Tv Review: Not Yet Awed By New 'couple’s’ Scriptwriting

Acknowledging the probability that no one who saw it could ever forget the 1970s adaptation developed by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, the creators of the new show pay homage to its forebear, not only by using a new arrangement of Neal Hefti’s unforgettable score, but also in how Thomas Lennon plays the odder of the titular couple, Felix Unger. Tony Randall never tried to imitate Jack Lemmon, who played Felix in the film version, but Lennon at times seems just one sinus-clearing honk away from impersonating Randall as the neurotic neatnik who shows up at the door of the unrepentant slob Oscar Madison (Matthew Perry), after his wife throws him out. The pilot episode finds Felix showing up just as the sportswriter is putting the moves on an attractive model named Casey (Leslie Bibb) who lives in his New York building. By the next morning, Felix has turned the high-rise landfill into a model apartment, reorganizing the kitchen, cleaning everything in sight, gathering all the dirty clothes and garbage from the living room, and probably disposing of both in the building’s trash chute. Oscar invites some friends over to watch sports (Dave Foley and Wendell Pierce), and Felix makes his version of “snacks” — meatless chicken wings and gazpacho. The result of this careful tightrope walk is that by the end of the pilot episode, Perry and Lennon have begun to develop their own chemistry. [...] “The Odd Couple” is a very close relative of another Simon hit, “The Sunshine Boys,” and both shows replicate the old vaudeville concept of the straight man and the top banana. Instead of working at an actual newspaper, whose existence you might have to explain to younger viewers, Oscar works at home, with his assistant (Yvette Nicole Brown) apparently willing to put up with Oscar’s sloppy personal habits. David Wiegand is TV critic and an assistant managing editor at The San Francisco Chronicle.