Dick Van Dyke Had to Fight for His Sitcom’s Edgiest Episode

While Rob and Laura were intimate, as husbands and wives are, or allowing others to venture into new and dicey territory,” Van Dyke wrote in his memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. 

New and dicey? Those modifiers applied to one episode in particular, and “we fought the network tooth and nail,” Van Dyke recently told People. “They just didn’t want us to do it.”

Bill Persky and Sam Denoff penned the script for “That’s My Boy,” a flashback episode in which Rob and Laura reminisce about the day their son Ritchie was born. Misdelivered flowers at the hospital give Rob the sneaking suspicion that their baby was accidentally switched with the offspring of the similarly named Peters family, who occupied the ading delivery room. Laura believes Rob is nuts, but he can’t get the idea out of his head. The issue is settled when the Peters family offers to drop off another mixed-up gift in exchange for one of theirs. The punchline: The Peters are Black.

“When the audience saw that couple walking in the door, they started to laugh and we had to cut the camera and just sit there,” Van Dyke told People. “It was the longest laugh I have ever experienced in my life — and the network didn’t like it.” 

What was the problem? In his memoir, Van Dyke reveals that the network believed a family sitcom was the wrong place to address racial issues. “When the network first read the script,” Reiner says in his book, Why and When The Dick Van Dyke Show Was Born, “they raised the possibility that white and African-Amerian audiences might be offended. I pointed out that, by the end of the show, the audience will know our heart is in the right place.” 

Producer Sheldon Leonard pitched in, twisting network executives’ arms until they finally gave in. 

Reiner, like Van Dyke, said the live audience reaction — heck, it was an ovation — represented “one of the biggest our show ever received.”

It was, in Van Dyke’s estimation, “a brilliant, socially relevant twist to an extremely funny episode.”

A nice postscript? The actor who played Mr. Peters was Greg Morris, who clearly cracks up at Rob’s shocked reaction. His charismatic appearance on The Dick Van Dyke Show so impressed TV producer Bruce Geller that he hired Morris to co-star in his new series, Mission: Impossible.