Retro : Ohhh, Rob! : ‘DICK VAN DYKE’ CAST AND CREATORS REUNITE FOR OLD TIMES’ SAKE

CBS has long tried to get the cast of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” together for a reunion. Over the last few years, the network has scored ratings success with retrospectives of “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”

But all of CBS’ attempts to gather up the “Dick Van Dyke” cast had failed. Until now.

“It never struck us,” explains Carl Reiner, who created the 1961-66 series. Reunions, he believes “are sort of embarrassing when you get up there and self-aggrandize yourself. Finally, after four or five times, we said, ‘If some outside source feels we should be celebrated, let them do it. Let somebody else talk about us rather than us talking about ourselves.’ ”

Reiner, who played the boorish TV star Alan Brady on the series, says he wanted someone like Charles Kuralt, whom he admires, to host the special. And it just so happened that Kuralt was a fan of the series. “We asked him to do it and he said, ‘I’d love to.’ ”

The Dick Van Dyke Show Retrospective features regulars Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie, Larry Matthews, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Reiner and executive producer Sheldon Leonard reminiscing about their experiences and recalling their favorite scenes on the Emmy Award-winning comedy.

Currently in repeats on cable’s Nick at Nite, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was set behind the scenes at a mythical New York-based TV show, “The Alan Brady Show.” It was a fun-house mirror of Reiner’s experience writing for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” an experience that Neil Simon recently drew on for his current hit Broadway play, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” Van Dyke played the show’s head writer Rob Petrie. Rose Marie and Amsterdam played his wisecracking co-writers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell.

Rob lived in suburban New Rochelle with his loving wife, Laura (Moore), a former dancer, and their young son Ritchie (Matthews). Guilbert played their nosy neighbor Millie Helper.

Reiner says he’s “tremendously pleased” by the continuing popularity of the series. “We knew we were doing something good. A few years ago, my wife and I watched them (on Nick at Nite) and I kept saying, ‘Look at what Mary and Dick are doing.’ They were revelatory as far as performance is concerned. When I was no longer involved in making the piece and just sitting back as an audience, I was really amazed at how many of them are very, very funny.”

Of course, Reiner adds, a few are very, very dated. “Those I am embarrassed about,” he says. “I wouldn’t write them today. Mary Tyler Moore as Laurie Petrie says she wanted to be dancing on (‘The Alan Brady Show’) and then says, ‘Oh, no. I just wanted to try it once. I am really happy being a housewife.’ You know you can’t do that now. You need two salaries to exist!”

Reiner doesn’t have a favorite episode, but has different feelings for different shows. The episodes he likes the best are the ones that mirrored his and wife Estelle’s life.

“All the shows in flashback where they met,” he says, “all of those shows were based a little bit on our feelings at the time. Maybe the stories weren’t, but the feelings were close.”

Rob and Laura’s honeymoon experience, Reiner says, was exactly the same. “This woman we rented one room from had admonishes on every piece of furniture. I used that. The fact that I went AWOL to have my honeymoon was true. All of those things are very close to me. The marriage was based on the feelings I had.”

Reiner also has a soft spot for such “wild” episodes as “It May Look Like a Walnut.”

“I was looking to do a show like ‘The Twilight Zone.’ I tried to vary our shows so we weren’t in the same milieu every week. We tried to find one in every 10 that was really crazy and outside the regular home life.”

Like “I Love Lucy,” many “Dick Van Dyke” episodes also included musical numbers. “There were three reasons we did these musical shows,” Reiner says. “One is that the people liked them; the second is because we loved them, and, third, I had to write a 28-page script, instead of a 44-page script. I didn’t have to write as many words.”

Reiner ended up playing Alan Brady, he says, because he couldn’t get anybody who was a big enough star to play him.

“My idea was to play him with his back to the audience,” Reiner says. “I never intended him to be seen very much. But once you get past the first season, you start to look for better ideas and then when you find that the ideas have Alan Brady in it strongly, we better turn him around. You can’t use the back of his head when you need to see the expression on his face.”

Reiner adored playing Brady. “But I could never play him more than once every 12 weeks, because the first three years I was doing all the writing and rewriting. I would run down and rehearse my scene and then run right back to my office.”

“The Dick Van Duke Show Retrospective” airs Monday at 8 p.m. on CBS; repeats of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” air weekdays at 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. ; Sundays at 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. and Mondays at 5 a.m. on Nickelodeon.