Lots of e-mail this morning on the opening I linked to from The Odd Couple. Quite a few reminded me that when The Mary Tyler Moore Show was being first assembled, there was the worry at CBS not just that people would think Mary was a bad person for having been divorced but that they'd think she'd divorced Dick Van Dyke! Guess that's why a few years earlier, when Lucille Ball came back to CBS in her first sitcom since I Love Lucy, she played a widow. They didn't want people to think Lucy had divorced Desi Arnaz…which, of course, she had.
I don't think anyone has mentioned this in e-mail yet but someone will. It dawned on me that the reason they put that line in the Odd Couple intro about Felix wanting to return to his wife was that they were concerned America would think that Felix really, really liked the idea of living with another man. I seem to remember an article around the time that claimed that ABC was worried that viewers would think Oscar and Felix were light, as they say, in the loafers and that they were keeping an eye on scripts to make sure everyone knew that the roommates liked the ladies.
Also: Apparently, there were more episodes than I recalled in which Tony Randall expressed a yearning to return to his wife and in the last episode of the series, he did. That feels a bit contrived to me and I'll bet if they were doing that show today — and sooner or later, Paramount is bound to bring us The New, New Odd Couple — it would just be about two guys who were irrevocably divorced.