By Stan Friedman

As Conan O’Brien recently observed, kids aren’t watching TV, “they’re on YouTube watching a cat on the toilet.” It was the same in 1975, only instead of surfing the Internet, kids were out dancing The Hustle and committing other grievous acts of disco. This left parents free on Saturdays to watch a golden, if unimaginatively titled, trio of CBS comedies: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show” and, sandwiched between them, “The Bob Newhart Show,” season four of which has just been released on DVD. While it is the lesser of the three franchisees, corny to a fault and square as a napkin, Newhart still serves as a master class in the art of comic timing and the joys of a running gag. It was also an early training ground for sitcom director extraordinaire, James Burrows.

Set in an all-Caucasian Chicago, where even the Chinese food delivery guy is a burly dude in a flannel shirt, Newhart plays psychologist Bob Hartley. At work he trades barbs with his secretary (Marcia Wallace), a dentist (Peter Bonerz) and a group of classically kooky patients with symptoms ranging from fear of geese to overt meekness. At home, he plays comic foil to his dopey neighbor (Bill Daily) and strident wife, Emily (the ever-raspy Suzanne Pleshette). It’s a strange peck-on-the-cheek marriage and Emily’s passive aggressive remarks give their scenes an edge that perhaps was not as sharp back in the day.

Newhart’s best routines as a stand-up comic are his one-sided phone conversations, such as the one where he portrays the caterer for the Last Supper and gasps into the phone, “You want the tables arranged how?” So, it’s no coincidence that every episode finds Bob in at least one scene with a receiver stuck to his ear. The best of these is in a Thanksgiving show, which also happens to hold spot number nine on TV Guide’s 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. With Emily away, the men folk gather at Bob’s apartment and get drunk on Von Kruger’s Scotch (“The Scotch aged in styrofoam kegs”). Bob’s slurred attempt to order Moo Goo Gai Pan for the tipsy gang is a riot.

But unfortunately, the DVD’s bonus features include a humorless gag reel and uninteresting commentary on four of the 24 episodes. And older TV sets may explode from the over-abundance of striped and plaid pants.