Johnny Carson Almost Played Rob Petrie on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’

Carl Reiner wrote his sitcom pilot Head of the Family with a specific star in mind: Carl Reiner. Who better to play the part of comedy writer Robert Petrie, since Reiner based the character and the sitcom’s plots on his own experiences writing for Your Show of Shows?

But network and sponsor reaction to the pilot was “fair to middling,” Reiner wrote in his book, Why and When The Dick Van Dyke Show Was Born. He was ready to give up on his sitcom idea when producer Sheldon Leonard called to say how impressed he was with the scripts for the proposed show. Reiner didn’t want to fail twice with the same project, but Leonard had a solution to fix the failed pilot: “We’ll get a better actor to play you!”

Leonard and Sheldon looked at several performers for the part. “Over the years, I have heard and read about other actors they considered,” Johnny Carson.”

At the time, Carson was the better-known of the two comics. He’d hosted popular daytime talk shows in the 1950s, including Carson’s Coffee Break and Johnny Carson’s Corner. He was affable, good-looking and quick-witted, in addition to being an actual comedy writer like Reiner. 

Eventually, Van Dyke. The latter had just won a Tony for his performance in Bye Bye Birdie, and Leonard sent Reiner to catch him in the Broadway show. “I went, I saw, and I was conquered,” ed Reiner. He liked that Van Dyke didn’t seem so much like an unapproachable celebrity as as someone “who can perform in a room at a party.”

In that way, Carson’s relative fame worked against him, according to Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today. Van Dyke “got the role, largely because he was less well-known than Carson and therefore would be more believable in the title role.”

Leonard liked that Van Dyke was good-looking but not movie-star handsome. Other big stars “were too glamorous to be sharing your living room,” Leonard believed. “Dick’s jaw was a little too long, his walk a little too gangly — assets, not liabilities on TV.”

“I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand,” Van Dyke says. “Let that be a lesson for future generations.”

There’s one other reason Van Dyke was glad that TV history didn’t turn in another direction, he told Conan O’Brien in 2012: “I would have been rotten on The Tonight Show.”