Yvette Nicole Brown should be in extremely high spirits. The Community actress survived the cancellation of NBC’s show, only to find out that Community will return for a sixth season via Yahoo. Now, she’s signed on to CBS’ Odd Couple reboot, playing the assistant to one of the two leads on the show.
With a pick-up from CBS and a midseason premiere date in the cards, you would think most of the big roles on The Odd Couple would have already been cast. However, Yvette Nicole Brown is set to play Dani, the assistant to Matthew Perry’s character, Oscar, on the show. In the pilot, the character was played by Go On actress Sarah Baker. However, back in May, we mentioned that two of the show’s female actresses, The New Normal’s Georgia King and Baker, left after the pilot was shot, leaving a couple of slots to be filled. While Brown is taking Baker’s slot, mum’s the word on whether King’s role will also be recast.
It’s hard to appear in regular roles on more than one series in any given season, but TV Line is reporting that Yvette Nicole Brown should be able to shoot both Community and The Odd Couple in the coming months. While it isn’t clear if the actress will appear in every episode of Community, the scheduling should still work out pretty well, since filming on The Odd Couple is expected to begin shortly and Community’s Season 6 production is still some time away.
The Odd Couple is a remake of Neil Simon’s popular 1970s series. CBS’ brand new episodes star Thomas Lennon and Matthew Perry, who play Felix and Oscar, respectively. The two men are unlikely roommates—one neat, the other disorganized. Recent Michael J. Fox Show castoff Wendell Pierce and She’s Out of My League actress Lindsay Sloane round out the cast. A lot of The Odd Couple's cast features actors whose shows recently did not work out. The good news is that Perry, Lennon, Brown, Pierce and more are all pretty damn funny, and really just need the right material to find an audience. Hopefully, The Odd Couple has the magic "it" factor.
There is still quite some time before Brown and the rest of The Odd Couple cast pop up on our televisions. CBS has a pretty stacked lineup this fall, and even though a few comedies, including How I Met Your Mother, are no longer on the schedule, there’s not a lot of room in the schedule to cater to new comedies. Luckily, while CBS is usually a ratings juggernaut, there are always a couple of shows that perform dismally each season, which means The Odd Couple will get its day to shine on network TV, eventually.
