'Mad About You' revival throws light on Mabel and her relationship with her parents in Episodes 2 and 3
The premise of the 'Mad About You' revival was quite simple. Twenty years after the sitcom ended, Paul and Jamie Buchman find themselves to be empty-nesters after their daughter, Mabel, goes off to college. In doing so, the revival also ignores the original series finale, which showed an adult Mabel narrating her parents' split and subsequently getting back together.
The college is not far - Mabel goes to NYU which is a mere five blocks away. Yet, Paul and Jamie deal with the absence of their daughter in their own way. Halfway through the first episode, we see that Jamie is more affected than she lets on, and this becomes full-blown in the second episode as Jamie tries to break into her daughter's dorm room.
Fed up with her mother's actions, Mabel makes her mother sign a contract promising no contact for 48 hours. In the absence of her mom to talk to, Mabel turns to Paul. Paul is delighted that his daughter is coming to him for advice, though he does try to prevent rubbing it in Jamie's face.
At first, it is all well and good. Paul, with the help of his colleague Yasmin, is able to offer some solid advice. Until, of course, Mabel approaches him with the problem of her roommate sleeping with her eyes open. Paul jokes that maybe Mabel should smother her with a pillow - and perhaps lack of sleep actually prompted Mabel into doing so.
In trouble with the Dean, it takes an apology letter drafted by her mother to finally get Mabel off the hook, after her father's failed attempt to talk to the Dean about it.
The third episode, similarly, revolves around the testy relationships parents can have with their daughters. When Paul is invited to speak to a film class at NYU in the last minute - a class Mabel attends - his daughter is horrified. She lets up only on one condition, that he pretends not to know her.
When the talk finally comes, along with a screening of his own movie, Paul is bombarded with questions from Mabel's woke classmates who ask him why there isn't any woman in his movie or why he is telling the story of a Vietnamese man. When Mabel pops to his defense, he calls her "honey", which does not go unnoticed by her classmates.
However, Mabel still does not want them to know that Paul is her father - although we wonder why the surname and their perceived familiarity did not give them away. So Paul does what he can do - he leans into the role of the misogynist to remain in his daughter's good graces.
Though Abby Quinn is great in the role of Mabel, the Buchman daughter comes across as spoilt and both incidents seem too far-reaching and written for the sake of comedy. As always, Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt play Paul and Jamie as if they never left the roles, and their dynamics with Mabel makes it feel like Quinn has also been part of the cast forever.
However, the trivialized plotlines do nothing for the revival and we wonder whether it might have been better off had Reiser stuck to his original plan of never revisiting the series at all.
The first six episodes of the 'Mad About You' revival are now streaming on Spectrum's On-Demand platform. The next six episodes will be released on December 18th.