Carl Reiner’s One Simple Question to Dick Van Dyke Show Writers Changed the Way Sitcoms Were Written

Few people have left an imprint on the way television shows are produced in the way Carl Reiner did.

In the first episode of NBC News Studio’s My Generation — a look back at the news stories and pop culture moments that changed life for Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Gen Z — TV writers reflect on Reiner’s technique that brought success to 1960s’ favorite The Dick Van Dyke Show.

“It was kind of a breakthrough,” notes Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond. “Why did it ring so true? Maybe it’s because Carl Reiner’s whole modus operandi was he would say to his writers, every week, ‘What happened at your house this week?’ ”

The simple question would spark storytelling and conversation among the writers that made for some of the most relatable episodes of TV of all time.

The technique was so successful that James L. Brooks and Allan Burns adopted it when working on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, four years after the conclusion of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

“Jim and Allan called me in. Before we started talking about the episode, I was telling them about something that had happened to me the week before,” recalls Treva Silverman, who was the first female writer hired for The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

“There was a FedEx guy or some package guy who came and he called me ma’am. But I’m 30 years old, why is this person calling me ma’am? And so Allan said, ‘That’s an episode.’ ”

The September 1970 episode, called “Today I Am a Ma’am,” ended up as the second episode of the first season.

Reiner spoke of his comedic writing process in 1977 in Carl Reiner: An American Film Institute Seminar on His Work, saying, “You have to imagine yourself as not somebody very special but somebody very ordinary. If you imagine yourself as somebody really normal and if it makes you laugh, it’s going to make everybody laugh.”

Reiner died in 2020 at the age of 98.

Learn more about what moments defined each generation by watching My Generation on MSNBC.