Jack Riley

Take twenty-two of these episodes and call us in the morning. It's time to check in for Dr. Hartley's final sessions with The Bob Newhart Show: Season Six! One of television's all-time great comedies comes to an end with this hilarious last season. Chicago psychologist Robert Hartley (Bob Newhart) continues his uphill battle to help his eccentric group of patients while maintaining balance with his personal life (filled with an equally eccentric group of friends).

Make an appointment to see television‚ funniest psychologist with The Bob Newhart Show: Season Five! This sitcom classic stars the incomparable Bob Newhart as Dr. Robert Hartley, a Chicago psychologist who finds himself surrounded by some unusual and neurotic characters: on the job and at home! But with the support of his quick-witted wife, Emily (Suzanne Pleshette), Hartley can always be counted on to deliver a healthy dose of laugh therapy.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was clearly comedian Bob Newhart and company's motto during the fourth season (1975-76) of The Bob Newhart Show, all 24 episodes of which are preserved in this three-disc set. Even with the show's ratings dipping somewhat, there's no shark-jumping going on here; Newhart and producers Jay Tarses and Tom Patchett clearly understood what made this show tick, and notwithstanding a little tinkering, they stuck with it. "It," of course, largely depended on Newhart himself.

It's more of the same in this box set from the third season of The Bob Newhart Show. That's altogether a good thing, as the mid-'70s series (these 24 episodes, compiled on three discs, come from 1974-75) remains a model of restraint in a sea of sit-com overkill, then and now. What a pleasure, not to mention a relief, it is to watch a comedy that manages to be more than a frantic cavalcade of shrill one-liners, would-be witty repartee, and endless sexual innuendo. Not that the show (the first of his two long-running series; Newhart followed in 1982), isn't funny.

In its sophomore season, The Bob Newhart Show became an integral part of CBS's phenomenal Stay Home Saturday lineup of now-immortal shows that included All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Carol Burnett Show. Audiences were initially slow to pick up on Bob, but by its second season, the show was on a roll, and enjoyed the highest ratings of its six-year run.