All the Pretty Sheeps Plz

Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau

In 2001, reporter Jeff Strickler reminisced over the time the two stars spent in Minnesota shooting Grumpy Old Men (1993): “It's fitting that Lemmon and Matthau, who died last year, were best known for the comedy The Odd Couple. Frequent collaborators, they were a real-life odd couple. Matthau was loud, gruff and always looking for a punch line, while Lemmon was soft-spoken, polite and took time to give thoughtful answers.” If contemporary depictions of gay couples in popular American television programming such as Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–2012) and Modern Family (ABC, 2009–2020) seem familiar, it is probably because they draw upon the odd couple tradition that Lemmon and Matthau so spectacularly represented. The newspapers of the time and later accounts of the men’s lives emphasized that they died almost within a year of each other, cementing a public image of the two men as a couple, though both left grieving widows, marriages of several decades, and adult children. “You’ve got to think a lot of that was [my father's] broken heart,” declared Lemmon’s son, Chris. “It doesn’t get any more difficult than having your best friend die.” Blogger and film reviewer Bob Westal elaborated, highlighting the actors’ status as a couple for twenty-first century viewers: “Matthau and Lemmon not only made a number of films together over the years, including the Grumpy Old Men pictures — they became inseparable in real life, as well as death. They are buried next to each other.” Adding to the legend, in 1992 Matthau confessed to Premiere magazine that he considered Lemmon “the most marvelous fellow in the world to work with and hang around, so bright and so decent, a helluva guy. I mean, it sounds a little bit like a homosexual relationship. If I were homosexual, I’d marry him in a minute.” “They adored each other,” concluded Chris Lemmon. “It was a true love affair.”

Jack Klugman & Tony Randall

Klugman and Randall also came to realize that they were a highly effective collaborative duo, both well trained in their craft and simpatico creatively, gifted at the fine art of adlibbing and dedicated to character-driven rather than shtick-driven comedy. While the two main characters struggled week after week to learn how to get along, the actors who played them were working out their own odd-couplesque personality differences to forge strong ties that would change both their lives forever: "We argued like cats and dogs for five years," Klugman once declared, "but only ever about how to make the show better. We never, ever had a personal argument in all that time." Klugman would not allow an episode to be cast in stone without its key element. “Where’s the love scene?” he’d demand. What he wanted was the moment where, after all the screaming and fighting between Felix Unger and Oscar Madison stopped, Oscar said that no matter how crazy or mad Felix made him, he still loved him as his best friend. It had to be there. And acccording to Klugman, it always was: "The Damon and Pittheus story has always been appreciated, even Brokeback Mountain. Two guys, whether they're or whatever, that love each other, that's the secret of the play." "I'll never know what makes us work so well together," said Randall. "It's like falling in love. It's all to do with chemistry. Ask me why I fell in love with my wives and I could never explain it, and I feel the same way about Jack!" Shortly after Klugman was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1989, the pair began working together again: "Tony and I share a love relationship. When I got sick, he was at the hospital the next day, telling me I had to come and do a play, even though I wasn't sure if I'd work again. That's how the one-night Odd Couple [1991 revival] happened. He thinks he did it selfishly to raise money, but I don't care, I know he it did for me."