With the Mad About You series revival set to premiere in November 2019, let’s take a look back at the show’s season 7 finale and whether or not it’s still considered canon. Mad About You was a New York City-set sitcom that aired for seven seasons on NBC between 1992 and 1999. The series starred Stranger Things’ Paul Reiser as documentary filmmaker Paul Buchman and Helen Hunt as his publicist wife Jamie and won a total of four Golden Globes and 12 Primetime Emmy Awards over its seven-season run.
Mad About You co-starred Anne Ramsay (Hart Of Dixie) as Jamie’s sister Lisa, John Pankow as Paul’s cousin Ira and featured plenty of celebrity guest stars from Cyndi Lauper to Bruce Willis and Yoko Ono. The show also had a couple of crossovers with other New York-based sitcoms broadcast on NBC including Seinfeld – in which Paul sublets his apartment to Cosmo Kramer – and Friends, which saw Jamie pop into Central Perk and mistake Phoebe for her twin Ursula, who originated on Mad About You.
The sitcom followed Paul and Jamie from the newlywed stage through to parenthood after the birth of their daughter Mabel in season 5. Mabel featured prominently in the Mad About You season 7 finale which was titled “The Final Frontier” in a nod to the show’s theme song. The two-part finale flashed forward twenty-odd years and saw an adult Mabel (Janeane Garofalo) following in her father’s footsteps and producing an autobiographical movie chronicling her family’s lives. In a series of flashbacks, the finale detailed how Paul and Jamie had separated for some time but eventually reconciled at a screening of Mabel’s film.
Now, after a twenty-year hiatus, Mad About You is set to return in a 12-episode limited series that will premiere on Spectrum Originals in late November. With the show jumping aboard the sitcom reboot bandwagon alongside Will & Grace and Roseanne, the question is: will the Mad About You revival series treat the season 7 finale as canon? According to the reboot’s writer, showrunner and executive producer Peter Tolan, the answer is no.
Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt will reprise their roles as Paul and Jamie but the Mad About You revival will pick up with their daughter Mabel (Abby Quinn) about to leave home for college – which doesn’t really fit in with the events of the original finale. It appears Mad About You will be taking a cue from Will & Grace and Roseanne by conveniently forgetting the closing chapter of its original run. Tolan has stated he’s pretending the original series finale didn’t happen and is hoping not many people will remember it after the show’s twenty-year absence. Whether Mad About You will address the plot holes that throws up in an amusing way like Will & Grace and Roseanne did remains to be seen.
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