Talk about timing. Fancast comedy correspondent Bob Hellman recently named The Odd Couple as the funniest sitcom ever. Today's NY Times included a story about the show, whose third season comes out on DVD January 22:
SELDOM, if ever, has a single comedic property gone through so many incarnations as “The Odd Couple.” It began life in 1965 as Neil Simon’s Broadway hit about the domestic discord between two divorced yet utterly dissimilar roommates, the finicky neat freak Felix Unger and the sloppy, beer-swilling Oscar Madison. It became a film (1968) and a television series (1970-75). It then morphed into a Saturday morning cartoon (1975-77), followed by a short-lived black television version (1982-83) and a more successful, virtually all-female Broadway rendering (1985-86) before reverting to basics with the 2005 revival on Broadway.
You wonder why they bothered. The first television show, starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, was the funniest of the bunch, Broadway original included.
