Earlier this week, we featured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s performance in Coldplay’s new music video, full of visual references to the sitcom that made him a household name in the early nineteen-sixties. And a household name he remains these six decades later, though one does wonder how many of those who appreciate his extreme longevity — both cultural and biological — have ever seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. I myself only caught the occasional late-night rerun in childhood, but however much he indulged his characteristic goofiness, the thirty-something Van Dyke in the role of comedy writer Rob Petrie always struck me as the very image of mature adulthood.
Whether or not you saw it in the first place, you can now watch The Dick Van Dyke Show’s five seasons free on Youtube, starting with the first here. They’ve come available at a channel called FilmRise Television, on whose collection of playlists you’ll also find such pillars of mid-century American television as Dragnet, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, and That Girl.
Hard though it may be to understand for anyone who came of age under the firehose of on-demand content these regularly scheduled entertainments became veritable cultural institutions when they originally aired on major networks in the fifties and sixties, with an influence that extended far beyond their already considerable viewership.
The millennial generation grew up regarding shows of this kind as hokey but sufficiently amusing diversions when nothing more irreverent or postmodern happened to be on. At worst, they felt like inferior predecessors of the then-current sitcoms and dramas we were watching in prime time. But then began the long “golden age” of prestige television, with its new levels of aesthetic and narrative complexity, which changed our very conception of television.
Today, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show or any of the other hits with which it shared the scarce airwaves feels almost exotic, like traveling to the past: a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley famously put it, where they do things differently — and a few of whose citizens are, fortunately, still around to entertain us.
Related content:
99-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Sings & Dances in a Touching New Coldplay Video, Directed by Spike Jonze
Dick Van Dyke Still Dancing at 96!
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
