Cynical Cinema

          When watching The Odd Couple, it strikes me that Tony Randall’s character, Felix (the tidy one), suffers from some kind of debilitating personality disorder.  Jack Klugman’s character Oscar (the messy one) is just sloppy and crass.  But Felix is desperately in need of a psychiatrist.  He’s the kind of guy you now see on Dr. Phil or Oprah, crying about how his family left him because of his germophobia and his obsessive compulsive antics.  And then Dr. Phil would send him to some boot camp for weirdos where he would have to lick a garbage can lid and bathe in maggots and miraculously emerge a cured man.  In the show, however, his life with his slovenly roommate Oscar is his only exposure to squalor, and he’s NEVER going to get better that way! 

          The premise of the show is that Oscar is a slob, and Felix is a neat-freak and a snobby sissy, a prototypical Niles Crane.  This was enough of a comedic premise to carry Neil Simon’s stage play for two hours in 1965.  It was enough to hold up the terrific Walter Matthau - Jack Lemmon movie in 1968 for an hour and forty-six minutes.  And apparently, it was enough to sustain the TV series for six seasons, beginning in 1970.  Even after the series was over, the premise lived on, as though spurred by some kind of never-ending desire the world over for sequels.  But by then, the idea had run its course.  In 1982, there was a “New Odd Couple” show that aired on ABC for less than four months.  Apparently, at the time, the humour from the Odd Couple concept had been completely used up, because this new show, in the 13 episodes it aired, actually used EIGHT scripts recycled from the show in the 70s. 

          Then there was that disastrous Odd Couple II, a truly dreadful 1998 sequel to the original movie, thirty years later, that saw Matthau and Lemmon in their last role together.  Apparently, whatever I’m-neat-and-you’re-sloppy jokes hadn’t been used up in the movie and the original TV series had been used up to make Grumpy Old Men.  Anyway, that doesn’t matter, because I’m talking about the DVD box set of Season Four of the Odd Couple here, and the joke well had not yet run dry.  It comes out tomorrow, June 10th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it’s still funny.  Klugman and Randall are terrific together, they have great chemistry, and the guest stars respond easily to the timing of the lead actors.  But the episodes are interchangeable, each one follows the exact same story arc as the last, and it really is one of the early cookie-cutter TV comedies.  You see, Felix is uptight and obnoxious, and we laugh at him.  The end.  

          The best episode on Season Four of The Odd Couple is the one with Bobby Riggs, the tennis star.  Riggs was very famous at the time (1973) as a chauvinist, who challenged female tennis players to games.  His match against Billie Jean King in 1973 is still one of the most famous tennis matches of all time.  (For those of you who are not aware of the match, Riggs lost to King in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.)  Riggs was also famous as a hustler and a gambler, and when he shows up in The Odd Couple, he plays himself as…a hustler, a gambler, and a chauvinist.  And he sucks in Oscar and Felix in the best episode of the season.  Other guest stars this season include Dick Clark, Jaye P. Morgan, Hugh Hefner and Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 3:05 am and is filed under Garry Marshall, 1973, Penny Marshall, Tony Randall, TV series, Jack Klugman, Comedy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.