this show did a "reverse jump".The first season was dull and forgettable.The producers must have known this and retooled it accordingly.The boring,unfunny guy that owned the Minuteman Cafe sold it to Larry and the Darryls,and Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari were introduced,completing an ensemble with decent chemistry.I thought it remained watchable from this point,all the way to the finale,which was NOT a "it-was-all-a-dream" copout,but a clever parody of same...

The ending was tipped off a week ahead of time publicly, so many of us knew it was coming. That ruined it. It got to the point after years of larry, Daryl and Daryl being introduced that I would change the channel when they arrived, I couldnt take that crap anymore. It was funny 5 or 6 times. By the 80th time is was freaking obnoxious!

One of the best comedies of its time, never jumped the shark. From the moment the musical opening with credits began,showing a car driving through the gorgeous countryside of Vermont, I was ready to unwind and laugh for thirty minutes. Had one of the best series finales ever,and this from a show that had to dump two major charactors from its weaker first season.The dream ending was great. Everyone knew the show was taped before a studio audience in California and most of the actors had never even been to Vermont but it was always about the idea--the fantasy of it alL.I posted this comment on JTS long ago but it still applies today.Newhart may have suceeded because we want that dream life of having fun people around us daily,running our own business that we love and living in a place as unspoiled as Vermont.

The finale was BRILLIANT!

I absolutely love Newhart! My favorite show was one of the later ones, where Larry, Darryl, and Darryl were dressed in tuxedos,each playing a grand piano on a revolving circle. I am glad they finally came out with season one and look forward to viewing all the other seasons!
P.S. You gotta have a dry sense of humor to appreciate the show.

Newhart came close to jumping the last couple of seasons but stepped firmly back from the edge with its now famous final episode.

As the show became more and more focused on Stephanie & Michael the plots became very thin. They were two characters that were enjoyable in small doses but could become very irritating when episode after episode was based on them.

Unlike some here I felt the first few seasons were the best and I'm certainly in the minority by saying that I enjoyed the characters of Kirk & Leslie. I agree that these characters would probably have run out of story lines within three seasons but the same could be said for the Stephanie/Michael pairing.

I never got tired of LD&D or the various community zannies wandering in and out of episodes. They were the wedges that kept opening the cracks in Dick Loudon's stable little world.

I've always been a Bob Newhart fan, I'm disappointed that they didn't release all seasons of his first sitcom but I'm already eagerly looking forward to the release of Season Two of Newhart.
Guest

I think the show started to jump when Dick Loudon went from being a long-suffering sitcom lead character to a doormat. He was never right, always massively inconvenienced, and never once able to work his will on anything or anyone--by this I mean employees, not Joanna, though she could have been a touch more supportive.

All that said, I think they addressed this in part with the nature of the finale, when Dick in essence destroys all his tormentors just by waking up.

Note that, as the dream was ending, Dick's world compacted, with all the crazies now living with him.

On the worst day of their marriage, Emily would always be a better wife than Joanna.

Not a show to go crazy over, but Newhart himself probably wanted it that way.

The very ending, however, was just plain cheap. Imaginative, maybe, Parody, probably, surreal, too obviously. Pity the viewers who actually like the character played by Mary Frann.

The problem is that TV is TV. It is not a Dos Passos novel.

never jumped and the ending was brilliant. btw, 'TheUnknownUnknown', your Islamophobic is nice, it's as nice as me saying that in the final episode Bob should be a Christian fundamentalist and took the whole town out ala Timothy McVeigh.

This show jumped the shark in the episode that took place in LA in 2019. It was a very creepy one, Larry was a genetic designer for a corporation called Tyrell. He got killed in the episode by Rutger Haure. Harrison Ford was also in this episode.....

don't you understand that the dream finale was a parody of those cop-out endings?

To me the show started its leap when Michael was fired from the TV station. His character worked in that context. After that, the show focused way too much on the cutesy, cutesy banter between Stepanie and Micheal. Those characters worked separately or in small doses together. After a while that couple got irritating.
Also agree with other posters about Larry, Daryl, & Daryl. That is, fun at first but way overdone after a while.
They could have focused more on the townspeople (like the mayor and fried). The show didn't seem devoid of ideas, but they insisted on Micheal and Steph.

what are the real life names of larry, daryl, and daryl, and what are they doing now?

Why does everybody call the ending genius? It's all a dream,please. That's not genius it's a cop out by a lazy writing staff who ran out of ideas and couldn't come up with an actual resolution to the show.

Bob newhart is a great comedian and it showed in the first couple seasons of this show. Sadly some moron decided to have him portraying a straightman to a town full of idiots. Instead of having it all be a dream which is a lame punch out way to end a show they should have had Bob go triple postal, convert to Islam, and hollar "Allah Ackbah!" As he blows up himself and everyone in town.