Helen Hunt revealed that she originally refused to consider a Mad About You reboot. The actress who co-starred with Paul Reiser on the NBC sitcom from 1992 to 1999, told Collider in a new interview that when she was approached about a revival of the series, she turned the idea down flat.
“We were 100 percent sure we would never do a reboot,” Hunt, 62, told the outlet. “It seemed like a really cheesy thing to do, and we’d answered everything, and we looked down on them.”
Hunt admitted that when she saw the Will & Grace revival in 2017, she changed her tune. “I was like, it’s really good and it’s really funny. Are we maybe stupid and should think about it?” she recalled.
Twenty years after Mad About You ended its original seven-season run, Hunt and Reiser reprised their roles as New York City couple Jamie and Paul Buchman for a 12-episode revival on Spectrum Originals. The limited series featured the couple as empty nesters after their daughter Mabel (Abby Quinn) went to college. Hunt told Collider that the revival mirrored what she and Reiser were going through in real life.
“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,’” she said. “When we realized, ‘Oh, empty nests would be a really fun thing to watch these two pinheads go through,’ we started getting excited.”
‘Mad About You’ Originally Ended With the Intention That There Would Never Be a Reboot
When Mad About You ended its original run in 1999, the Buchmans’ toddler daughter Mabel was suddenly 23 years old. The series finale featured a flash forward of the adult Mabel (Janeane Garofalo) as she described the family’s next 20 years via flashbacks.
Reiser previously revealed that the flash-forward finale was intended to wrap up the characters’ storylines for good, so there would be no need to ever go back to the series.
“One of the things we did deliberately in the finale was that we jumped ahead in the future. We saw where they went,” Reiser told Variety in 2016. “Part of why we did that was to avoid the temptation of going back…When you watch a reunion (show), all you do is say, ‘Wow, do they look older.’”
Related: Beloved Sitcom Set for Reboot With Original Stars 15 Years After Finale
