Bob Newhart Ended ‘Newhart’ In Bed With Suzanne Pleshette, And Even His Own Cast Was Kept In The Dark

For eight seasons on Newhart, Bob Newhart played Dick Loudon, a how-to author running the Stratford Inn in a small Vermont town full of oddballs. Then, on May 21, 1990, CBS aired the finale, “The Last Newhart,” and in its final minute the lights came up on a Chicago bedroom that viewers had not seen in 12 years. Lying there was Dr. Bob Hartley, the psychologist Newhart played on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 to 1978, and beside him was his wife Emily, played once again by Suzanne Pleshette.

So the short answer is yes. As far as the show itself is concerned, Newhart was a dream, and it was Bob Hartley’s dream. He wakes Emily to tell her about the Vermont inn he dreamed he ran, and she gets the last word. What fans have argued about for 36 years is everything around that answer, from whose idea it was to whether Newhart ever meant it to wipe out the whole run.

Whose Dinner Table Did the Idea Come From?

The story Bob Newhart told for the rest of his life starts with him wanting out. Around the end of the sixth season he was seriously thinking about quitting, and his wife, Ginnie, knew it. “Ginny knew I was unhappy with CBS,” he told Yahoo Entertainment for the finale’s 30th anniversary in 2020. As he remembered it, she had the ending ready on the spot, telling him, “You know what the final show should be? You wake up in bed with Suzie.”

Her reasoning was practical. On Showtime’s Inside Comedy in 2013, Newhart said she told him to end in a dream sequence “because there was so much inexplicable about the show,” and he confirmed the same story in his 2006 memoir, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! Pleshette, who said she first heard the idea over dinner with the Newharts, backed it up in her interview for the Television Academy’s archive. When Newhart put it to her, her answer became part of the legend. “She said, ‘I’ll be there in a New York minute,'” he told Yahoo. Then she waited two more years, because Newhart made peace with the network and kept going.

That is the version most fans know. The people who wrote the episode tell it differently.

Why Did the Writers Say It Wasn’t Ginnie’s Idea?

In 1995, after Entertainment Weekly credited Ginnie Newhart with the twist, the episode’s writers and executive producers, Mark Egan, Mark Solomon and Bob Bendetson, sent the magazine a sharp letter. “The final episode of Newhart was not ‘dreamed up’ by Bob’s wife, Ginny,” they wrote, adding that she “had absolutely no connection with the show.” They gave the credit to staff writer Dan O’Shannon, who had pitched the bedroom ending in the writers’ room the season before.

Veteran sitcom writer Ken Levine went straight to O’Shannon in 2010 and reported on his blog that O’Shannon confirmed the idea was his. Levine added a generous twist of his own: O’Shannon told him “it’s quite possible Mrs. Newhart thought of it independently.” Bob Newhart, for his part, said he simply handed his wife’s idea to the writers, who “filled out the rest.” The honest answer is that the credit was never settled.

Whoever thought of it, the hard part was keeping it quiet.

How Do You Hide Suzanne Pleshette on a Sitcom Set?

Very carefully. According to Newhart, Pleshette and director Dick Martin, the final scene was kept from the cast and most of the crew. The scripts that went around the set had a decoy ending in which Dick Loudon is hit by a golf ball, dies and meets God, played in the rumors by George Burns or George C. Scott. “That was a red herring!” Newhart told Yahoo. “We did that to mislead the tabloids.”

The real bedroom set was built on a separate stage, and Pleshette was kept out of sight. “They hid me in a trailer for six hours, with no phone,” she told CBS News. Accounts differ on when the rest of the cast was let in on the secret, with Newhart remembering “maybe a couple days before” and other retellings putting it on the day of the shoot. Everyone agrees they did not get a rehearsal.

That left two old pros about to perform a scene nobody had ever run, in front of a live audience that had no idea what was coming.

What Did the Final Scene Actually Show?

The episode itself plays it straight almost to the end. A Japanese tycoon buys up the town to build a golf resort, Dick and his wife Joanna (Mary Frann) refuse to sell, and five years later the Stratford Inn sits in the middle of a golf course. At a reunion of the townsfolk, a stray golf ball knocks Dick out cold.

When it comes back, the audience at the taping recognized the Hartleys’ bedroom before anyone said a word. “The audience started applauding, because they remembered it!” Newhart told Yahoo. “And then, they saw Suzie and I, and they immediately started cheering.” Years later, Pleshette described holding his hand just before the cameras rolled. “Bob and I were holding hands and he said, ‘Wait for the laugh,'” she recalled. “What if there isn’t one?” There was. They did it in one take.

On screen, Bob wakes Emily and tells her about his dream of running an inn in a little Vermont town. He mentions a beautiful blonde and suggests Emily wear more sweaters, a gentle wink at Mary Frann’s famous wardrobe. Emily, half asleep, delivers the closing line: “That settles it. No more Japanese food before you go to bed.” The episode drew 29.5 million viewers, according to the Los Angeles Times, and was the most-watched program of the week.

So Was All of ‘Newhart’ Really Just a Dream?

On the plain evidence of the scene, yes. Bob Hartley does not describe a single strange night at the inn; he describes the whole place and its people, which means every season of Dick Loudon’s life was his dream. CBS News, looking back on the 20th anniversary, put it bluntly, saying the scene “reduced the entire eight-year run of Newhart to nothing but a dream.” Pleshette felt the same way, later saying the scene basically negated every episode that came before it.

Bob Newhart never seemed to take it that literally. To him it was a joke shared with the people who had watched him since the 1970s. “To me, it was the ultimate wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of thing,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2010. “The audience was in on the joke.” That is where canon honestly stops. The show never returned to clear it up, so “it was all Bob Hartley’s dream” is the only reading the episode supports, even if the man who lived both lives treated it as a farewell gag rather than a ruling on eight years of television.

Most of the people in that bedroom scene are gone now. Mary Frann died in 1998 at 55. Pleshette married Tom Poston, who played handyman George Utley, in 2001, and lost him in 2007, when he was 85. She died on January 19, 2008, at 70. Ginnie Newhart died in 2023, and Bob Newhart followed on July 18, 2024, at 94. You can read about the one star of The Bob Newhart Show cast who is still alive today.

Newhart outlived the argument over whose idea it was, and he never stopped giving the credit to the woman he was married to for 60 years. “It’s held up to other shows as the standard,” he said of the ending in 2010, and he always made sure people knew where he thought it began: at a party, with Ginnie telling him to go wake up next to Suzie.