RIP Bob Newhart

The Dark Herald provides the eulogy:

It was easily the greatest ending to a television comedy in history. I never even heard the lines I was laughing so hard. It was without question a “you had to be there” to understand moment. There had been all kinds of rumors going around about how Newhart would end. Mostly they’d promised something really intolerable. That Bob, who had been a fixture in our lives throughout the 1980s was going to be killed by a golfball in the series finale.

That final scene transporting Bob Newhart back to his bedroom and wife from his previous TV series left the country howling.

It was the perfect way to end a TV show that had been in the background of our lives for eight years. It kind of understated but it was always reliable for a good laugh. You could say the exact same thing about the Bob Newhart show (1972-1978), for that matter you could say the same thing about Bob Newhart himself.