How Bob Newhart Made History with “Newhart”'s Classic Sitcom Ending

Thirty-four years after its 1990 debut, the late comedian's sitcom is routinely ranked as one of the best of all-time TV finales due to its unexpected conclusion

Bob Newhart, who died on July 18 at age 94, wasn’t considered a wild and crazy guy. Quite the opposite, in fact.

At the start of his standup career, he was billed as “the button-down mind” and in the decades that followed, he perfected a poker-faced, slightly anxious, absolutely non-emphatic delivery—he was a meter needle that barely moved left or right.

But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know and appreciate wildness and craziness. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be still remembering—and talking about—the immortal, utterly unexpected conclusion of Newhart, which occurred on May 21, 1990.

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With roughly three minutes to go in the final episode of his second CBS sitcom, Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon (Newhart) wakes up in bed, switches on the light and turns to his wife Joanna (Mary Frann) to tell her that he's just had the strangest dream. But it isn’t Joanna—or Mary Fran. Switching on a second light, the woman beside Dick reveals herself to be Suzanne Pleshette, making a surprise return as Emily, the wife from Newhart’s first CBS series, The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978), on which he played Chicago psychologist Bob Hartley.

In fact, we’re back in the Hartleys' Chicago bedroom—meaning that the entire run of Newhart was a dream. Dick Loudon was just some crazy blip in Bob Hartley’s unconsciousness.

The public and critical response was rapturous, and continues to be—this is routinely ranked as one of the best of all TV finales. At the very least, it was a wonderful joke (conceived, Newhart said, by his wife Ginnie), that's done no harm to the memory of either The Bob Newhart Show or Newhart. But it was also an inspired gambit that raised the stakes for how inventive a series finale should or could be.

No one worried about the metaphysics of Newhart’s twist—this wasn’t the ending of Lost, thank goodness—but it did upend one satisfaction traditionally offered to an audience watching a hit show as it bid farewell, an assumption that the characters would pretty much continue on their way into the indefinite future and, perhaps, someday be reunited for a Netflix reboot.

Think of it this way: Without Newhart’s precedent, would we have had 1998’s still controversial Seinfeld finale, which saw Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George jailed for their solipsistic contempt for anyone else? Or, more recently, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s elaborately plotted jailhouse finale to HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm? It was a finale that commented on the finale of a different show.

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The Newhart finale was also—in a way that would have been better appreciated at the time—a good-humored nod to two other series that had blindsided audiences with fantasy switcheroos. NBC’s hospital drama St. Elsewhere ended in 1988 with the revelation that the whole show had unfolded in the imagination of a boy with autism. (The audience reception was not rapturous.) And CBS’s Dallas, in a twist that provoked a collective gasp of disbelief, brought back the dead Bobby (Patrick Duffy) at the start of the 1989 season—apparently, Victoria Principal’s Pamela had dreamed the whole thing (including the previous season). Newhart showed how to do this sort of thing right.

It’s good to remember, though, that Newhart had been giving rein to its own strain of absurd humor long before Pleshette's nutty cameo. Newhart was not only an odder, sharper sitcom than The Bob Newhart Show—which had ended with a smiling, teary sendoff very much in the style of 1977’s Mary Tyler Moore Show finale—also flakier, and even more daring, than just about any other sitcom of its era. No other show had a running gag as inexplicable as the three backwoods brothers Larry, Darryl, and Darryl. ("Hi, I'm Larry. This is my brother, Darryl, and my other brother, Darryl.”) There was even a sitcom-in-a-sitcom, Seein’ Double, with the pampered Steph (Julia Duffy) playing identical 15-year-old twins. (Theme-song lyrics: “Since their mom drowned in a lake / Dad has taught the girls to bake”). In the finale, for that matter, everyone walked around singing “Anatevka” from Fiddler on the Roof, and Mary Frann's Joan dressed up like geishas.

Which brings us to one last thought: The replacement of Frann with Pleshette—if only for a few surreal minutes—represented a kind of wish fulfillment, maybe even a sign of regret.

Pleshette’s role on The Bob Newhart Show hadn’t been a particularly rich one—it seemed to be an endless iteration of the line “Hi, Bob.” But she'd been a bemused, amusing, sexy presence. Frann had been more brittle and less engaging—she seemed to have wandered onto the wrong show. The Newhart finale, in an oblique way, wrote her out of the series. It was the television equivalent of targeted DNA repair.

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Newhart can be streamed on Prime Video.

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