A classicsitcomstar has opened up about why she changed her mind about rebooting the series, after initially not wanting to have the show return. There have been a multitude of sitcom revivals in recent years that take familiar characters and progressed their stories after the initial ending. Newseasons ofWill & Grace, for instance, drew strong success.
However, it’s also been a tossup surrounding which revivals are going to succeed and which won’t. One of the more recent examples isFrasier, which originally ended in 2004, but returned in 2023. Following theFrasierrevival’s season 2 finale, the show was unfortunately cancelled on Paramount+. But there’s one sitcom revival that almost didn’t happen because of trepidation.
In a recent interview, Helen Hunt, star ofthe ’90s sitcomMad About You, revealed her initial misgivings about a potential revival. The original sitcom follows Hunt’s Jamie and Paul Reiser’s Paul in the first years of their marriage, including the number of ups and downs in their lives. The sitcom was revived for one season in 2019.
Speaking withCollider, Hunt revealed she was initially against the idea of revivingMad About You. However, upon seeing the success ofWill & Grace, she started to reconsider. The idea of Jamie and Paul being empty nesters in the follow-up season later came about when Hunt and Reiser’s real-life kids were going to college around the same time:
We were 100% sure we would never do a reboot. It seemed like a really cheesy thing to do, and we’d answered everything, and we looked down on them. And then I saw Will & Grace, and I was like, it’s really good and it’s really funny. Are we maybe stupid and should think about it? When that happened, my daughter was getting ready to go to college, and his son was getting ready to go to college, and we went, “Oh, it could be about empty nests.” And that was the thing every year, to find something that the episodes would be about. One year was about work, one year was about trying to be pregnant, one year was about being pregnant. And so when we realized, “Oh, empty nests would be a really fun thing to watch these two pinheads go through,” we started getting excited.
Hunt’s response to theMad About Yourevivalwound up changing at various points, until the show finally happened. The series' return followed Jamie and Paul as empty nesters, with their now 18-year-old daughter, Mabel, going to college. The pair end up getting into hilarious scenarios as they tackle living alone again after nearly two decades of parenting.
While the stars' initial reaction to the idea was negative, it no doubt helped that many other sitcoms from the time period were coming back with a degree of success.Will & GraceandFuller Houseare two examples of revivals that managed to run for multiple seasons. However,Mad About You’s was short-lived, ending after 10 episodes on Spectrum.
Even so, thesitcom’s return wound up delivering some memorable moments, with plenty of different situations the core couple found themselves in. While it didn’t last long,Mad About Youreturning ended up adding a positive epilogue to the main show befitting of the original premise. It emphasizes how Hunt’s decision to do it wound up being positive.
