Newhart’s first album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, sold more than one million copies. In 1961, it won a Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year, a first for a comedy album, and Newhart also won for Best New Artist, the only time a comedian had been so honored. In 2006, the album was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.
The album’s phenomenal success, Newhart said in a 2002 interview, catapulted him to stand-up stardom, even though recording the live album was the first time Newhart had performed his material in front of a nightclub audience. (It reportedly took his manager five months to find a venue—the Tidelands Club at Houston’s Tideland Motor Inn—that would book an unknown comedian). “In one year, I went from doing a man-on-the-street show to six Ed Sullivan shows,” Newhart said.
Newhart’s first foray into television was The Bob Newhart Show, a 1961 variety series that lasted one season but was honored with an Emmy and a Peabody Award.
“I probably never should have done it,” he said in a 2015 Huffington Post interview. “I wasn’t seasoned enough. I did a monologue every week . . . and I felt I couldn’t maintain the quality I had achieved on the record album. And they put me in sketches, which I wasn’t very good at.”
He parlayed his recording and nightclub success into appearances on variety and talk shows. He guest-hosted The Tonight Show during the Johnny Carson era almost 90 times.
In 1972, The Bob Newhart Show, a sitcom produced by MTM Enterprises, producers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, premiered. Newhart starred as Chicago psychologist Robert Hartley, a role that took full advantage of his ability to mine laughs just by listening. Unlike All in the Family, the series rarely tackled the social issues of the day; its humor was primarily character and situational driven. Suzanne Pleschette co-starred as his wife, Emily. At Newhart’s insistence, the couple had no children—he didn’t want to play the hapless or dopey sitcom dad. In the show’s later years, writers submitted a script in which the couple had a baby. Newhart responded by complimenting the writing but then asked, “Who are you going to get to play Bob?”
The show ran for six seasons. In its second year, it was part of CBS’s Saturday night programming block, arguably the greatest lineup in television history: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.
Newhart jokingly revealed the formula for sitcom success to The Huffington Post: “Get great writing and a great cast, and take all the credit yourself.”
He repeated this formula with his next sitcom, Newhart, playing Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon. This series ran for eight seasons and is best known for its audacious finale in which it was revealed that the entire series was a dream of Dr. Hartley’s. Newhart, in character as his first sitcom protagonist, wakes up in bed next to his former sitcom wife, Pleschette—an idea suggested by Newhart’s wife, Virginia, whom he married in 1963.