What does it say about society that Seinfeld ended up being much more popular than Mad About You?
These two shows about neurotic new yorkers stumbling into elaborate schemes to avoid discomfort and inconvenience began around the same time, ended around the same time, and canonically took place in the same universe (with crossovers & shared locations).
The cast of Seinfeld, as famously shown in the last episode, are bad people. They are constantly screwing other people over with their egocentrism. The famous statistic about the number of women George Costanza slept with is because every member of the core cast is dating and dumping somebody new almost every week. These romantic interests exist mostly to have their pain be slightly annoying & inconvenient to the main cast.
The pilot gives us a hint about how we might want to handle this, by opening up with a Jerry Seinfeld standup bit that implies that Jerry is unaware of menstruation, and following it with an episode about Jerry and George being weird and out of touch about women. In other words, we can take the cue from the pilot and say: this is a show about fundamentally unlikeable and unadmirable people, and we are not supposed to actually empathize with them. I think other Larry David productions do this better. I don’t think the majority of audiences interpreted the show this way during its run, though, and later we’ve seen that the actors in fully half the cast have shown themselves to be egocentric and unempathetic in major scandals. (As far as I know, Jason Alexander, who was already an established character actor, and Julie Louis Dryfus, who consistently has the most compelling, interesting, and believable performances on the show, have not scandalized themselves.)
Mad About You, as I’ve noted, is also about neurotic new yorkers. But while the plots in Seinfeld are about a convenient solution to discomfort being impossible (or some shortcut being in reality untenable), Mad About You always centers on moral conundrums. Paul and Jamie are good people in exactly the same environment as Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer. They deal with the same kinds of off the wall situations and characters. (Paul even deals with Kramer.) But Paul and Jamie are always weighing the good thing against the easy thing. As a result, Mad About You has a lot more heart. It also has a lot more solidarity. The primary and secondary cast of Mad About You are family members and current or former coworkers. While there are some Seinfeld-style wacky one-off characters who blow through to set off the plot, most…
