The Dick Van Dyke Show “Never Bathe on Saturday” (March 31, 1965)

Never was this series’ frank, hip attitude toward sex more evident than in this episode that sent the Petries on a second honeymoon.  Chaos descends when Laura, en flagrante and awaiting her husband’s seduction, gets her toe stuck in the bathtub.  Carl Reiner’s script makes terrific use of both Mary Tyler Moore’s quavery delivery (“I was playing with a drip”), all the funnier for being delivered from off-screen, and Van Dyke’s impeccable slapstick (trying to shoulder down the locked bathroom door), but it’s also getting at something a little deeper, the male possessiveness that comes to the surface when Rob Petrie is faced with the possibility of strangers seeing his wife naked.  As in “Turkeys Away,” the comedy turns on what’s left to the imagination, only here it’s nudity instead of carnage.  At a time when the Petries couldn’t be shown occupying the same bed, Reiner had his audience contemplating the mental image of his leading lady’s nude form for the better part of this half-hour.