‘The Odd Couple’ season 3 will only be 13 episodes; cancellation odds increase greatly

It appears that this particular “Odd Couple” could be, rather unfortunately, well on its way to breaking up.

According to a new report coming in right now via Deadline, the CBS series starring Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon is going to be ending its run for the season after just 13 episodes. That means that the show will be done with its season probably early on in the new year, and will eventually be replaced by something else.

The season 3 renewal in itself was somewhat unexpected, given that the show was pushed until late in the spring for its second season and it delivered much stronger ratings than anyone projected. Unfortunately, for whatever reason those ratings have fallen dramatically this fall. This is the lowest-rated scripted comedy on the network’s schedule, and one of the lower-rated series as a whole.

While all of this does make the show’s odds of coming back for another season significantly smaller, we should make it clear that this is not a guarantee that the series is canceled. CBS will make a firm decision come May what they want to do with the majority of their programming, but it will probably take either a significant rise in “Odd Couple” ratings or a decline in many of their other comedies for them to consider a fourth season.

Ultimately, we’ll see what happens here, but for the time being, we’re not optimistic. At least this show is not going the way of “The Millers,” which was actually canceled in the middle of its second season — a really unusual move for a network comedy that made its past the first go-around on the air.

We got a pretty good sense that bad news was coming for the series yesterday, when CBS programmed a new episode of this show amidst a night of repeats everywhere else.