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Since the beginning of last season, Hunt has served as a Mad About You producer. This is no star perk. She proposes story ideas, speaks up in the conferences, makes heeded notes on each script. Next month, she will direct the first of three episodes. Reiser and she will also decide then whether to re-up for Season 7. "Cross my heart, hope to die, I really don't know what will happen next year," she says. "And neither does Paul. It's a load of money, and I don't take that lightly. But we both have lives we want to get back to. And we wonder, Have we done it all?" To judge from next week's episode, "The Conversation," the answer is, Not nearly. Shot in one commercialless 20-min. take, the show has Jamie and Paul waiting outside their bedroom for their daughter to fall asleep. Two people talking--a novel idea for a sitcom. And for the Buchmans, who wonder how much they still have to say to each other.
Jamie on her worst day couldn't touch Melvin Udall, of As Good As It Gets, on his best. Melvin writes romantic novels--62 so far--and strafes the lives of all who amble into his gun sight. Most folks allow the stray nasty thought to blip across their radar, but Melvin lacks a social censor; he blurts out every random insult that occurs to him. "Sound crazy somewhere else!" he snaps at a helpful Hispanic maid. "We're all stocked up here." At times he turns his vocal virulence into action. In the hallway of his Greenwich Village apartment, he spots Verdell, a dog belonging to his neighbor Simon (Greg Kinnear), and dumps the poor pooch down the garbage chute.
Suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Melvin adheres to strict rituals: wearing gloves, washing hands, turning his door lock five times, avoiding stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. And mocking those whose misery is less acute than his. Thrown out of his shrink's office for a typical outrage, he stops to stare at the troubled souls in the waiting room and asks them, "What if this is as good as it gets?"
Each day Melvin goes to a coffee shop with his plastic utensils and orders breakfast from "his" waitress, Carol Connelly (Hunt). She is the best part of his awful routine. But why does Carol suffer Melvin's churlishness? Because suffering is her vocation. Her son's asthma makes motherhood a full-time paramedical job. Take Spence's temperature, mop up the vomit and, five or six times a month, run him to to the emergency room, where, she says, "I get whatever nine-year-old they just made a doctor." Carol knows all about her son's illness but nothing about her own. She has become addicted to service. Hunt says of Carol, "She is complicit in the problem. She has to look at how she needed her son to be sick so she'd know who she was."
The plot will give this codependent all she could hope for: two more sick children. Melvin has a child's enveloping egotism. And Simon--the lauded gay artist mutilated by punks in his own home, then financially broken by the medical bills--is another wounded kid who needs a foster mom. He also needs a friend. Slim pickings--it's Melvin, who's been persuaded to care for Verdell. To be rehabilitated, the mean old man must inch his way up the food chain of compassion. First he has to fall in love with an orphan dog.