Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Bob Newhart Show: Cast Photo

The Bob Newhart Show ran from September 1972 until August 1978 on CBS.

Low key Bob Newhart, an accountant turned dead-pan stand-up comic who had developed into one of the great reactors in television comedy starred in this hit sitcom as Bob Hartley, a successful Chicago psychologist who lived in a high-rise apartment with his wife Emily ( Suzanne Pleshette), an elementary school teacher. Bob shared the services of his receptionist Carol( Marcia Wallace) with a bachelor dentist, Jerry Robinson ( Peter Bonerz). Carol was a brash, crazy girl who could dish it out pretty well to both her bosses. In the fall of 1975, she married Larry Bondurant( Will Mackenzie), a travel agent, after a worldwind courtship. Originally Two of the Hartley's neighbors were seen on a regular basis; Howard Borden ( Bill Daily), a divorced commerical airline pilot who had an annoying habit of barging into their apartment without knocking and Margaret Hoover( Patricia Smith), a friend of Emily's. Bob's sister Ellen ( Pat Finley)lived with him and Emily for a short time , and at one point almost married Howard but she went off the show and out of his life when she moved to Cleveland for a better job ( she was a newspaper reporter).

Bob was a very low-key guy, which was good at the office but did not always prove effective in dealing with his wife and friends. He had a slew of regular patients They included: Elliott Carlin ( Jack Riley), the character with some of the biggest problems - he completely lacked self-confidence, had a persecution complex and was forever putting himself down - he was probably the most neurotic individual ever seen on TV!, Mrs. Bakerman ( Florida Freibus)who was always seen knitting, Miss Larson ( Penny Marshall), Michelle ( Renee Lipon), Mr. Peterson ( John Fiedler), Mr. Vickers ( Noam Pitlik), Mr. Herd( Oliver Clark), and mean fruit salesman Mr. Gianelli (Noam Pitlik), who we should point out stopped being mean after he was crushed to death by a load of zucchini.. His patients problems ranged from ordinary, everyday problems to homosexuality to extreme paranoia. They were all trying to find themselves.In addition to treating his patients individually, Bob was a firm believer in group therapy and his patients interacted in various groups in hilarious fashion.

Longtime Newhart buddy Tom Poston was seen occasionally as Bob Hartley's backslapping college chum Cliff ("The Peeper") Murdock. Among the guest stars on the series were Ralph Bellamy, Morgan Fairchild, Henry Winkler, Martha Scott, Ann Rutherford, Loni Anderson and Howard Hesseman ( both before hitting it big on WKRP In Cincinnatti), Keenan Wynn and Howard Morris.

Through it all Bob got by with a well timed comment, and understated glance, and a low key smile. Bob Newhart's comic style fit his character perfectly and the rich supporting cast took care of the rest. The result was a sitcom classic running 6 humerous seasons in prime-time, until Bob Hartley and Emily were dispatched by the peerless writers to Oregon in the final episode where it was announced he had moved to take a college teaching job.

Tom Patchet and Jay Tarses ( a former comedy team), were the executive producers for MTM Enterprises.

Here's Suzanne Pleshette's Obituary from The New York Times

Suzanne Pleshette, 70, ‘Newhart’ Actress, Dies
By ANITA GATES
Published: January 21, 2008

Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced actress who redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s, playing the smart, sardonic Emily Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.

Ms. Pleshette died of respiratory failure, her lawyer, Robert Finkelstein, told The Associated Press. Ms. Pleshette had undergone chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Pleshette already had a full career on stage and screen in 1971 when producers saw her on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” and noticed a chemistry between her and another guest, Mr. Newhart. She was soon cast as the wife of Mr. Newhart’s character, a mild-mannered Chicago psychologist, and the series ran six seasons, from 1972 to 1978, as part of CBS’s ratings-winning Saturday night lineup.

Emily Hartley’s work life (as a schoolteacher) did not receive much attention, but the character was confident, sexy and anything but submissive to her husband.

Moviegoers knew Ms. Pleshette from a string of Hollywood features, and her low-key performances often transcended thankless roles in bad movies. She made her film debut in a 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, “The Geisha Boy,” in a supporting role as a romantic WAC sergeant. She came to teenage audiences’ attention in her second movie, “Rome Adventure” (1962), a good-girl, bad-girl romance opposite Troy Donahue, the beautiful blond heartthrob of the moment. (Ms. Pleshette played the virgin.) After making another film together in 1964, she and Mr. Donahue married, but the marriage lasted only eight months.

Alfred Hitchcock fans knew Ms. Pleshette best as the pretty small-town teacher who not only loses the guy (Rod Taylor) to the blonde (Tippi Hedren), but is also pecked to death by an angry flock in “The Birds” (1963). Because she was a method actress, “Hitch didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Pleshette said in a 1999 Film Quarterly interview with other Hitchcock heroines. “He regretted the day that he hired me.” Many disagreed with that conclusion.

Suzanne Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, to Eugene Pleshette, who managed the Paramount and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and Gloria Kaplan Pleshette, a former dancer.

An only child, Ms. Pleshette attended the New York High School of the Performing Arts, then Syracuse University and transferred to Finch College, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She also studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and with its teaching star Sanford Meisner.

Her professional career began in 1957 with her television debut, a single episode in a short-lived adventure series, “Harbourmaster,” and her Broadway debut in “Compulsion,” a drama about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which she played Fourth Girl but soon moved up to a supporting role. In 1959, she appeared in “Golden Fleecing,” a comedy set in Venice, opposite Tom Poston, whom she would marry four decades later.

Her real Broadway triumph came in February 1961 when she replaced Anne Bancroft (who had just won a Tony Award) as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke. Her reviews were admiring.

Ms. Pleshette returned to Broadway once more, some two decades later. “Special Occasions” (1982), a play about a divorced couple, was so ravaged by theater critics that it closed after a series of previews and one regular performance. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, excoriated the play but praised Ms. Pleshette’s performance: “The throaty voice, wide-open smiles and quick intelligence are as alluring as ever,” he wrote.

Ms. Pleshette had an active film career in the 1960s and the first half of the ’70s. She starred in several Disney movies, including “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976). Early on, she dealt with heavier subjects, playing a flight attendant who survives an airline crash in “Fate Is the Hunter” (1964), a sexually compulsive heiress in “A Rage to Live” (1965) and a book editor trying to save a successful young author from himself in “Youngblood Hawke” (1964). Eventually, though, she seemed to settle into comedies, like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), about a busload of unhappy American tourists.

But it was in television that she received the greatest recognition. She was nominated for an Emmy Award four times, first in 1962 for a guest performance in “Dr. Kildare,” twice for “The Bob Newhart Show” (1977 and 1978) and in 1991 for playing the title role in the television movie “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”

She was never in a hit series again (although there were efforts), but she continued to appear in television movies and as a guest in popular series into the 21st century. Her last role was as Megan Mullally’s estranged mother in several episodes of NBC’s “Will & Grace” from 2002 to 2004.

After her divorce from Mr. Donahue, Ms. Pleshette married twice. In 1968, she wed Tom Gallagher, a businessman, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2000. In 2001 she wed Tom Poston, her long-ago Broadway co-star, who had also been a guest star on “The Bob Newhart Show” and a regular in Mr. Newhart’s second sitcom, “Newhart,” in the 1980s. He died last year.

Arguably Ms. Pleshette’s most memorable television moment was not in “The Bob Newhart Show” but in the final episode of “Newhart.” On May 21, 1990, Mr. Newhart’s character, Dick Loudon, was hit in the head by a golf ball and woke up to find himself in Dr. Robert Hartley’s bed, with his beautiful, unfailingly sane wife, Emily, at his side. The whole second sitcom had been a nightmare.

The episode was considered one of the most successful series finales in television history, partly because it managed to remain a secret until it was broadcast. As time passed, some found the scene a useful metaphor for hopes that a difficult situation might turn out to be just a bad dream. In 1999, a headline in the humor publication The Onion read, “Universe Ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette.”

For another review of The Bob Newhart Show go to www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/bobnewharts/bobnewharts.htm

To see how The Bob Newhart Show crossed over to Newhart go to For another review of The Bob Newhart Show go to http://poobala.com/bobandnewhart.html