Helen Hunt admits she thought 'Mad About You' would bomb, now she's exploring reboot
Helen Hunt admits she had her reservations about playing PR specialist Jaime Buchman in Mad About You when future co-star and series co-creator Paul Reiser pitched it to her after the pair met at a dinner party.
“I thought, ‘I don’t want to be in a sitcom playing someone’s wife, that’s just not what I want to do,’” Hunt told Yahoo Entertainment this week (watch above) during our Role Recall interview while promoting her inspirational new drama, The Miracle Season. Then she looked at the script Reiser sent her “and I started paging through it and thought, ‘This is a really, really good part.’”
Hunt agreed to join Reiser, but remained skeptical that the series would find success when it launched in 1992. “When we did the pilot, I thought ‘This show’s never gonna go, it’s not about enough, it’s not [high concept] like a dad with seven kids,” Hunt said. “It was just these two people. And I thought, ‘This is gonna be good, but this is probably it. And then it wasn’t it.”
Not only did the show go, it went on for seven seasons, and earned Hunt four consecutive Emmy awards (not to mention historic $1 million-per-episode paychecks for both her and Reiser over the course of its final season in 1999).
Now, as other ’90s shows like Full House and Roseanne return to the airwaves, so could Mad About You. Reports first surfaced in December that Reiser and Hunt could return for a revival that would focus on the couple dealing with their pending status as empty nesters with their now-17-year-old heading off for college.
“It’s possible,” Hunt told us. “Paul and I feel really proud of the work we did, and we left it in the best way we knew how to do. And so I think any hesitation on both of our parts is that we don’t want to mess it up.
“But we’re talking about it.”
Look for our full “Role Recall” interview on Yahoo Entertainment soon.
The Miracle Season opens April 6. Watch the trailer:
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