Television stardom requires an unquantifiable talent unique to this medium: the ability to remain intriguing and likable to a massive audience week after week, month after month, year after year. Most often, it's more a matter of personality -- or rather, the persona a star projects -- than it is craft or skill. For example, I doubt Robert Urich would take great offense if I said he's not the greatest actor in the world. But here's a man who has remained one of the most welcome faces on our TV screens for more than a quarter of a century, in series successful, like Vega$ (1978-81) and Spenser: For Hire (1985-88), and short-lived (everything from 1973's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to 1993's It Had to Be You).
Dick Van Dyke, who's starred in nothing less than one of the fundaments of television history (you know which show I mean) but also six seasons of Diagnosis Murder, says: ''Once you've been around long enough on TV, you become part of the furniture. You're just expected to be there, and I guess it's kind of comfortable to have somebody who's been around for a long time. It's something that's peculiar to television and not to movies.''
Using this, what might be called the Van Dyke Principle (VDP), helps to explain such phenomena as Tony Danza, Bill Cosby, James Garner, the Michaels Landon and J. Fox, and the sole woman with as consistent a multi-series background, Heather Locklear. None of these beloved TV actors have been able to parlay TV charisma into a substantial feature-film career (although Fox didn't get enough credit for Brian De Palma's Casualties of War, nor Garner for his low-key mastery in The Americanization of Emily and Victor/Victoria). These folks radiate a kind of comfy, slow-burning charisma: TV personality as incense.
Garner and Landon are perhaps the classic examples of enduring figures who were able to adapt to both their own aging and the medium's. Garner's slick charm was as apt for Maverick's young, savvy cardsharp as for The Rockford Files' jaded, middle-aged gumshoe. Landon hit the screen galloping, as genial Little Joe on Bonanza. But where his TV dad Lorne Greene slipped into self-parody on Battlestar Galactica and a few other unremarkable shows, Landon made a shrewd modification of his image. He remained in a rural setting but became a dad himself, adapting the Laura Ingalls Wilder books into Little House on the Prairie. The transition -- from eager young adult to firm father figure -- was entirely believable, and not just because of Landon's streak of premature gray.
When it comes to TV comedians, Bob Newhart is the foremost exponent of VDP; he has survived and flourished more than any other performer. This is the reward of the low-key: Where gut busters ranging from Sid Caesar to Robin Williams' Mork flared and flamed out in weekly TV showcases, Newhart's self-described ''buttoned-down'' style was a steady, comforting audience-pleaser that has seen him through a succession of satisfying sitcoms. Like so many of TV's most enduring performers, Newhart is a reactor, not a catalyst; a straight man, not a tummler. As befits Marshall McLuhan's ''cool medium'' theory, long-lasting TV actors cannot be hotheads; put Sean Penn in a sitcom and he wouldn't last a month. But put Newhart in a half-hour comedy version of Dead Man Walking and you've got yourself a show. I'd watch Bob sit and stew in his cell every week.
