Dick Van Dyke Was ‘Heartbroken’ When Carl Reiner Ended His Sitcom

Who doesn’t love Dick Van Dyke? After all, the 99-year-old star of Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang helped to make all of our childhoods magical/creepy.

Van Dyke has appeared in countless movies, TV shows and stage productions, but for a lot of fans, he will always be Rob Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show, the sitcom that did for the ottoman what And Just Like That… did for the Peloton. 

Despite being a hit with audiences, The Dick Van Dyke Show lasted for just five seasons before going off the air forever. Although, to be fair, it did briefly return for a 2004 Ray Romano-hosted special in which Rob gets to dance with his own CGI avatar. 

But if it was up to Van Dyke, the show would have gone on for a lot longer than that. 

When The Dick Van Dyke wrapped up in 1966, some people were puzzled as to why it was coming to an end so soon. “We wanted to quit while we were still proud of it,” Van Dyke told LIFE at the time. Others have pointed out that Van Dyke had Hollywood ambitions and Mary Tyler Moore wanted to work on Broadway. Plus, had the show stayed on the air, it would have likely followed the trend set by other sitcoms and transitioned from black and white to color, which wasn’t exactly cheap. 

But according to the Dick Van Dyke of today, the decision exclusively came from creator Carl Reiner. Van Dyke recently guested on Ted Danson’s podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name and recalled that “nobody wanted to quit the show, but Carl wanted to go on and do some movies and things.”

“We were heartbroken. We had such fun, it was such a great group,” Van Dyke explained, specifically recollecting that he and co-stars Maury Amsterdam and Rose Marie would improvise and revise scenes during production. “Half those scripts were written on the floor,” Van Dyke revealed. “He’d give us a basic script, but between Rosie and Maury and me, we’d start throwing lines in.”

In his book My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir, Van Dyke was a little more charitable to Reiner, suggesting that his decision to end The Dick Van Dyke Show had less to do with his own career opportunities, and more to do with preserving the legacy of the work. “I think he recognized that all of us, through our collaboration and hard work, had produced a TV classic, and he feared that if repetition and fatigue set in, it could damage the show’s magical reputation,” Van Dyke wrote of Reiner in 2011. 

While it may have been disappointing for the cast at the time, for all we know Reiner spared us from a sixth season of The Dick Van Dyke Show in which Rob Petrie water skis over a man-eating sea creature.