“A lot of television was about bosoms in 1980, when ‘Buddies’ began its two-year run,” Susan Stewart wrote in The New York Times in 2007, assessing a DVD release. Hanks’s first prominent assignment, lasted only 37 episodes, but it has gained a sort of kitschy cachet over the years thanks to some witty touches in the scripts and the subsequent careers of the two stars. Scolari had done some stage work but was easing into television when he was cast alongside Tom Hanks in 1980 as one of the two principal characters on “Bosom Buddies,” an ABC comedy about two men who pretend to be women so they can live in a low-cost all-female apartment complex. His management company, Wright Entertainment, said the cause was cancer.
Peter Scolari, a familiar face on “Bosom Buddies,” “Newhart,” “Girls” and other television shows and in Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions, died on Friday in Manhattan.
