(3 of 3)
Love and War is shrewder and funnier, but its therapy-session psychologizing tends to run amuck. Wally and Jack, the couple from opposite sides of the tracks, dissect their relationship in first-person comments to the camera. (He: "I have this feeling about her. It's like the first time I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island. I was strangely excited, and a little nauseous at the same time." She: "I've always found his type very attractive, but I'm in a dangerously vulnerable place right now.") Conversing with each other, however, they revert to adolescent stammering. Jack tries to ask Wally for a date: "Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? O.K., O.K., that was too much, too formal, too crazy. Want to eat with me tonight? I mean, I have to eat, you have to eat . . ."
The one subject in which conversation is blunt and unambiguous is sex. On their first date, Jack and Wally kiss briefly, then she suddenly blurts out, "Would you like to have sex?" They proceed to debate the possibility with all the emotional involvement of a discussion of tax policy on Wall Street Week. There are gag lines that must have had the show's writers in stitches ("Your condom or mine?"), but the whole encounter is contrived and phony, like too much of the show.
Love and War seems even more artificial when compared with Mad About You, the season's best new sitcom. Paul and Jamie (Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt) are Manhattan newlyweds with no cute eccentricities, no clashing political views, no comical disparities in social background. Their problems are the little ones that occur when even compatible people are tossed into the same house together for the first time. Just getting out of the apartment in the morning is a Feydeau farce: she rushes back to open the window (the dog needs air), he rushes back to close it (a burglar might get in).
Mad About You, like Love and War, is too self-consciously verbal on the subject of sex, but it has more self-deprecating wit. She: "It doesn't bother you that we haven't had sex in five days? What's going on with us?" He: "What's going on is that we're married five months and the sexual part . . . is over. I thought you understood that."
% Reiser, a former stand-up comic, has knife-edge timing and a full repertoire of nervous tics, and Hunt manages to be both charming and exasperating at the same time. One sign of a sitcom that cares more about its characters than its gag lines: when Paul and Jamie start to fight, they ask their dinner guests to leave the room -- carrying their potential wisecracks with them. Privacy is one concept that becomes more precious with age.