It’s Rob and Laura Petrie reunited! Dick Van Dyke to present Mary Tyler Moore with SAG Award

ICONS: It pains me that there are plenty of younger folks out there (I sound like a grandpa!) who are not familiar with the brilliance of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

It is, quite simply, one of THE best situation comedies to ever air on television and if you’ve never seen an episode, buy some of the DVDs! I have three of the five seasons in my collection and the show is timeless – and still so very funny.

Anyway, the show obviously starred Dick Van Dyke as comedy writer Rob Petrie. The great Maury Amsterdam and Rose Marie played his writing partners and a young actress by the name of Mary Tyler Moore played his wife Laura.

That actress, just 23 when the show began in 1961, went on to win two Emmys for the series then went on the star in The Mary Tyler Moore Show – another one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. Mary won four individual Emmys for her portrayal of single working woman Mary Richards and got an Oscar nomination for the film Ordinary People.

On Jan. 19, Miss Moore and Mr. Van Dyke will be reunited when he presents her with Screen Actors Guild’s 48th Life Achievement Award at the SAG Awards.

The pair has worked together on occasion since the five-year run of their original sitcom ended. In 1969, they reunited for a one-hour variety special called Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman and joined forces again in a 1979 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Hour reprising their roles as the Petries in a tongue-in-cheek comedic sketch.

Other notable collaborations by the famously funny TV spouses include a PBS version of D. L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nursing home-set stage play The Gin Game, as well as a reunion with former cast mates in TV Land’s nostalgic The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited.

I’d love to revisit this pair anytime, anywhere.