Something for Thursday

We’ve been rewatching Mad About You lately.

Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during the ten or so months after I graduated college that we were doing a long-distance thing. Mad About You, at its best, had a lot of wonderful things to say about love and marriage…and I’ll have done there, as I want to write a longer piece about the show and What It Meant To Me, probably for the upcoming newsletter relaunch.

So, instead of a music selection, here’s a comedic sequence from Mad About You. This is from the show’s second season, when it really hit its stride; its best seasons were probably its second and third. To understand what’s happening here, all you need know is that Paul Buchman is a documentary filmmaker by trade who often finds himself doing film work he finds “beneath” himself (but he grits his teeth and does it because he knows he has to eat). Here he’s been working on a film called A Day At the Zoo. The rest of this should be easy to understand. This scene never comes out and says what’s on “the tape”, but we know, don’t we? And the comedic timing here is just amazing. Reiser and Hunt had the kind of chemistry together that many actors playing parts of fictional partnerships dream of achieving.

(Oh, and this scene ends at the episode’s first commercial break. The complications pile up after this.)

* By the way, what was up with sitcoms in the 90s featuring standup comedians in the lead playing dudes with the same first name as themselves? In Mad About You Paul Reiser plays Paul Buchman. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld plays…another version of Jerry Seinfeld. Jonathan Silverman starred in The Single Guy, as Jonathan Eliot.