Newhart vs. The Bob Newhart Show

The first season of the Bob Newhart Show is, in my opinion, the worst. The actors begin to find their place in the second season and they mesh very well after the first season.

I tried to watch Newhart but I just don't get the same family feeling I get when I watch TBNS. The only character I really like is George which is probably because he was Peeper on TBNS. TBNS is realistic. You have the home life with Emily and Howard, then you have the work life with Carol, Jerry, Carlin, etc.

And, if you keep watching, you will see that Emily is far more reasonable than Bob is. Emily becomes much stronger, more like Suzanne Pleshette, after the first season. Their chemistry is fantastic, something I did not see with the other lady (whose name I forgot) in Newhart.

I remember liking Newhart but it was never consistently as funny as The Bob Newhart Show. I do agree with the person who said the earlier series got better after the first season, but I liked it better than Newhart as well.

Newhart had some tremendously funny episodes, but it had more duds and a lot that were just "decently funny"--translate that to a 6 or 7 on your 1-10 scale. The 70s series more often had 8s or 9s, to me.

For the record, the first season of Bob, where he was a cartoonist, but back in Chicago was as good as the best season of either of his previous series, if not better.

I think Newhart lacked the different workplace, in general, that made the other series so good. When Bob was going to work daily and roughly half the action took place there, half at home, this was when the shows were at their best. In Newhart, Dick was at home at the Stratford except for a few times doing some work on his TV show "Vermont Today." And, in my memory, some of the best episodes were when he was doing that show--such as the one about the "world's smallest horse."

But mostly, he was just sitting around the Stratford and it wasn't as funny.

Still a good series, far better than most.

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Very close, but I chose Newhart. I have dvds and VHS copies of partial seasons for both shows, and Newhart is the one I find myself watching more.

Dini

In "Newhart" he was no different. He was the anchor. The anchor really is the source of all the laughs because he's the one reacting to the idiots and bringing everything back to reality. Bob was the "George Burns", the "Seinfeld", the "Bud Abbott" of those two sitcoms.

I liked The Bob Newhart Show better. Better actors and better writing. MTM always had the best casting, writers, directors and producers.

The first sitcom also holds up much better. The situations and jokes on The Bob Newhart Show are more evergreen.

I have to pick "Newhart". It's just the funnier show to me with Michael, Stephanie, Larry and his brother Darryl and his other brother Darryl. However, I do prefer Suzanne Pleshette as his TV wife to Mary Frann who was fine also. I just like Miss Pleshette more.

My vote goes for TBNS--Newhart had some funny moments, but I thought it also had too many jokes they worked into the ground, Larry, Darryl and Darryl being chief among them. Not that they weren't funny, but it became overused quickly.

And I never cottoned on to Michael and Stephanie--more annoying than witty, and again, too one-note, with the note in their case not even being especially hilarious. The best part of the whole 'Stephanie' character was the occasional guest-star appearances by a very funny Jose Ferrer as her fatuous father.

More standard 'sitcom' in the feeling of the writing too much of the time, and Mary Frann just never cut it for me as Bob's wife. By no means a bad show, but The Bob Newhart Show definitely comes closer to classic comedy status than Newhart ever did.

I would say TBNS is better. Newhart started out strong and the first two seasons were really good. I liked Kirk, but I think that Bob Newhart had something to do with Kirk being written off the show. Kirk was becoming very popular and I don't think Newhart liked how he was being overshadowed by the character. So we come to season 3 with the introduction of Michael. I never really liked the character as much as Kirk and I felt that after a couple seasons the Michael and Stephanie scenes began to really annoy me. There were some good episodes after season 4, but the quality definitely went down. The final season is absolutely horrendous. There were a couple a good episodes, but the rest of the other episodes were unbelievably bad. Even the final episode is just god awful until the last scene whee Bob wakes up next to Emily and finds that everything was all a dream.

The Bob Newhart Show had better writing, but if Newhart had stayed on the path of the first few seasons the show might have beaten The Bob Newhart Show.