‘The Odd Couple’ Turns 50: Here’s What Happened to Oscar and Felix Before, During and After the Show

It Started with Neil Simon

You can’t put too fine a point on this fact: without Neil Simon, you don’t have The Odd Couple. Born July 4, 1927, in the Bronx, New York, Neil got his start writing scripts for early television like Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Phil Silvers Show in the 1950s, but with the new decade, he began writing Broadway plays. The first was 1961’s Come Blow Your Horn, which lasted 678 performances, and was followed by the considerably more successful Barefoot in the Park in 1963, and, in turn, The Odd Couple two years later. Now Neil has written a lot of plays and screenplays over the years, many of which have been extremely successful, but none of them have had the impact or the longevity of concept as The Odd Couple. Paramount Pictures certainly realized it, which is why the studio bought the film rights based on his premise.

As to the original concept, Neil explained in an exclusive interview, “I’m never aware of the genesis of a play. Sometimes they’re inspired by real life incidents in my life or somebody else’s life, which was the case with The Odd Couple. It actually happened to my brother and a friend of his who were living together and going through all that. I witnessed it and said, ‘That’s a great idea for a play.'”

As Neil observed what his brother Danny and his roommate, Roy Gerber, were going through, he suggested that Danny turn it into a play. Danny tried, but ultimately gave up on it after about 10 or 15 pages. Neil asked him for permission to take a crack at it and was given Danny’s blessing (though Neil insisted on making a financial arrangement with him should something happen with it). In a PBS salute to Neil, Danny was interviewed and he explained, “I thought there was an idea for a play about a divorced man from the time he breaks up with his wife until he finds his life again, but I couldn’t think of a good conflict. Then it struck me like lightning: the same problems that two divorced roommates had with their wives, they would have with each other.”

In that same special, Roy Gerber noted that, “Danny used to call me in the office, like a wife, and was serious — this wasn’t a joke or a bit — he’d say, ‘Are you coming home tonight?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know what time I’m going to be home. Leave me alone. I don’t know. I don’t even report to my mother the way you want me to report.’”

With the version that Neil ended up writing, Danny said, “What he did with the play was far more than I ever could, because I wouldn’t have exposed myself that way.”

In the pages of his biography, Memoirs, Neil explained that the first thing he did was flesh out the characters inspired by Danny and Roy, coming up with many more contrasts between them than what actually existed in real life. “I made Danny a finicky and compulsive demander of neatness and order, which Danny was not,” he writes, “and I made Roy sloppy, disorganized, and grouchy, none of those characteristics really fitting Roy Gerber’s true nature. Roy and Danny actually liked each other very much, and aside from Danny’s need to have Roy and friends come to dinner on time, they got on pretty well. As a result of my changes, however, the play’s characters now found it was not only difficult to live with each other on a day-to-day basis — as it is for almost all of us — but that they were complete opposites, unable to be together under any circumstances.”

Neil and Mike Nichols, who was brought aboard to direct the first play, met with and hired Art Carney from The Honeymooners to play Felix. Writes Neil, “Art was a vastly underrated actor/comedian who was generally overshadowed by the mammoth Jackie Gleason. Not in my book. I preferred Carney’s nuances and deftly understated characters to Gleason’s, ‘Watch out, pal, I’m taking the stage’ brand of comedy.'”

Next approached was Walter Matthau, who reflected in the production notes for The Odd Couple II that he first met Neil, who was a fledgling playwright at the time, at a party in New York. “He said to me, ‘My name is Neil Simon and I’m writing a play for you.’ I said, ‘How many acts do you have?’ He said there were three acts. I said, ‘When you have two acts finished, would you send them to me?’ And he said yes. I was doing a picture in Hollywood when I got the first two acts of The Odd Couple. I turned to my wife and I said, ‘Well, I don’t care what the third act is like. This play will run 10 years. This is hilarious.'”

 One problem, however: “He wanted to play Felix,” noted Neil. “It would have been the blunder heard ’round Shubert Alley. I called Matthau and asked why he wanted to play Felix when he would not only be perfect as Oscar, but that he was Oscar. Walter replied, ‘I know. It’s too easy. I could phone Oscar in. But to play Felix, that would be acting.’ I said, ‘Walter, do me a favor. Act in someone else’s play. Do Oscar in mine.'”

Years later, Walter appeared on Jay Leno’s version of The Tonight Show, and admitted, “I never really wanted to play [Felix], I just said it to create an argument. I love to create arguments. That thrills me. That enthuses me. That pumps me up.” Nonetheless, he said, there were similarities between him and Felix: “I put coasters under cups and glasses. And when I cook, I like to cook a meatloaf and like my guests to be on time so the meatloaf is not overdone.”

Points out Geoffrey Mark, “Although Walter Matthau had had a long career before The Odd Couple, it is the one project that propelled Mr. Matthau from being a well thought of second banana character — both the Broadway and film versions propelled him into being the huge star we remember him to be. It’s also the last great Broadway appearance of Art Carney. I don’t know how many Felix Ungers I’ve seen, but no one did it better than Art Carney. And to watch a man play someone so hyper-neurotic when in real life he was so hyper-neurotic, and having a nervous breakdown, is amazing and sad. He took all of his neuroticism and brought it on that stage through Neil Simon’s words.

“Now Mr. Carney’s troubles were not exactly the same as Mr. Unger’s,” he continues, “but he was able to channel the energy of one into the other and that also propelled Mr. Carney, who had tremendous success over a long career from being a television star into a full blown media star and the films and other things that followed wouldn’t have happened without The Odd Couple.”

The Odd Couple ran on Broadway for 964 performances, only a portion of which saw Art Carney as Felix, who had to leave. He was replaced by Eddie Bracken.

‘The Odd Couple’ Heads to the Big Screen

The movie version of The Odd Couple arrived in theaters three years after its Broadway debut. Walter was brought back as Oscar (after insisting on getting a $300,000 payday from Paramount), but Art Carney was not asked to reprise the role of Felix. Instead, Jack Lemmon (winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1956’s Mister Roberts) — who said he would only sign if Walter was involved — came aboard as the fastidious Mr. Ungar. The duo had previously worked together in 1966’s The Fortune Cookie.

Jack, being quoted by author Joe Baltake in his book The Films of Jack Lemmon, explained, “I’ve never enjoyed working with any actor more than Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple. We have a great rapport. We’re very close friends, and it’s exciting to work with him. If in the middle of a scene someone gets an idea, there’s no hesitation, we just do it. The Odd Couple was a very lucky picture for me.”

In the pages of Matthau: A Life, actress Carole Shelley, who played one-half of Oscar and Felix’s neighbors, the Pigeon Sisters, comments, “I think Jack and Walter had an incredible working relationship. They made it very safe for each other to be dangerous. [For example], in one scene Walter breaks down; he’s really crying like a kid. It could have been a big man with a funny face pretending to cry. And it isn’t. It’s a big, strong, sloppy man crying. That’s quite dangerous.”

 In the same book, Jack added, “Chemistry is just something that you have, like the color of our hair. It’s just when the two of you are on the same wavelength. I can tell where Walter is going with something before he gets there in a scene.”

For Neil, the film version of The Odd Couple was the perfect experience, his screenplay utilizing all the dialogue from his play, but, whereas the stage show took place entirely in Oscar’s apartment, the film opened things up a bit. As he writes in his autobiography, “I made minor adjustments in the dialogue so that playing a scene on Riverside Drive near Grant’s Tomb seemed perfectly natural. When Jack Lemmon did his moose calls to clear up his sinus problems, it was far funnier taking place in a luncheonette, because it provided an opportunity for all the customers to look curiously at Jack each time his horn blew again. It made Walter Matthau equally funnier, because every time Jack honked, Walter half-smiled and looked away, pretending he didn’t really know this man he was sitting with, and why was he doing those weird duck imitations?”

As to the casting of Jack Lemmon as Felix, he added, “He was a perfect match for Walter, because, oddly enough, the so-called straight man in the piece must be even more convincing than the so-called funny one. Jack is the one we have to believe and Walter is, in a sense, the Greek chorus. Whatever he says about Jack’s (Felix’s) idiosyncrasies really mirrors what we ourselves feel about him. To hear an actor say exactly what we’ve just been thinking is very funny to an audience. And of course, nobody says it as funny as Walter.”

And for the audience of 1968, there was little funnier than The Odd Couple, the film becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of that year, pulling in $44.5 million (which was huge back then), its success inspiring the The Odd Couple TV series, which, of course, would make Oscar and Felix even bigger stars than they already were.

Getting ‘Odd’ on the Small Screen

When Paramount decided to turn The Odd Couple into a television series, they turned to writer/producers Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson. “Paramount called us in and asked us if we wanted to do it,” Garry said in an exclusive interview, “and we were delighted. I loved all of Neil Simon’s work. He was one of my idols — still is — and they said, ‘Write a script.’ So we wrote a script that we thought captured the essence of the play. They actually thought it was a script taken from Simon and said, ‘This is the play,’ and we said, ‘No, it’s not the play. It’s our play.”

Jerry added, “Garry and I had written probably a hundred TV scripts together, and I think we agreed that the pilot of The Odd Couple was the best, probably because Neil Simon supplied such great characters.”

According to Garry, an early struggle with the network (ABC) was over the casting of the lead characters. Originally, the producing duo wanted Art Carney as Felix and Martin Balsam as Oscar. “Luckily for us,” said Garry, “we couldn’t get them. Then Tony Randall and Jack Klugman occurred to us, and we knew it would be magic. Then ABC wanted Tony Randall and Mickey Rooney, which we thought was a little far-fetched for what we needed. I wanted Jack Klugman and the network didn’t really know who he was. I had seen Jack in Gypsy, and I figured if he could stand there with Ethel Merman, he could be with anybody. It surprised me that by the end of the play I really liked him. He did one hell of a job, and this was an actor who had no part to play, but he was great. I like a man who stands there and doesn’t carry on, which he was so wonderful at on The Odd Couple.”

Points out Geoffrey, “What’s little known is that Jack Carter was in serious consideration to play Oscar Madison. He was less expensive than Jack Klugman. He was not the horse gambler that Klugman was and they thought he’d be perhaps more reliable, but Jack was more reliable emotionally. Jack Carter was a hothead, and I say this with love, because we were very close friends, but he would lose his temper and tell people off and it lost him a lot of work. So they eliminated Jack Carter and gave the part to Jack Klugman.”

The network was eventually convinced, which meant that they would have Klugman and Randall, but then Garry had to convince his actors, which wasn’t such an easy thing to do — until they recognized that their potential co-star was guaranteeing it would be a class production. And from there the scripts seemed to flow fairly easily. “The characters that Neil wrote were so perfect,” Garry detailed, “that it wasn’t difficult to expand on them. There was, however, a tendency at the time to do more women stories, but the show wasn’t women. It was about them; their friendship. We finally convinced the network of that, and they left us alone. We worked very hard on the show, late hours, to maintain a certain level of quality. Friends we had went home early from other shows. We were there forever. But when we finally shot them, it was well worth it. A lot of them have held up very well. We did 114 episodes and I would say three or four were disappointing. The others I thought we gave our best shot.”

Working With the Leads Wasn’t Always Easy

It should be noted that just because they were able to secure Tony and Jack, it didn’t mean that things were always easy. Said Jerry Belson, “Tony and Jack were rough. They said they loved our script, we were getting ready to shoot it, and on the first day of production they walked in and said, ‘We’re not shooting this piece of crap,’ and walked out again. But then we found out that was the way Tony and Jack worked. Every week was a panic. We did a lot of changes on the show in terms of rewrites, but that’s because Tony and Jack are both perfectionists and really wanted to get it right.”

ABC Feared Oscar and Felix Would Be Perceived As Gay

The series would open with a narration that begins, “On November 13th, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. This request came from his wife…” The reason it was there, is that the network thought these two middle-aged men living together would be perceived by the audience as being gay (at a time when television didn’t have regular gay characters). Sighs Garry Marshall, “They were always sending memos like that. We kept sending them special shots from the set of Tony and Jack hugging, just to make them crazy. It was based on some research they did in some little town in Michigan.”

Neil Simon Hated the TV Show … At First

Garry Marshall explains, "Neil Simon had gotten a bad deal from Paramount financially when he sold them the film rights, and didn’t want it to be a series. He wouldn't talk to us and he tried to sue the studio. It broke my heart, because my idol didn't like what I was doing." For his part, Neil adds, "The Odd Couple took me a while to watch, because I thought, 'Oh, God, they’ve stolen my baby.' But then people began telling me how good it was. I still never watched it until I caught it in New Mexico and actually found myself laughing."

Bringing in a Live Studio Audience Changed Everything

In the first season, The Odd Couple was filmed with one camera, like a movie or a drama, with a traditional laugh track added in later. With the exception of Jerry Belson (who thought they would be doing a serious look at divorce, but realized later that wasn’t right for the show), everyone wanted a live studio audience. Says Garry Marshall, "I had wanted three-cameras [and shot in front of an audience like a play] all along, but I didn’t have the power to do anything about it. Tony and Jack had the clout, so they managed to pull it off. The shows just got better after that." Adds Jack Klugman, "We spent three days rehearsing the show. We sat around a table the first day. We tore the script apart. We took out all the jokes and put in character. The only reason we leave in any jokes is for the rotten canned laughter. I hated it. I watch the shows at home, I see Oscar come in and he says, 'Hi,' and there is the laughter. 'Hey,' I think, 'what the hell did I do?' I hate it; it insults the audience."

According to Geoffrey, “Tony Randall did not like the production values of the show or the one-camera approach. He felt Neil Simon needed an audience’s response and here you’ve got two stage-trained, Broadway actors week after week. It’s not like making a film. He didn’t want The Odd Couple to be put in the same category as children’s entertainment like The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family. He wanted it to be a serious contender as a sitcom. He wanted it to be adult, funny, witty and the real laughter of the audience.”

Ed Robertson believes that adding to all of that was the difference between the stage Felix and the one Tony Randall played. “Felix is a little more morose in the play than he is in the show,” he says. “But Felix is not as nuts on stage as in the TV show, but you understand why he is — you’ve got to come up with 25 stories a year. Building the television character, you take certain traits and exaggerate them for effect. You may bring a little more of the personality or idiosyncrasies or the likes or dislikes of the actor playing them. Television comedy is a heightened sense of reality and of ridiculousness. One of the things that made the show so great is that both Randall and Klugman committed to whatever they asked them to do. No matter how ridiculous it may make their characters seem. That’s why the show, even the ridiculous moments, make you laugh out loud.”

Oscar’s Messy Bedroom Had a Bigger Meaning Behind It

One of the secret weapons of the show was anytime the action moved into Oscar’s bedroom, which was nothing short of a disaster. Explains Jerry Belson, "If you think about The Odd Couple, you’ve got neat and sloppy. In the play it worked fine, because Felix moved in, but in the series, it was going to be for five years. How do you show the sloppy part when Felix would have cleaned up? This was a major problem, and the answer we came up with seems so simple now. We would have Oscar have a messy room, but believe it or not that didn’t occur to anybody, especially we the creators, until much later. Otherwise, Oscar would keep messing it up, and Felix would be cleaning it up for five years, so we created this island of filth he called a bedroom."

There Was a Secret Behind Oscar’s Bedroom Was Always Getting a Big Laugh

When you go back to watch episodes of the series from season two onward, pay attention whenever things do shift into Oscar’s bedroom. You’ll probably notice an interesting response from the studio audience. Explains writer/director Frank Buxton, "We used to screen off the sets we weren’t using, so the people in the studio audience would concentrate on, say, the living room. Then, when we got ready to do a scene in the kitchen, we’d pull the screen away, move the camera in and start rolling. When we did Oscar’s bedroom, we would roll the cameras. The guys would get into position, and then we would roll away the screen as we said, 'Action!', so we started with a huge lift from the audience. There’s a big initial reaction in those scenes and that's the reason."

The Writers Often Fought with the Actors

Conflicts on The Odd Couple weren't limited to the creators of the show and the network. Explains writer/director Frank Buxton, "The creative staff was in turmoil, but a healthy turmoil. Tony and Jack were very contributory and very concerned about the result of the show. They were not always pleasant to be with, but we were in the middle of the creative process and were ending up with something really terrific. So you could take those lumps and you could dish them out, too. You could face them off and say, 'You’re wrong,' and we did. You talked to Garry Marshall, so you know how he sounds. He used to say to Tony, 'You runed it!' Tony would say, 'I runed it?' And Garry would say, 'It was a good joke and you runed it.' So we would face them, they’d face us and we’d go toe to toe. It was great. It’s better than some namby pamby guy who says, 'Give me the words, I’ll say them.'"

Adds executive producer/director Harvey Miller, "The show was just a great marriage of people, all looking for ways to make it better. And Tony and Jack were just incredible, because they could work out a lot on their feet. These guys could learn 35 pages worth of dialogue in one night."

‘A Grave for Felix’

One of the funniest episodes of the series ever produced had Felix lose the perfect cemetery plot because of Oscar — which he doesn’t realize at first, so he goes there to, uh, try it on for size. Says writer Dick Bensfield, "I think dealing with death is, strangely enough, always funny to write about, if you’re dealing with it from a humorous point of view. The fact that you approach it from that point of view just heightens it. We had fun making a little bit of sport of mortuaries and the whole death thing. I remember that particular episode, because of a joke that came from advertising going on at that particular time. When Felix was stretched out on the ground, the caretaker comes over and thinks he’s one of the $33 funerals. That came from an ad that was running: a funeral that looked like they just lay you on the ground."

ABC Wanted Guest Stars Crammed Into the Show, But Not These Guest Stars!

Yet another battle between the creators of the show and ABC was over the idea of guest stars. ABC insisted that high profile names would boost the ratings, while Garry Marshall and his team could care less. "We had a lot of guest stars on," says Garry, "but only two of them were done for ratings. The first was Howard Cosell, and the second was Bobby Riggs at the height of their popularity. ABC wanted us to throw in guest stars, but we would throw in guest stars that wouldn't boost the ratings, like opera singers and ballet dancers, which got them crazy."

One Guest Star Triggered An Unnerving Response From the Studio Audience

Season three’s "Felix’s First Commercial" guest starred Deacon Jones, who at the time was on the LA Rams. The point needs to be made that he’s black, with Harvey Miller noting, "When we introduced Deacon Jones, he got this huge round of applause and a standing ovation. His wife was in the audience, too. Deacon said, 'Hey, honey, stand up,’ and this beautiful white blonde stood up and the audience went cold. I think the audience was shipped in from the South or something."

Billie Jean King Almost Backed Out of Her Notable Guest Appearance

Shortly after Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis competition, Riggs appeared on The Odd Couple as himself, playing a friend of Oscar’s who keeps beating him in every bet — to the point where he wins Felix as a butler! The guys challenge him to a ping-pong game to win Felix’s freedom back, and to help them they call in their ace in the hole: Billie Jean King. Explains Harvey Miller, "Billie Jean King had just beaten him and I thought what a great coup it would be to get her on the show. She said yes and suddenly I was a hero. The president of ABC called me up and said, 'Wow, you’ve done it now; this is great!' Then the next day her manager calls me back and said, 'Billie Jean doesn’t want to do it.' I said, 'You don’t understand, I had the president of ABC on the phone with me about this. She has to do it or I’m out of a job.' Finally, she did do it. She was only hesitant because it wasn’t convenient, not because of Bobby. It was their first public appearance together after she’d beaten him."

Some Filming Was Done On Location in New York

The Odd Couple was shot in front of a studio audience on the Paramount lot in California, but throughout each season, there seemed to be a lot of New York as well. Notes Garry Marshall, "The Odd Couple was one of the forerunners in mixing one camera with three cameras. Nobody else knew quite how to do it. Normally you have to have all your scripts so you know what to do. We just sort of winged it. We went at the beginning the season, shot all the New York stuff and guessed — or hoped — it could be spread out over the 22 scripts that hadn’t been written yet."

Jack and Tony Were Always Making Each Other Laugh

During the original run of The Odd Couple, the game show Let’s Make a Deal was a huge success. Monty Hall served as host with people dressing up in wild costumes in the hopes he would pick them with the possibility of winning prizes. In this third season episode, Oscar and Felix come in dressed as a horse (Felix the front, Oscar the back), hoping to win a mattress that Oscar destroyed while sleeping with a cigar. It also really captured the nature of the friendship between Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. Says Frank Buxton, "I remember Tony and Jack cracking up in the costume, and you can see them cracking up on film. It was probably when Tony said to Jack, 'Are you kidding? Without me we wouldn’t be in this swell horse outfit.' And Klugman had to hide, because he’s cracking up. These guys made each other laugh all the time. They really enjoyed each other, and when they were funny, they knew it. They were professionals, so they never laughed on screen, but every now and then one or the other would get to them and they would just roar."

After Five Seasons Everyone Was Ready to Move On

By the time The Odd Couple reached its fifth season, everyone pretty much knew things would be coming to an end. The ratings were never huge (though when the show hit reruns in syndication it became a blockbuster), and, creatively, things were getting more challenging. Says executive producer Mark Rothman, "It was not an easy show to do every week, because you constantly had to have them on opposite sides of an issue and they had to constantly be in conflict. I just remember the last batch of shows not being our strongest. We relied more and more on guest stars during the last season, because it was a last-ditch effort to try to save it." Adds Garry Marshall, "I think after five years, the writers were moving on and Tony and Jack didn’t want to work with new writers. Jack was ready to move on to Quincy, although Tony, I think, would have stayed. We had a lot of writers who went on to many different things. All of us did."

Two Endings Were Shot For the Final Episode

The last episode to air (though not the last one shot) had Felix and his ex-wife Gloria remarrying, much to Oscar’s joy. Ending a sitcom story wise was pretty unusual back then, though it’s the norm these days. Says writer Larry Rhine, “There were originally two endings to that episode. In one, in case the series didn’t get picked up, Felix remarried. And in case the series did get picked up, they had him remain unmarried, because he was being such a pain in the ass about the catering, the flowers and that sort of thing at the wedding, that Gloria left him before the ceremony was completed.” Garry Marshall adds, “We wanted to do a show that ended it, and the network didn’t want us to do that. They said, ‘Make the audience believe it will be on next week. You don’t want people to think it’s over.’ We said, ‘No, we’re ending it.'”

But that certainly wasn’t the end for The Odd Couple. Shortly after the show concluded its network run, it went into syndicated reruns on local stations and became a pop culture sensation, airing in New York, for instance, six times a day.

‘The New Odd Couple’

In 1982 ABC decided to launch a new version of the show, with Demond Wilson of Sanford and Son as Oscar and Ron Glass of Barney Miller as Felix. While the show had great potential, it was irreparably harmed by the insistence that many of the episodes use scripts from the original series, despite the fact they were so well known. The show was gone in 18 episodes. Suggests Geoffrey, “Matthau, Carney, Lemmon, Klugman and Randall played the parts, understood the intention of the author and gave their characters a slightly different backstory so that everything they said was believable and hysterically funny. The people who did it on television afterwards were playing a sitcom. They said the words and made the movements, but they weren’t giving the intention of the original author and finding the humor in the characters. They were saying funny things in a sitcom and waiting for the audience to laugh rather than being the characters. It’s just not the same. Casting is huge in sitcoms. Most of the people I’ve met through the years say that the casting of a sitcom is even more important than the premise, because you’ve got to have actors with good chemistry together who are talented and can make almost any situation funny and believable.”

Sighed Garry, who contractually had his name on the show, “It was somebody’s bright idea that this would be an easy show to do. They still had all of the old scripts and they wanted to redo them, and then thought to cast the show black. It didn’t really work. I mean, why rewrite the scripts? That wasn’t the right way to do it. They should have written a completely new version and not relied on the old scripts. The actors were fine and gave it their best shot, and although my name was on it, I couldn’t work on the show, because I didn’t agree with what was going on. It was just another case of greed that didn’t work.”

Additional Pairings

It didn’t, but that certainly didn’t curb interest in The Odd Couple. In 1985, Neil Simon took what seems like a somewhat radical step of rewriting the original version of the play into one with female leads. Oscar became Olive with Felix becoming Florence — initially cast with Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers as the respective leads. It began previews on Broadway on June 4, 1985, opened on the 11^th and closed February 23, 1986 after 295 performances. Like the original, it’s continued to be performed all around the world. In 1993 Jack Klugman and Tony Randall reprised their roles in the 1993 TV movie The Odd Couple: Together Again, which was poorly received, and three years later they enjoyed a three-month run at London’s Theatre Royal in a staged version of the original. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon brought their characters back to the big screen in 1998’s The Odd Couple II and, in 2005, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick respectively played Oscar and Felix in a Broadway revival of the original show.

Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon Get ‘Odd’

In 2015, CBS aired the first of three seasons of a new version of The Odd Couple, featuring Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon as Oscar and Felix. For executive producer/showrunner Bob Daily, it felt like a natural as, in an exclusive interview, he pointed to a history of TV sitcoms with the concept’s DNA in it. “Two And A Half Men was basically The Odd Couple with a kid,” he muses. “I worked on Frasier for years. Frasier was Felix and his dad was Oscar. The pairing of those two characters is so iconic. One of the things that’s so appealing about it, and one of the things that was fun as we broke stories, is that it’s about two guys who sort of complete each other in a weird way. They are each half of the perfect man together. And yet they will never quite master the other side, which is why you can do a series and keep it going for a long time.”

The challenge at the start was ensuring that this version was similar yet unique from those that had come before, which was not easily achieved. Thomas Lennon describes season one as finding its footing, while what followed was made up of more “powerhouse, genuinely hilarious” episodes. “The first season, starting up, was complicated,” he reflects. “We shot the pilot a couple of times, we kept tweaking things and finding our footing as we discovered what worked.”

Part of the tweaking came in adjusting the format itself by expanding the stories beyond Oscar and Felix. While the ’70s show certainly had supporting characters, this take has created much more of a full ensemble. “We could not, nor would you want to, change Oscar and Felix,” says Daily, “but changing the people around them was a way to make it more contemporary. And when people like Wendell Pierce, Lindsay Sloane and Nicole Brown became available, we were able to tailor those parts to them. We tried to give it much more of the feeling of an ensemble with Oscar and Felix being a little greater among equals.”

One of the show’s strengths was the involvement of Garry Marshall as creative consultant, which proved to be much more than a contractual position. “My only concern about Garry coming in was wondering if he would be saying things like, ‘That’s not how we did it in the old version,'” Daily says. “But he has completely given us free reign to reinvent the show, while suggesting things. He’s the one who said he felt the best episodes when he was doing it was when Oscar taught Felix something or vice-versa. That idea immediately gave rise to an episode where it establishes Felix as a lifelong New Yorker who, like many lifelong New Yorkers, never learned how to drive. But now that he’s dating Emily and she’s always driving, he wants to learn how, so Oscar has to teach Felix how to drive.”

As Thomas Lennon explains, “There was a moment when I felt Garry embraced me in the role of Felix. He went from someone who admits he had no idea who I was when I showed up the first day (he thought I was the craft service guy) to coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re killing it.’ That was pretty amazing. It was then that I started to feel the right to play this character.”

In the End, There’s Klugman and Randall

As noted throughout, The Odd Couple has had an extensive history with so many actors bringing Oscar and Felix to life, but through all of these years, it is undoubtedly Jack Klugman and Tony Randall that have made the greatest impression. And one of the most beautiful things that came out of their pairing took place in the final decade or so of Jack Klugman’s life when he was battling throat cancer. Tony Randall was there for him every step of the way, helping him to fight back and keeping him in the acting game. Always close, their friendship without question deepened.

“I honestly don’t know how well they knew each other in the beginning,” says Geoffrey. “Before The Odd Couple they had both done tons of live television in New York and they had to have come across one another in the fifties. They’d both done film and Broadway and obviously by working together for five years, they developed a real bond. They were both menches. They were both men of good character who found that in one another. And their friendship grew out of that. It’s why we were able to see it on the show and why we weren’t surprised when these two men actually took care of each other in old age.”