Emily's Gone Home
Suzanne Pleshette has died. (Her husband Tom Poston died last year.) In the late 50s and 60s she appeared on stage, TV and movies, often playing the ingenue. The first thing I remember seeing her in was Disney's The Ugly Dachsund where she played Dean Jones' suspicious wife.
Pleshette was cute and charming, but she rarely played straight out sexy roles. She was better as the wife than the gal the guy cheats on his wife with.
The role she's remembered for is Emily, Bob Newhart's wife on The Bob Newhart Show in the 70s. I thought she and Bob had one of the most adult marriages ever shown on network TV. For one thing, they slept in the same bed, which hadn't been done. But it was more. They were in love, sure, but there were plenty of times they seemed exasperated with each other. They struck me as two people who'd been together for years and didn't need to constantly reaffirm their love (and sometimes didn't entirely feel it).
Pleshette's greatest moment, easily, came more than a decade after the show left the air. Bob had another show, Newhart, and after eight years, the final scene showed him in bed again with Emily--the whole thing had been a dream. It's the greatest finale ever.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:38 AM
7 Comments:
That's a very apt observation about the Emily-Bob relationship. There's a funny scene in one episode when Emily -- for reasons I cannot remember -- is dressed in a wonderful black nightgown to welcome Bob home from a day at the office. He looks at her and deadpans "you were expecting someone else?" Pretty hilarious.
best finale ever?? was that intended to stimulate response?: I'm goint with the Soprano's and screw most of the dimwitted public who didn't like it -- schmendricks.
How come you never saw Suzanne Pleshette's legs? (A question my late father never failed to asked whenever we watched the Bob Newhart Show)
I would say that the final scene of Newhart with Emily and Bob was by itself the best finale although the rest of that show was not vintage Newhart- The Darryls talked and the level of unreality was hiked up by a factor of ten.
(By the way- I just saw Bob's other hot TV wife in an old episode of the Incredible Hulk where she palyed a struggling Chicago Pizzeria owner beset by an investigative reporter from The National Enquirer who planted rats in the restaurant to fuel exposees-The green guy was not the most incredible thing in that episode
Actually, when I called it the best finale ever, I didn't expect much argument. There are few enough finales which are even good, much less the best moment the show ever had. It was the longest comic payoff ever. (Compare, however, the ending of St. Elsewhere--a disaster.)
Mary Frann had the thankless job of being Bob's new wife on Newhart. (She died about a decade ago.) I remember her before that from a guest star role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was an odd "issue" episode--almost the only one they ever did--that dealth with, of all thing, anti-Semitism. Frann played a snooty WASP who hangs out with Mary and didn't want Rhoda at her country club.
What about Allan Melvin, better known as Sam the butcher on the Brady Bunch. Doesn't he deserve some notice?
Well, it might be the longest payoff ever, but don't forget LAGuy, it was a comic riff based on other series pulling the silly dream thing. My guess is that one season of Dallas, but maybe it was St. Elsewhere--which ended first? It wouldn't have worked, at least as well, without those other absurdities preceding it.
SWMBCg, etc.
She was definitely a smoker. Her voice must have dropped an octave in her later years.
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