Baby Buchman Upsets the Balance in ‘Mad About You’

Is the birth of Baby Buchman going to be the death of a once great sitcom?

That is the question that can no longer be avoided after the recent “Mad About You” episode that took place entirely outside the door of Mabel Buchman’s room as her guilt-ridden parents let their infant daughter cry herself to sleep for the first time.

Helen Hunt, the best actress working in sitcoms, was again terrific. Paul Reiser wasn’t bad either. But 22 minutes of an infant wailing was way too much Baby Buchman for me and perfectly illustrated how goo-goo, ga-ga, baby-obsessed this once savvy, sexy sitcom has become.

For his part, Reiser insists the baby has not overtaken the sitcom, about a young couple in the big city, and says “Mad About You” has never been better.

“We’ve been talking about a baby for three or four years, and I was the president of the let’s-not-do-a-show-just-about-a-baby club, because I wouldn’t want to watch that kind of show,” he said.

“And I’m really proud of our work. I think we’ve done some of our best shows ever this season, and our batting average is higher than it’s ever been.”

But that’s not what the audience seems to think. Ratings are down for “Mad About You” in this, its sixth season. It’s no longer a regular in the Nielsen Top 20, despite some of its weakest competition ever.

In fact, it has barely been able to beat the military drama “JAG” on CBS, while ABC took the 8 p.m. Tuesday time period during key sweeps weeks in November by counter-programming with extra episodes of “Home Improvement.”

Furthermore, once a darling of the critics, “Mad About You” is starting to take some hits, like a recent jeer in TV Guide about Paul (Reiser) and Jamie (Hunt) suddenly seeming strangely out of character in their cluelessness with the baby.

In its decidedly thumbs-down review of the cry-baby episode on “Mad About You,” USA Today called Mabel Buchman the “most ill-conceived television baby since Murphy Brown’s controversial Avery.”

Reiser says he had not been aware of any criticism of the series. As for charges that the baby is changing the show for the worse, he points to a history going back to “I Love Lucy” of sitcoms with babies doing just fine.

Indeed, sitcoms and babies do seem to go together like, well, love and marriage, especially during May sweeps, when everyone is looking for a ratings bump--like the one “Mad About You” got last spring.

But the dominant pattern going back to Lucy is that most series did not know what to do with the baby come September.

Lucy gave birth in 1953. The next season of shows featured the Ricardos and Mertzes on a cross-country car trip to Hollywood as Ricky pursued a film offer. This is when the famous episodes of “I Love Lucy” with William Holden at the Brown Derby and John Wayne at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre took place.

Baby Ricky, meanwhile, was left with Lucy’s mom, Mrs. MacGillicuddy.

The season after that, the two couples went to Europe. Again, baby was out of sight.

It was not until 1956 that Little Ricky (Richard Keith) appeared regularly in the sitcom--suddenly old enough to play the drums and do an occasional guest shot at Dad’s Club Babaloo.

A more recent birth that quickly resulted in producers realizing they had to ditch the baby to save the show came in 1991 on “Murphy Brown.” Little Avery Brown all but disappeared after the controversy surrounding his birth was played for every ratings point possible during the 1991-1992 season.

One hypothesis about what’s gone wrong with “Mad About You” centers on a similarly radical change in Hunt’s character now that there’s a baby on board.

“I think one thing that could have happened in this case is that they’ve de-sexualized Helen Hunt’s character by making her a mom,” says Dr. Michael Brody, a psychiatrist who writes about television and film for the Journal of Popular Culture.

“It’s the old Madonna-whore thing of our culture. By her now being a mother, this person is no longer as sexualized. And I wonder if NBC doesn’t already know this, because, if you saw Helen Hunt on ‘Saturday Night Live’ recently, you saw how sexualized they made her by putting her in all these sexual situations in skits.”

Sexuality--with Jamie as the object of desire and Paul doing most of the desiring--was a big part of the series. Remember the pilot? Remember what happened on the kitchen table between Jamie and Paul while a living room full of guests waited for the couple to bring out dinner?

Losing the sexual spark is no small matter to such a series, as the producers of “Moonlighting” and “Northern Exposure” found out.

There are a lot of possible explanations for the trouble with “Mad About You,” but they all ultimately point to the baby.

At the heart of all the explanations is an understanding that our connections to our favorite sitcom characters are complicated and deeply emotional. Once we make the leap and allow ourselves to believe and trust in a sitcom, we have certain expectations as viewers that must be met.

We know that week by week the established order of the sitcom will be threatened with some sort of disruption. But we also know that the fundamental order will almost always be reestablished by the end of the episode or story arc.

Looking back at tapes of “Mad’s” fall season, the sitcom was in deep trouble from the first episode, which dealt with bringing the baby home from the hospital.

The most important space in the apartment--the bed they shared--was different with the baby there. It wasn’t the desexualization of it so much as it was that the bed had been the place where Jamie and Paul had their best conversations. It was the place of their intimacy.

But in this year’s opener, they used the bed only as a place to collapse silently, exhausted, after dealing with the baby.