Mad About You revival deals with the empty nest
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
When “Mad About You” took its final bow in 1999, stars Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt had no intention of reprising their roles as spouses Paul and Jamie Buchman.
After 20 years though, the pair will reunite in their beloved roles on Nov. 20 when a revival of the same name premières on Spectrum’s On Demand platform.
“We don’t think of this as a nostalgia thing,” Reiser, who cocreated the original sitcom, told the Daily News earlier this month.
And though the original series, which ran from 1992 to 1999, was part of NBC’s acclaimed comedy lineup (including “Seinfeld” and “Friends” — both of which participated in “Mad” crossovers), Reiser, 62, is adamant they’re “not trying to bring it back to 1999. We’re not trying to go back to anything.
“The hope is that it’s sort of timeless and that it’s not confined to any period or anything topical,” he said.
The ’90s iteration saw the couple adjusting to married life in the months following their wedding. Now, viewers will see them adjusting to a semi-empty nest, Hunt says, while their 18year-old daughter Mabel (Abby Quinn) is living at New York University ... five blocks away.
“The idea (for the original) was the hoopla from the wedding died down ... now what? And the series was sort of an answer to that,” Hunt, 56, said alongside her costar. “This season is all about the hoopla around getting your kid off to school, and then you look at each other and say, ‘Now what?’”
When the original concluded, Mabel was just a toddler, and the finale offered out-of-order flashbacks with the adult Mabel, played by Janeane Garafalo, narrating the trio’s life over the coming decades — including a temporary separation for Paul and Jamie.
Their daughter, Reiser says, “is the best and worst of her parents.”
The show deals with issues, Hunt says, “like how untenable it is to love a kid so much and how really untenable it is to be expected to fall back in love with your partner when they haven’t been your number 1 priority.”
Ultimately, Hunt says, the story tries to determine “how do you learn how to be together when the people you used to be don’t exist anymore.”
The show is billed as a 12-episode limited series, the duo isn’t ruling out a continuation.
“We’ve been wrong about everything,” said Reiser, pointing to their previous reluctance about a revival. “I don’t think either of us would have done this if they said, ‘We need you for three years or seven years.’ ... It’s not impossible. We would never say it’s impossible again. But the idea was ... let’s just do a little visit and see how that goes.”