Truly, madly, binge-worthy

My comfort-food show these days happens to be a sitcom from the 1990s. Over the years, I'd caught reruns of Mad About You—starring Paul Reiser and the incomparable Helen Hunt—but now, watching the seven-season series episode by episode, I'm properly charmed.

- RAJA SEN

My comfort-food show these days happens to be a sitcom from the 1990s. Over the years, I'd caught reruns of Mad About You—starring Paul Reiser and the incomparable Helen Hunt—but now, watching the seven-season series episode by episode, I'm properly charmed. Imagine the smallest annoyances of a relationship being elevated, through the New York clamor, into the stuff of gentle opera. Picture Paul and Jamie Buchman, he a neurotic documentary filmmaker, she an eloquently practical PR executive, sparring over the size of a couch (née loveseat) as if the whole world depended on it. In a way, it does. Mad About You is all about the inevitable chaos of cohabitation and co-dependence. The show is so obsessed with the micro that the macro simply falls into its lap, pliant and grinning.

Within the vast, neon-lit world of the American sitcom, Mad About You slides midway between Seinfeld, with its social self-absorption, and Friends, with its photogenic schmaltz. Where Seinfeld is about the nothingness of everydayness and Friends is about the everythingness of togetherness, Mad About You is about the intricacies of shared solitude. Hang around somebody long enough, and every sigh can be heard in surround sound. Created by actor Paul Reiser with Danny Jacobson, the show's writer's room boasted talents who went on to gild such series as Frasier, Modern Family, and even The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Paul: Do you want to tell me why I just lied to our closest friends?

Jamie: They wanted to take us to dinner.

Paul: The bastards.