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Partners aired from September 1995 until April 1996 on Fox.
Owen and Bob ( Tate Donovan, Jon Cryer) were architects and best friends working together at a San Franciso architectural firm. Their relationship underwent a major change when Owen , the creative one, proposed to Alicia ( Maria Pitillo), a sexy lawyer, in the series premiere. Obsessive Bob had always gotten along with Alicia, but now that she and Owen were engaged, he felt threatened, and for the next several months competed with her for Owen's attention. Early in 1996, Bob started dating Alicia's best friend Lolie ( Corinne Bohrer), and in March, after a falling out with their boss, Owen and Bob quit the firm to start their own architectuaral firm. Heather ( Catherine Lloyd Burns), their efficiennt but incredibly accident-prone secretary/assistant went with them. In the season finale, as Owen and Alicia were about to get married, Bob proposed to Lolie-who turned him down because they hadn't been going out long enough. They decided to give it more time. At the end of the episode, on the morning of their wedding day, Owen and Alicia woke up after having spent the night stranded in his old car whose battery had died. As the credits rolled they were walking back to town to get married.
Since the series was not renewed, nobody will ever know if they made it to the church on time.
An Article from The New York Times
COVER STORY;It's Bob and Owen and Jon and Tate And Last but Not Least, the Two Jeffs
By ANDY MEISLER
Published: December 17, 1995
THOSE who subscribe to the currently fashionable, reversely snobbish view that series television is a vital (albeit commercial) art form should be cheered by "Partners," a half-hour comedy new to the Fox Monday night lineup this season.
This critically praised but precariously low-rated sitcom centers on Bob and Owen (played by Jon Cryer and Tate Donovan), a pair of eccentric male San Francisco arhitects, and Owen's fiancee, Alicia (Maria Pitillo), an attractive lawyer who both divides and unites them. The show is propelled by young writers whose own idiosyncratic, almost impossibly long-running relationship forms the heart of the enterprise.
We're drawing on - and analyzing - our own relationship all the time," Mr. Strauss said over breakfast recently. At 33, he is already a veteran of some of the most successful sitcoms of the past decade, including "Friends." He and Mr. Greenstein, 31, have been working together for nearly 15 years.
"Yes," said Mr. Greenstein, who was also, inevitably, present. "It comes out in a lot of Bob and Owen's relationship - the shorthand they have with each other, the way they finish each other's sentences, the way they lean on each other as partners - and the fact that really good work doesn't take place unless both of them are in the room together."
Mr. Strauss added: "The tension between the work relationship and the friendships and the romantic relationships in our lives is endlessly pilfered. That's the bedrock of this show.
"But it's not totally about us. It can't be. While we're mining our own relationship, we're also making sure that these are experiences that everyone has."
So far on "Partners," Bob and Owen have clashed comedically over the amount of time Alicia "steals" from their work schedule, over Owen's uncanny ability - not all matched by Bob - to buy attractive clothing for Alicia, and over Bob's nesting instincts and Owen's neurotic search for a mate. They have also arrived at work wearing the exact same outfits, which actually happened to Mr. Strauss and Mr. Greenstein.
This interesting combination of quirkiness and universality has been noted by reviewers and industry insiders, who have declared "Partners" one of the best of this season's tidal wave of new comedies. James Burrows, a co-creator of NBC's "Cheers," has signed on to direct half of the "Partners" episodes this season. "I'm attracted to good writing," said Mr. Burrows. "And the two Jeffs are very good. They have a style, they write funny, and they write real. That's a tough combination to find."
Neither Mr. Strauss nor Mr. Greenstein has yet written a script solo or with a different partner.
"We're working together 5 days a week, 8 to 10 hours a day," Mr. Strauss said. "We spend more time with each other, at least when we're awake, than with anyone else, including our wives."
Mr. Greenstein added: "We've been doing this for a truly unrealistic period of our lives."
The two met while they were undergraduates at Tufts University in the early 1980's. Mr. Greenstein, who is 6-feet 6 inches and not particularly svelte, studied dancing and film making in college. Mr. Strauss, who is 5 feet 10 inches, took a more conventional route, combining fiction writing and film.
After graduation they moved to Los Angeles and shared an apartment "about the size of your tape recorder," said Mr. Strauss. For their first project, they wrote a movie script.
"It was truly awful," said Mr. Greenstein. "Should it ever surface, it could end our careers."
"Of course, at the time we thought it was terrific." said Mr. Strauss. "The very interesting, and kind of scary, thing is that when our friends read that screenplay, the best thing thay could say about it was it was like spending two and a half hours with us."
Mr. Strauss got a job as an assistant to a programming executive at ABC. Mr. Greenstein took secretarial jobs, including one as a writer's assistant on the NBC series "Matlock."
They turned their attention to writing television comedy. They broke through by selling scripts to shows like "Family Ties," "Mr. Belvedere" and "Perfect Strangers." Then came the long Writers Guild strike of 1988.
I worked as a word processor," said Mr. Greenstein.
"I sold Hondas," said Mr. Strauss.
In 1989 they got their first television staff jobs, as a writing team on the HBO series "Dream On."
In 1993, the producers of "Dream On," David Crane and Marta Kauffman, recruited them for their new NBC series "Friends." They rose to supervising producers on that show, then left to create "Partners" for Fox.
Mr. Strauss was married several years ago to to an executive at Columbia television. He has a 2-year-old daughter. Mr. Greenstein is also married, to a publicity agent.
Both writers admit to feeling considerable strain between their demanding job and partnership and their family lives. The strain, they say, is generating new story lines nearly every week.
As for "Partners," it was put into a demanding 9 P.M. time slot, opposite "Murphy Brown" on CBS and "Monday Night Football" on ABC. Its audience share has not risen above 10 percent.
Nevertheless, Fox - which would like to move away from the raucous live comedies for which it is known - recently gave Mr. Greenstein and Mr. Strauss a vote of confidence by renewing the series through the rest of the season.
Both concede, however, that the possibility that "Partners" might fail has given them more to worry about than usual.
"After we shot the pilot and when we didn't know whether the series would get picked up," said Mr. Strauss, "we sat around saying: 'You know what? This is the best thing we've every done. It's coming from our hearts and soul and lives. And if this doesn't work, what else can we do?' "
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