Odd Couples
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television ODD COUPLES BY MARVIN KITMAN The current season has been another letdown. That is hardly news, 1 realize, yet before it began there was reason for hope. Take Bob Newhart's latest...
...The TV season could suffer the fate of its counterpart in radio...
...Two people with contrasting personalities has been the staple of a heap of shows...
...Telling Felix he doesn't want to go to prison for income tax evasion, for example, the new Oscar says, "Didn't you see Scared Straight...
...The former Doc Hartley is now Dick Loudon, a writer who becomes the proprietor of a New England-sl yle inn circa 1974...
...It is now black, with Ron Glass as Felix and Demond Wilson as Oscar...
...TNOC is a perfect example of the theorem, "If at first you don't fail, try, try again...
...The sole distinction of the '82-'83 season may be its lack of distinction...
...Then a friend of mine told me of seeing the premier of TNOC with a scholar who had immersed himself in the original OC three and four times a night in 1978-79...
...It's too soon...
...Sitcom writers are as predictable as the tides...
...Or did Bob and Emily finally split up over the hours he spent watching football...
...Where did he find Joanna, in one of his groups...
...The zanier ones change the characters' sex to female...
...Not surprisingly, this beefcake failed this season...
...The closest we came to anything even faintly novel was macho TV, where the chief actor takes off his shirt once a week...
...The scripts are from the original series, the dialogues virtually identical, only the cast has been changed...
...The computer told them we wanted Newhart without Emily and a black Odd Couple...
...The laugh track is also too loud...
...And the best paid per word...
...Indeed, this may be the first nonseason, literally a blank in the history books...
...The rest of the TV season has been very lackluster as well...
...Had she known in advance about the football strike, would they still be together...
...Suzanne Pleshette is pretty good, loo...
...It's almost as if it never occurred...
...we're all dressed up and anticipating the screen in unison...
...The people at ABC rightly consider television's TOC a classic...
...I'll tell you why...
...Take Bob Newhart's latest show, called Newhart, although I prefer Newhart II (CBS, Monday, 9:30-10:00p.m...
...His personality was exactly right for the role, controlled and quiet, a perfect caricature...
...Still, the current production rubs me the wrong way...
...As far as I'm concerned, that short-lived masterpiece was the definitive American sitcom, despite the fact that the BBC produced it, an Englishman named John Cleese starred in it and only selected U.S...
...Unless, of course, Bob and Emily are still friends...
...We could be witnessing the start of an era in programing-maybe they will perform The Odd Couple over and over 400 years from now...
...And the acoustics are so bad, you would think the show was being done in a cave...
...I used to think of him as my analyst, and so did many others...
...He was superb as a Chicago psychologist in his previous vehicle, which ran from 1972-78...
...His newest series has left me cold...
...This also could be the last year of seasons as we knew them in the golden age of TV, which ended in 1981...
...That's a lot by the industry's standards...
...Doc Hartley treated all of us together...
...I'm willing to give Bob's present wife a chance, but honestly, I think the network owes us some explanation...
...Programmers at the networks seemed brain dead...
...You have to wonder why it would redo one of the best shows ever, especially using the same scripts...
...It's a disservice to Glass and Wilson, two fine actors...
...Heck, theft is commonplace in TV land, so it makes more sense to steal from yourself-someone you respect-than from most of the other guys...
...Nobody in America looks like the heartthrobs, and so the visual interest notwithstanding, no one identifies with them...
...Even the healthy miraculously improved under his care...
...The other outrage of the year is The New Odd Couple (ABC, Friday, 8:30-9:00 p.m...
...TV stations aired it...
...That's because the highest offices respond only to audience analysis and money analysis...
...Something is wrong, and it's not Newhart's fault...
...Loudon, a history buff, turns out how-to books (how to build your own patio, how to buy old inns and restore them for fun and profit...
...An event like The Winds of Warm 1983 will be what matters on TV, the season nothing...
...The show is the handiwork of Gary Marshall, the creator of the first TV series...
...Why, the girls even had different bust sizes...
...It produced a boom in employment for actors who look like Tom Selleck...
...Remember what a lousy time she had at Bob's father's hunting lodge, and on the group's weekend trip...
...And there have been 278 copies or imitations of Marshall's duo without royalties being paid to Marshall, Simon, or God...
...At first I thought I was imagining things...
...The overall effect is akin to watching a dinner theater do a Broadway show...
...Joanie still loves Chacchi...
...This clicked in "A" and "B" counties, so it will work nationwide, and the network bosses have their computer printouts as proof...
...This has to be the strangest event in the annals of television...
...It was positively onto-logical, as if he was seeing French patients without speaking a word of the language...
...The food is changed, too...
...Or John Hancock...
...Only in California could they call this a genuine antique...
...The last one was Bosom Buddies...
...His theory of treatment-the Chicago School-was that you don't have to be sick to get better...
...Perhaps ABC is trying to catch up with NBC, which has become the urban network (the industry jargon for black ghetto) with Fame, Diff'rent Strokes, Gimme a Break and Hill Street Blues...
...The landscape will be remembered the way it was when the volcano hit the fan...
...TV to day is like Pompeii.Everything is frozen in place...
...I'm going to be nervous the entire season, imagining the scene if Emily happens to be in Vermont and stops at the inn...
...And the dialogue is punctuated with "say what...
...And so did this critic...
...I kept recalling how Tony Randall and Jack Klugman did the material better...
...this is fast-food takeout action...
...But when after months of waiting I finally got to see the new Newhart, was I disappointed...
...You're supposed to be watching a new show and your mouth is unconsciously reciting the lines-from another time, another place...
...The premise of the prototype Broadway play by Neil Simon wasn't so original either...
...The inn may date from 1927, tops (nothing goes back further in Lotus land...
...They seemed to have a pretty good marriage, although you never can tell about these showbusiness types...
...People talked about the new radio season in 1947, while listeners were more interested in the new Frank Sinatra album...
...It was mass group therapy, perhaps the largest group ever treated by one man in the history of the world...
...It's The Rocky Horror Picture Show of TV...
...Sometimes the story is transferred from New York to California, or a third person is thrown in (then you have Three's Company) . Taken as a whole, sitcom scribes are the most pitiful souls in the history of the written word...
...Everything seemed to fail, even the dull and prosaic stuff that usually succeeds...
...What ABC has done to one of the greatest sitcoms strikes me as sacrilegious...
...But forget all that...
...He was able to come out with each line right before it was spoken, and he was correct 99 per cent of the time...
...Other experts say the overlap is 90 per cent...
...The dramas have been no less ordinary than the sitcoms...
...Hartley's practice...
...Where did they get that inn...
...Perhaps they thought that redoing it now was like rest aging Moliereor Feydeau, Shakespeare or Sheridan...
...He is supposed to be realizing the American dream of leaving the big city and setting up housekeeping in a historically authentic Vermont inn...
...If William Conrad had stripped down to the waist once a week, Cannon would have lasted 20 years...
...I happen to have been secretly in love with Emily all those years...
...We can start a "Where Is Emily Society...
...It was lifted from the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the model odd couple, who taught us that oppo-sites attract...
...There are no ceilings where you bang your head on the beams, no slanting floors...
...It's hardly old New England...
...What really bothers me is the absence of Emily, Bob's wife from his previous series...
...Usually Bob cracks me up simply answering a telephone...
...Here is a show that was in reruns from the opening episode last October 29...
...He was a surrogate therapist," a real psychoanalyst once observed of Dr...
...I was enthralled by his travesty of the profession...
...Oscar now prefers hog jowls and greens, chitlins and corn-pone...
...Maybe Emily refused to leave Chicago for the wilds of Vermont...
...There are a handful of updatings, true...
...James Madison slept there...
...Till the end of time...
...I think ABC lost its mind on this one...
...At least you had one fairly fresh twist on an idea...
...The summer hype led me to expect a Fawlty Towers, whetting my appetite...
...A few years back when Cannon and Archie Bunker were big in TV, beefcake might have worked...
...Apparently it never occurred to the top brass that there are many unexplored reaches of black experience to delve into before remaking The Odd Couple...
...These things have to spend time in the oven before they are ready...
...Does she know that he has run off to New England with some blond named Joanna (Mary Frann...
Vol. 66 • January 1983 • No. 1
