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…