Earlier this year, the MCU radically subverted its audience’s expectations with WandaVision, a show that was devoid of superhero action for a months’ worth of episodes and whose biggest conflict (at least in the early days) was an ill-prepared dinner party. In the style of an old black-and-white sitcom, WandaVision chronicled Wanda and Vision’s comical misadventures in the tranquil suburban neighborhood of Westview.
The series paid homage to a ton of beloved sitcoms from every era of television, from I Love Lucy to Full House to Modern Family, but arguably the show’s biggest influence – at least in its early 4:3 B&W episodes – was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Wanda is seen watching the show as a child in the episode “Previously On,” and Dick Van Dyke himself worked on the series as a consultant.
The Dick Van Dyke Show is one of the greatest sitcoms ever made and it’s a bingeable gem that still holds up in the streaming age. It may take a couple of episodes to get used to the old-timey format, but once you get to know the Petries, you’ll blaze through the show’s 158 half-hour episodes. The cultural references are obviously dated – Danny Thomas is no longer the world-renowned showman he was in 1963 – but the characters and their relationships and the hilarious situations they find themselves in are all timeless.
Created by comedy legend Carl Reiner, The Dick Van Dyke Show stars Dick Van Dyke (obviously) as Rob Petrie, the head writer of the sketch variety series The Alan Brady Show, and Mary Tyler Moore as his wife Laura. While most sitcoms focus on marital squabbles, The Dick Van Dyke Show constantly reinforces the strength of Rob and Laura’s marriage. The series’ conflicts are more “us versus the world” than “us versus each other.” Frankly, The Dick Van Dyke Show has a more progressive view of gender roles than a lot of sitcoms on the air today.
Reiner based The Dick Van Dyke Show on his experiences writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. In addition to drawing comedic hijinks from Rob’s marriage, parenting, and general buffoonery, it also wrings plenty of laughs out of his lucrative career as a jokester. A stark contrast to all the mundane white-collar jobs peddled by sitcoms of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Rob spends his days in the office writing sketches for Alan Brady with his creative partners Buddy Sorrell and Sally Rogers, played with pitch-perfect old-school comic timing by the scene-stealing Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie. Wisecracking motormouth Buddy was loosely based on Mel Brooks and the hilariously dry Sally was loosely based on Selma Diamond and Lucille Kallen. With its tantalizing promise that young viewers could one day make a living goofing off with their friends like Rob, The Dick Van Dyke Show inspired a generation of comedy writers.
“It May Look Like a Walnut,” the season 2 episode that Wanda and her family watch in WandaVision’s Sokovia flashbacks, is one of the greatest TV episodes ever to hit the airwaves. In 1997, TV Guide ranked it as the 15th greatest episode in the history of television, and in 2009, they bumped it up to the #13 spot. In the episode, Rob catches a science fiction movie on TV about alien invaders and becomes convinced that the otherworldly walnut-based conspiracy depicted in the film has spilled out into his real life. It’s a spot-on spoof of paranoid sci-fi stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which were hugely popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s in the wake of McCarthyism.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “It May Look Like a Walnut” is praised as one of The Dick Van Dyke Show’s best installments, but the series has no shortage of great episodes. In season 3’s “That’s My Boy?,” Rob recounts how he became convinced that he came home from the hospital with the wrong baby. It culminates in a hysterical moment that doubles as a perfect visual punchline for the episode and an early example of depicting racial equality on television. Season 4’s “Never Bathe on Saturday” is a meticulously crafted farce that builds on the outrageous premise of Laura getting her toe stuck in a bathtub spout with a bunch of hilarious payoffs. In season 5’s “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth,” Laura accidentally reveals on national television that Alan Brady wears a hairpiece and braces herself for the nuclear fallout.
There are classic episodes in every season of The Dick Van Dyke Show and there are no truly terrible episodes that need to be skipped (except for the original pilot, Head of the Family, which some streaming platforms cram into the middle of the first season – it’s just a watered-down version of the show it eventually became with actors who aren’t right for the roles). Unlike most sitcoms, The Dick Van Dyke Show never dipped in quality throughout its entire half-decade-long run. It’s a show that’s ideal for binge-watching, even though it was created about 50 years before binge-watching was even a thing.