Suzanne Pleshette: So Much More Beyond “The Bob Newhart Show”

A Classic TV Retrospective of a Female Icon

It’s almost five decades since Suzanne Pleshette was first introduced to millions of viewers as Emily Hartley, the smart and sassy TV wife with the sexy gravelly voice on The Bob Newhart Show, which originally aired on CBS from the fall of 1972 to the spring of 1978.

The sultry brunette with large “bedroom eyes” (explain that later), Pleshette played Emily as a hip and hot television spouse, much differently than say Florence Henderson interpreted Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch. Pleshette’s Emily was kind of like a steroid-induced Laura Petrie, Mary Tyler Moore’s character from The Dick Van Dyke Show. But whereas Laura engineered the Petrie household, and made certain to have dinner on the table for her TV-writer-husband Rob (Van Dyke), the wise-cracking Emily was a school-teacher by day and was sure to entertain her TV psychologist-hubbie Bob Hartley (played by Newhart), especially after a long day’s journey into work with his psychiatric ward of mentally-challenged patients.

The New York Times critic Frank Rich once described as Pleshette’s Emily as “the sensible yet woolly wife,” on the Bob Newhart sitcom, the star of which once appeared with her on The Tonight Show shortly before they were paired in the series. A few of B-Newhart producers…