How a baby’s arrival made Mad About You as tedious as parenthood

In another pointless reboot, marriage sitcom Mad About You will return to screens later this year after a 20-year hiatus. Pitched by creators Danny Jacobson and Paul Reiser as a “shorter, funnier” Thirtysomething, it originally ran from 1992 to 1999 alongside Friends and Seinfeld as part of NBC’s ratings-dominant “Must See TV” lineup. More grounded than the former but less cynical than the latter, it starred Reiser and Helen Hunt as Paul and Jamie Buchman, a documentary film-maker and publicist, respectively, portraying their relationship from first date to baby gates.

It was as low-concept and low-stakes as it sounds: episodes were primarily based in the couple’s inexplicably huge Manhattan apartment and focused on tiny dramas such as buying a sofa or hiring a dog walker. The humour was more facetious than uproarious (“Is my head getting smaller?” Jamie worries in the pilot. “I didn’t want to say anything but: yes, and for some time now,” her husband responds). But the fast-paced dialogue, chemistry between the leads and the best-connected production company in town (guest stars included Mel Brooks, Cyndi Lauper and Carol Burnett) made it both supremely watchable and a critical darling – at least in its early years, when it won 12 Emmys, four of them for Hunt.

Although it had a strong supporting cast, including John Pankow as Paul’s perpetually single cousin Ira and Anne Ramsey, who played Jamie’s unstable sister Lisa, Mad About You was at its best when it focused on the bonding and bickering of the central couple, although it sometimes tipped into melancholy, as with infertility and near-infidelity subplots in season four. When Jamie gave birth to their long-awaited baby in season five, it seemed to signal a new start, with the show topping the ratings for the first time. Sadly, though, the arrival of this bundle of joy prompted the writers to wallow in sentimentality. An episode centred on what to call the new addition saw Paul’s mother Sylvia (Cynthia Harris) blurt: “Mothers always bring extra love,” as a cringey pretext for the couple choosing the name Mabel.

Even more ill-conceived was an instalment in which Paul and Jamie learned to sleep-train the baby. This meant viewers watching for 20 minutes as the couple sat outside their daughter’s room and waited for her to stop crying. Filmed in one take, it was an impressive acting achievement, but one that replicated the noise and tedium of early parenthood far too effectively.

Undaunted, the show continued to double down on Mabel, with a two-part flash-forward finale set in 2021, which even Mabel growing up to become Janeane Garofalo at the height of her fame couldn’t salvage. Using the conceit that she had made a film about her parents as a framing device, Mabel guided us through such uplifting future moments as Paul’s father dying, as well as revealing that her parents had separated, only to show their reconciliation in a hurried closing scene. Mad? Livid is more like it.