Revisiting "That's My Boy??" on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" Fifty years ago Wednesday, Rob Petrie opened the front door of his home in New Rochelle, N.Y., and admitted two visitors. Their arrival collapsed a studio audience in laughter and, amid the watershed year of 1963, perhaps nudged the needle of social change toward integration and inclusiveness. The moment was the climactic scene of the season-opening episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," one of the most popular series on television that year. It's worth revisiting as a then-and-now study in how television effects transformation. Today TV seems to push various envelopes with a vengeance, often clumsily so, trying for shock value in a world that is increasingly hard to shock. You have to admire the bravery and the unwillingness to tolerate any barrier, whether it be the one against gay characters or characters with disabilities or unsettling subjects like rape and child abuse. But you also sometimes are left mourning the lack of subtlety and art. A half-century ago television was generally not nearly as brave or inclusive. The 1950s, with the medium still experimenting, had seen some ambitious programs like the series "Playhouse 90," but by the early 1960s, especially on the sitcom side, things had become pretty tame. The audience was not expecting to be jostled out of its comfort zone, and on Sept. 25, 1963, that gave "The Dick Van Dyke Show" the opportunity to be slyly, hilariously subversive in its Season 3 premiere. The episode is "That's My Boy??" and it begins with a dinner party at which Rob and Laura Petrie - Mr. Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore - are hosting a few friends. Rob is goaded into telling the story of the time he became convinced that he and Laura had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. The episode flashes back to that time, with Mr. Van Dyke - later to win an Emmy for his work that season - giving a riotous performance as a flustered new father stringing together anecdotal evidence to reach the wrong conclusion. Another couple, the Peterses, had also welcomed a baby that day in a nearby room in the same hospital, and misdelivered flowers and such convince Rob that he and Laura had returned home with the Peters baby rather than their own. The episode (the writing credits went to Bill Persky and Sam Denoff) builds perfectly to a sight-gag punch line when Rob opens the door and the visiting Peterses walk in. They're black. The show was filmed in front of an audience, and the crowd's reaction left Greg Morris, who played Mr. Peters, unable to keep a straight face. It's difficult today to appreciate the jolt this expertly rendered joke must have sent through white America. If the March on Washington a month earlier had put race on top of the national agenda, "That's My Boy??" perhaps gently inserted it into the living rooms of suburbia. The Petries" New Rochelle had essentially been an all-white world for its first two seasons. Now here was a new idea: middle-class blacks, having a baby just a few hospital rooms away from America's most prominent and whitest sitcom couple. Ms. Moore, in an interview last year, remembered that some of the cast members were nervous about the episode and how the studio audience would react. Carl Reiner, who created "The Dick Van Dyke Show," was more concerned with the guardians of taste who policed his scripts. "They were worried that it might be racist, that black people would be upset," he said in a telephone interview. That was an unusual thing for them to be worried about. He himself had no trepidation. "I was so happy with this script I couldn't wait to get it on," he said. I knew it was something very, very special. So white was the Petries" world that the moment when the Peterses walk through the door was a comic payoff that had been building not only for the whole episode but also for the life of the series. The most subversive bit in "That's My Boy??," though, is sometimes forgotten. It occurs after the flashback, when Rob tells his dinner guests that, now that the boys who were babies in his story are in school together, the Peterses" child earns straight A's while his son, Ritchie, is mediocrity incarnate. "I still think we got the wrong kid," Rob says. For Mr. Reiner, that gag was the real victory. "I was very proud that in the tag I got that little dig in that their kid was in the top of the class and Ritchie was in the bottom," he said. Perhaps it's piling a lot onto one episode of a mild-mannered sitcom to say that it helped change attitudes about race, but this was a time when television altered the landscape with small steps rather than big, brash statements. That impact wasn't always beneficial, of course. "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was, in the fall of 1963, the No. 3 show in the country. At the top was "The Beverly Hillbillies," whose backwoods stereotypes about "poor mountaineers" (to invoke its theme song) are still with us. But it's worth noting that doors would soon begin opening. In three years, Mr. Morris (who died in 1996) would become one of the first black actors in a major role on TV when he was cast as Barney Collier, the electronics expert, on "Mission: Impossible." The breakthroughs of Bill Cosby on "I Spy" and Ivan Dixon on "Hogan's Heroes" preceded his by a year. Television shows would eventually grow more willing to shake things up with bold strokes like Sammy Davis Jr."s kiss of Archie Bunker in 1972 and Murphy Brown's single-woman pregnancy in 1991. Today almost anything goes, often replacing the slyness of "That's My Boy??" with a sort of desperation. On Wednesday night's series premiere of the ABC comedy "Back in the Game," for instance, a young boy kisses another young boy on the mouth, with only the flimsiest of excuses. Shocking? Maybe a little. But artful?