'Rob, Laura' collide again on PBS show

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Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore star in D.L. Coburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Gin Game" on PBS Presents. PBS

But Rob and Laura Petrie say some nasty things when they finally reunite on TV this spring after 35 years apart. She even hauls off and hits him.

Of course, it isn't really Rob and Laura — it's Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, acting together for the first time since the '60s sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show" when they team up on PBS for the two-character play "The Gin Game," set to air on May 7.

As elderly rest-home residents who regularly wrangle over cards in D.L. Coburn's 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Van Dyke and Moore have some adult dialogue, and "I really do want to get out the warning on that," Van Dyke said.

"With the kind of stuff we're seeing in movies and television today, it's so harmless by comparison. The guy does swear like a trouper, but my God, you hear it all the time now. It's just the fact it comes from me: It seems like Mister Rogers swearing."

Moore, 66, gets in her licks, too. "Toward the end, I kind of lose my cool and control," she says, "and I let forth with a few four-letter words. And it felt so right."

So, apparently, does the climactic scene in which her character slaps his.

"We faked it from every angle you could possibly fake it," Van Dyke says, but the director wasn't satisfied and asked Moore to really hit her co-star. "She teed off on me," he reports. "My glasses flew across the stage. I mean, what a shock. She's been waiting 40 years for that!"

Van Dyke, 77, looks younger these days. After shooting "The Gin Game," he shaved the white mustache so familiar from "Diagnosis Murder." "The other morning I was carefully trimming the mustache, and I said, 'I don't need this anymore. Why am I wearing this thing?' "

"I'm so glad," Moore said. "He has a face that should be seen."

PBS stations that prefer a sanitized version of the show have been given the option of airing a "clean" version of "The Gin Game." In a bow to any skittish affiliates, PBS plans to provide alternate editions of the production: original, as well as one that deletes some of the swear words uttered by Van Dyke.

At Hawai'i public television affiliate KHET, Communications Director Kay Kasamoto said the station's programmer hadn't yet viewed the program, and so had not determined which version would air.

Van Dyke, for one, objects to the sanitizing.

But, according to PBS, giving stations a choice makes sense.

"I don't know if any of the markets will choose to air the cleaner version, or if they'll go with the original," said Mary Mazur, "PBS Hollywood Presents" executive producer. "But some markets do prefer that option."