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By 19 she was back in New York City, studying acting and landing the occasional job. She played Shakespeare in the Park and Our Town on Broadway (she was Emily opposite Eric Stoltz). On film, she joined other stars of the future (Jim Carrey, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen) in Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married and landed a meaty girlfriend role in Project X with Matthew Broderick, who for a few years was also her off-screen co-star. She eventually achieved a Hollywood identity: crown princess of disease-of-the-week TV movies. Fine, but could she do comedy? Reiser and Danny Jacobson, creators of a new show about a just-married couple in New York, may have wondered that until Hunt showed her stuff. She beat out Teri Hatcher (later Lois Lane on Lois & Clark), and--voila!--Jamie Stemple Buchman was born.
TV's notion of family in '90s sitcoms is rabidly postnuclear: single dads, single moms, two older guys, gangs of roving angels. The Jacobson-Reiser premise of a thirtyish, big-city couple in love--reminiscent of classic romantic comedy--was so old it was new. From the start, the show kindled an erotic intimacy; Paul and Jamie Buchman made smart bedroom talk in every room in their lower Fifth Avenue apartment. The combustive blend of Hunt and Reiser, the rare stand-up comedian who takes acting seriously and plays with a subtle attention to his character's mercurial moods, has made Mad About You the best-acted sitcom of its time.
The Buchmans, a documentary filmmaker and his Yale-educated, intermittently employed wife, face modern problems with laughs and lots of compromise. They try making time for each other ("I thought we could have sex now," says Jamie, after planting a big kiss on Paul. "Then we won't have to do it later!"). Sometimes they even work together, with frustrating results (Jamie: "I missed you this week." Paul: "We were together every minute." Jamie: "I know, I didn't have time to think about you--to miss you. I missed missing you!"). And they are constantly analyzing their own moves ("You were very close to the edge there," Jamie says after Paul deflects an argument with a compliment. "But I pulled it off!" he triumphantly replies).
More often than a sitcom ought to, the show pulls it off. It has nursed the Buchmans through infertility and virtual infidelity. This year it gave them a baby, and Hunt a chance to legitimize Jamie's drive and desperation as the postpartum crazies; she's often the mad one in Mad About You. In a superb episode this October (directed by Gordon Hunt), Jamie threatened to walk out of the marriage, then threw Paul out, then nearly frightened a fiance out of her wedding with a harrowing description of marriage and motherhood, then perked up when Paul brought home two pints of Ben & Jerry's, then flared again and fast-balled the ice cream out of their 11th-floor window. (Somehow the whole thing is resolved during a production of The Pirates of Penzance.) Hunt navigates these shoals with America's Cup-worthy dexterity, earning Reiser's praise that "she can spin from touching to funny on a dime."