Hulu Just Lost an Iconic CBS Sitcom
The Dick Van Dyke Show, one of the greatest television shows ever made, left Hulu the moment the calendar switched from 2021 to 2022. The Disney-owned streaming service was the streaming home for the beloved show that starred Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. The series was created by the late Carl Reiner and ran five seasons from 1961 to 1966.
Now that the show has left Hulu, it is temporarily unavailable in a complete form on any streaming platform. Amazon Prime Video only has a handful of random episodes from Season 2 available. The other seasons are only to purchase or rent. Paramount+ seems to be the next likely landing place for the series since CBS handles the distribution of the show. Both CBS and Paramount+ are under the ViacomCBS umbrella. However, Paramount+'s January 2022 list does not include The Dick Van Dyke Show, so we might have to wait a few months before it returns to a streaming platform. The Dick Van Dyke Show is also available in complete form on DVD and Blu-ray for those who love the show so much they don't want to worry about it leaving streaming services.
The Dick Van Dyke Show stars Van Dyke as television writer Rob Petrie, who works for fictional host Alan Brady (Reiner), alongside co-writers Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) and Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam). At home, Rob is married to Laura (Moore) and they have a son, Ritchie (Larry Mathews). Van Dyke's real brother, Jerry Van Dyke, had a recurring role as Rob's brother Stacey.
Even when the show aired, The Dick Van Dyke Show was praised and widely seen as one of the funniest sitcoms ever made. It won 15 Emmys, including the Outstanding Comedy Series award every year from 1963 to 1966. Van Dyke won Emmys in 1964, 1965, and 1966, while Moore won Emmys in 1964 and 1966. In 1996, Reiner won an Emmy for playing Alan Brady in an episode of Mad About You.
The show continues to have its fans, with CBS airing colorized versions of episodes as recently as May 2021. Reiner agreed to film the entire season in black and white to keep costs down. While some movie and television creators were not happy with colorized versions of their work, Reiner was a rare proponent of the practice. In 2018, he told Entertainment Weekly he liked the idea to keep the show fresh for modern audiences.
"They're wonderful," Reiner said of the colorized episodes. "It's nice to see Mary Tyler Moore's flashing black eyes and her hair. And Dick Van Dyke is the most talented human being ever. As a matter of fact, Steve Martin once said that in all of show business, nobody is more talented than Dick Van Dyke, and I agree with that."
The colorized episodes were "close" to the real colors, Reiner said. "Thank goodness one of our photographers back then had taken some pictures of some of the rooms, so a lot of it is very accurate, and others are close enough," he explained. "It's very satisfying to the eye."