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 had seen the segment and knew immediately that they had found their Emily.

Pleshette went on to earn two Emmy nominations for the role and, according to TV Guide at the time, Bob Newhart was finding himself “outtalked” by Pleshette on the set about 12 to 1 but professed to be unperturbed by the phenomenon. “I don’t tangle with any lady who didn’t give Johnny a chance to exercise his mouth — even to sneer — for 10 whole minutes,” the actor said.

Besides Pleshette’s voice, one of her other most appealing physical traits was her significantly ground-breaking and relatively short brunette locks. In the first season or so of The Bob Newhart Show, Emily’s hair was coifed with a shag or mullet cut, the style made popular by David Cassidy on The Partridge Family. But also like…