While just about every network TV show has celebrated its renewal or mourned its cancellation by now, there are still some stragglers waiting to get official word about the future. That official word has finally come down for CBS' The Odd Couple, after many months of weighted presumptions, and the network is indeed closing the curtains on this latest small screen adaptation of Neil Simon's play.
Nothing about The Odd Couple's cancellation comes across as shocking or completely unwarranted, as reported by THR, but it does make one wonder why CBS held out this long on announcing the decision if it was just going to be a bad one anyway. Perhaps there was some big hope being held out that all the pieces could come together to make Season 4 a reality, but those pieces remained disparate.
While The Odd Couple was a smash hit for CBS for its midseason placement in early 2015, the network decided to keep the limited episode orders going for Season 2 rather than making the sitcom a fall entry. An attempt to fix that error came up in Season 3, which got a fall debut, but the ratings had already tumbled quite far by that point, and the writing on the wall became quite clear when Fox chose not to order the back half of Season 3.
Thomas Lennon pretty much called the cancellation whenever he spoke with CinemaBlend some months back. And last month, Matthew Perry took to Twitter to share what he saw as the show's albatross.
So yes, another Matthew Perry series bites the dust after not kicking up that much of it to begin with. To be fair, the actor's post-Friends career reached an apex with The Odd Couple's three seasons, while other arguably more suitably renewable shows like Go On and Studio 60 were shown the exit far too early. And if there's a silver lining to the sitcom's cancellation, it's that Perry, Thomas Lennon, Yvette Nicole Brown, Wendell Pierce, Lindsay Sloane and the rest of the cast are all able to lend their massive talents to other shows on the small screen. Brown is already locked in for ABC's The Mayor, which has been ordered to series already.
Without The Odd Couple's new season to look forward to, there still isn't much to worry about as far as finding something good to watch, although it'll admittedly be hard to find multi-camera sitcoms. You can find everything hitting the small screen in the coming months with our summer TV schedule, and to see how all shows are doing in the renewal and cancellation field, head to our rundowns for both networks series and streaming/cable shows.
