Sketch o’the Week- Jerry Van Dyke!

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Since his big brother Dick was out subject last week, It’s only fitting that we continue our series of classic sitcom sketches with Jerry Van Dyke from the ill-fated and infamous 1965 sitcom “My Mother the Car.” The sitcom’s premise revolved around a small town lawyer who buys an old, dilapidated car that turns out to be his dead mother reincarnated who talked to him through the car’s radio. That sounds ridiculous (and it is), but you need to remember at the time a lot of sitcoms were based on fantastical gimmicks like a talking horse, a suburban housewife witch, a genie serving an astronaut, a crash-landed martian, super-spies, horror creatures living as a family in the suburbs, or a flying nun. It was kind of a thing.

When I say “infamous” I mean it. “My Mother The Car” is usually near the top of any list of the worst TV shows ever. TV Guide named it the second worst ever, just behind “The Jerry Springer Show”. Considering the creative team behind it, it’s a bit surprising the show was such an epic critical and commercial failure. Show creators Chris Hayward and Allen Burns were early writers on “Rocky and Bullwinkle” scripts for producer Jay Ward. They also helped create “Get Smart” and “The Munsters”, and would go on to give us many classic shows like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, “Lou Grant”, “Get Smart”, “Rhoda”, and “Room 222”.

The show is also famous for being near the top of another list, this time for “worst TV actor career choices ever”. Jerry Van Dyke reportedly turned down the Don Knotts role in “The Andy Griffith Show” and the role of Gilligan in “Gilligan’s Island” (a role his agent urged him to take) to star in “My Mother the Car”. Van Dyke explained why by saying, “”My Mother the Car” read like Neil Simon compared to the Gilligan’s Island script.”

I never understood the show’s premise. Given Van Dyke’s character was about 30 at the time of the show (1965), and that his mother was probably about 20 when the character was born, she’d had been born in 1915. That would have made her 13 when the car, a 1928 Porter, was manufactured. You can’t be reincarnated into anything until you are dead. Accuracy was hardly a concern for the show, however. Not only was there never a 1928 Porter (the car used in the show was a custom fictional make/model), car radios were not invented until 1930.