65 Years Ago Today, ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ Premiered on CBS; Dick Van Dyke Thought Mary Tyler Moore Was Too Young to Play His Wife

It’s been 65 years since The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered.

Starring Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam and Larry Matthews, the CBS sitcom made its debut on Oct. 3, 1961, and ran for five seasons as it followed the life of TV comedy writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke), at work and at home. The groundbreaking, Emmy-winning series was one of the most beloved sitcoms of the early 1960s.

Moore was just 23 years old when she auditioned for the part of Van Dyke’s wife, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role of Laura Petrie. But Van Dyke, who was in his mid-30s at the time, was concerned about their age gap. He also wasn’t sure if Moore could do comedy years before she scored her own self-titled sitcom.

In an interview with CBS News, Van Dyke, now 100, recalled that Moore almost didn’t go to her audition for The Dick Van Dyke Show.

“She had kind of a mid-Atlantic accent — kind of a Katharine Hepburn. And I thought, ‘Gosh, she’s beautiful, but do you think she can do comedy?’” Van Dyke said.

The young actress proved her co-star wrong, quickly proving she was perfect for the part.

“It was amazing how quickly she picked it up… had such good timing,” Van Dyke recalled of Moore, who died in 2017. “In no time, she had us laughing. … The chemistry that happened between us was just serendipity. We became an improv group. We could almost reach each other’s mind.”

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Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner had auditioned dozens of other actresses for the role when his pal Danny Thomas suggested Moore.

“When I had to cast Mary, the part of Laura, I was at my wits’ end,” Reiner told ABC News. “I had auditioned literally 23 or 27 girls, and I told Sheldon Leonard, our executive producer, ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.’ I said, ‘None of these girls seem to work.'”

Reiner was mesmerized when he met Moore.

“She walked into the room, I looked at those eyes, the smile and those legs and I said, ‘I found her,'” the showrunner recalled. “I wanted to see if she could talk, so I gave her a script…she read one line, the first line, and I heard this intelligent ping…and I said, ‘That’s it.'”

“Dick was a little nervous about the fact she was 23, and he was 30-something,” Reiner added. “There was a 12-year difference or something, and he was very worried about that, and I said, ‘Nobody’s going to notice.’ And nobody ever mentioned the fact that they were not a couple. They were a couple from the moment they kissed in the main title.”

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Laura Petrie had originally been written as a small role, but that all changed when Moore was cast.

“As I saw it originally, it was only a minor role. I thought she would just be there to greet Van Dyke when he came home at night and to serve him his dinner,” Reiner once told The Courier, per MeTV. “Mary has fantastic dedication to her work, and we soon discovered we had accidentally stumbled onto a kid who could do great comedy if for no other reason than her relentless will to excel.”

What ensued was one of the greatest comedy partnerships of television’s golden era, and one that stands the test of time 65 years later.

“It was just fascinating to watch Mary Tyler Moore grab it, just grasp it so quickly from the first day,” Van Dyke once told The Television Academy Foundation. “Right from the beginning she saw what was happening and played off it … by the time the week was up, and we were in front of the audience, we knew we just had something going there.”

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