TV Land marathon takes a trip back to Bob Newhart’s couch

Bob Newhart may stammer, but he never misses a beat.

As the story goes, Newhart feared turning into a sitcom cliche -- the dopey but lovable dad -- so he insisted his TV characters be childless. When the creators of his 1970s CBS classic, “The Bob Newhart Show,� eventually presented him with a script in which his on-screen wife, Emily (Suzanne Pleshette), gets pregnant, he chuckled and asked, “Who are you going to get to play Bob?�

More than four decades of deadpan wit have earned New- hart the Mark Twain Prize, awarded Tuesday night by the Kennedy Center in Washington in an all-star comedy concert. The annual award was originated in 1998 to honor those who create humor from their uniquely American experiences.

Newhart, the former bookkeeper who scored a hit in 1960 with his debut comedy album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,� later starred in several TV series and is still going strong as a stand-up.

The Kennedy Center’s tribute will air Nov. 13 on PBS, but the cable network TV Land offers its own Newhart salute tonight: A marathon from 8 p.m. to midnight featuring eight of the ‘70s sitcom’s best episodes.

As tonight’s episodes remind us, Newhart’s character, a Chicago psychologist, never quite made any breakthroughs with his therapy group, including the smug Elliot Carlin (Jack Riley), the henpecked Mr. Peterson (John Fiedler) and the lonely Mrs. Bakerman (Florida Friebus). But for six years, it was group therapy for America.