[Marshall] and everyone else involved [in The Dick Van Dyke Show] have a right to be proud. Somewhere in each installment … there is at least one laugh—a real honest-to-goodness, right-in-your-own-living-room, out-loud laugh every week. What higher praise can ever be given to a situation comedy?…

[But the show is, after all,] only a husband-and-wife thing where the husband happens to be a comedy writer. He still stutters as he proposes, panics when his son is born, leaps to wrong conclusions at the drop of a slip of paper. In short he is your average, amiable idiot of a TV husband. But there is one important exception to the foregoing. Neither he nor any of the others are average, amiable, idiot TV performers. The actors never jump out of character for the sake of a laugh. They stay real amidst the plot twists. The humor comes from the...