Come and Knock on Our Door: 'Three's Company' 50th Anniversary Tour Kicks Off With Live Pilot Readings

NEW YORK — The John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health announced Monday, via PR Newswire, a multi-city celebration of the 50th anniversary of Three's Company — the landmark ABC sitcom whose golden anniversary arrives March 15, 2027. The tour, titled "Come And Knock On Our Door" after the show's famous theme song, kicks off with the foundation's "Evening From The Heart" event at Joe's Pub in New York City on Monday, November 2, 2026. The evening will be co-hosted by Amy Yasbeck — Ritter's widow and the foundation's founder — and Joyce DeWitt, who played Janet Wood opposite Ritter's Jack Tripper for the show's entire eight-season run.

THE KICKOFF — For the centerpiece of the New York launch, Jason Biggs will step into the role of Jack Tripper in a live staged reading of the original pilot episode. Richard Kline — who originated the role of Jack's best friend and neighbor Larry Dallas — returns as the evening's narrator, and additional celebrity guests are to be announced. After Joe's Pub, the same pilot script travels to Dallas, Cleveland and Los Angeles, where celebrity casts will perform the live readings city by city.

THE CAST — Biggs is a fitting choice to channel Ritter for an evening. Best known as the star of the American Pie films, he has spent his career in the same lane Ritter owned — high-wire physical comedy played with total sincerity, the kind where the performer commits so hard to the bit that the audience can't help but commit too. That is the Ritter register: pratfalls delivered with the soul of a leading man. Kline, meanwhile, brings the evening's living link to the original room — the neighbor who was always knocking. Together with DeWitt and Yasbeck, the Joe's Pub lineup bridges the show's past and its next half-century.

THE PILOT — Choosing the pilot is a deliberate love letter to the show's origin story. Adapted from the British sitcom Man About the House, the 1977 premiere introduced Jack Tripper, a cooking student whose sham engagement — staged for the benefit of conservative landlord Stanley Roper — lets him keep his room in a Santa Monica apartment shared with two women, Janet Wood and Chrissy Snow. That single misunderstanding powered eight seasons of door-slamming, double-taking farce. Hearing that first script read aloud by a new generation of performers is the tour's central idea: the words are the same, but the laughter is new.

THE SHOW — When Three's Company premiered on ABC on March 15, 1977, it was an instant cultural flashpoint — a sex comedy built on the era's last Victorian anxieties about men and women living together, and carried by one of the great physical comedians of the medium. Ritter's Jack Tripper — pratfalls, double-takes, and a rubber-faced innocence — earned him an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy in 1984. The show ran for eight seasons, spun off The Ropers and Three's a Crowd, and made its theme song's invitation — 'come and knock on our door' — one of the most quoted lyrics in sitcom history.

THE CAUSE — The celebration has a serious purpose underneath the laughs. The John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health funds research into aortic disease and supports patients and families — a mission made personal by Ritter's 2003 death from an aortic dissection at the height of his career. The tour folds that mission into the festivities: the anniversary is a celebration of Ritter's comedy, and the proceeds advance the science that might have saved him.

THE TOUR — The multi-city shape of the tour matters. This isn't a one-night New York gala; it's a rolling commemoration — Dallas, Cleveland and Los Angeles each get the full staged-reading treatment with celebrity casts, carrying the show's anniversary beyond the coasts and into the living rooms of the audiences who kept it in syndication for five decades. The announcement credits DLT Entertainment Ltd. for its support of the tour.

THE MOMENT — The tour arrives at a moment when classic sitcoms are being rediscovered in real time. The staged reading itself has become a genre — beloved scripts performed live by rotating casts — and few sitcoms have a pilot as stage-worthy as this one: three strangers, one apartment, and a lie that has to survive dinner. Broadcast sitcoms still dominate the conversation too, from season premieres like Abbott Elementary's sixth season to streaming revivals like the 'A Different World' sequel's second-season renewal on Netflix. The Three's Company tour sits squarely in that lane — nostalgia as a live event, not a clip package.

WHAT'S NEXT — The Joe's Pub evening on Nov. 2 opens the door; Dallas, Cleveland and Los Angeles follow with their own casts and readings. Additional celebrity guests for the tour are still to be announced. The actual 50th anniversary — March 15, 2027 — gives the celebration a natural finish line, half a year of events building toward the day Jack Tripper first knocked. Fifty years later, the door is still open. Come and knock.