This week we are joined by one of television's best comedy writers Dave Mandel (SNL, Seinfeld, Veep) to discuss an unproduced episode of The Odd Couple for which we have obtained an official script from 1973. It is a Thanksgiving episode and would have been for the 4th season to air in November 1973.

We start by discussing Dave's history with The Odd Couple and how it influenced his TV writing.

We then get into the script itself and -- spoiler - it is not very good so we discuss in depth why it doesn't work and how it maybe could have become a workable episode.

We also start going into it line by line but that is too painful ultimately so we summarize the last few acts.

We also discuss why The Odd Couple had no traditional holiday episodes after S1 like so many of its fellow sitcoms did during the 1970s.

If you want to get a dropbox link to the script to read it for yourself please email us at 1049pod@gmail.com

In this episode we welcome Adam Klugman to talk about his father’s legendary career in depth – for more than two hours. Among the many topics we cover are: Jack’s childhood in Philadelphia and a shocking story about his mother; how he discovered acting; his early working days in theater and live television; The Twilight Zone; performing in The Odd Couple the play; of course playing Oscar on the series; Adam’s two appearances on the show; Quincy; Jack’s marriage to Brett Somers; her role on The Match Game; Jack’s throat cancer and his final days. Adam was a delightful guest and storyteller with great vocal impressions of many of the people involved in Jack’s life. We hope the fans find this a great celebration of Jack Klugman’s life and career.

In this episode we analyze the differences in “final” scripts vs the filmed episode for Win One For Felix and Oscar In Love.

The script for Win One For Felix is called Little League Football and is lacking four pages so we spend less time on this one. Also, it is not dramatically different than the filmed episode but it is missing the emotional motivations behind Felix’s actions as we discuss.

The script for Oscar In Love, here called Oscar Remarries, is quite different from the filmed episode in many ways – narrative flow, story devices, motivations for actions and the lack of Speed’s reappearance. We get a little lost as we try to break down the differences but ultimately get back on track.

If you want access to all the PDFs for the scripts we have acquired please email us at 1049pod@gmail.com and ask for the dropbox link.