In last week’s blog post, I took a look at the ratings for the February 19th premiere of The Odd Couple. This week, I’m examining the critical reaction. At this point, it’s anybody’s guess, as the critics were mixed. However, many of them added that regardless of the quality of the show, The Odd Couple has a 50/50 shot of being renewed for a second season. As a fan of the original version of The Odd Couple, I find the new version to be lacking the original spark that made the Tony Randall-Jack Klugman incarnation so entertaining and successful.
In his review, Entertainment Weekly writer Jeff Jensen eloquently hit upon the problem with the revamped version of The Odd Couple, “There is a kind of bad show that might be the saddest kind of bad show. It’s the show that strands talented actors known for being funny on a sitcom that isn’t funny at all. The Odd Couple has Matthew Perry, Thomas Lennon, Yvette Nicole Brown, Dave Foley and more. You’d never know that they’re perfectly capable of making you laugh if you hadn’t seen their previous work, because their current show is, again, not funny.”
In the end, only time and the numbers will give us certainty on The Odd Couple’s future, but with a general overall feeling that it is just mediocre fare, it looks like it won’t be joining its CBS predecessors, The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men as a runaway hit.