This is what I'm sayin'.

That's what Paul Buchman, on Mad About You, was always saying to his wife, Jamie. For a time in the 90s, Mad About You was one of my favorite shows -- I loved its way of taking delight in urban life, its general lack of Seinfeldian cynicism, and the warm chemistry between Paul and Jamie, played by Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. Of course, Mad About You spent two or maybe even three seasons on the air longer than it should have (its last episode was quite good, but its last season was pretty much of a disaster). Helen Hunt, of course, went on to stardom and became an Oscar winner, while Reiser slipped into a much lower profile, and in general, the mild success of Mad About You (it was never a ratings juggernaut, just a solid show for six seasons) was attributed largely to Hunt.

But reading this brief article by Reiser in today's Huffington Post, I'm wondering if that's really fair. Mad About You wasn't a brilliant show, but in its best episodes, it displayed a pretty insightful view of the loving relationships between men and women, and it's clear that this theme is still driving Reiser in his post-Mad work.

It seems that Reiser has made a movie, starring Peter Falk, called The Thing About My Folks. Here's the money paragraph, which stopped me cold as soon as I read it quoted in full over at Lance Mannion's blog:

I always wished I could have known my parents before they were parents. I would love to have known who they were before they became the 70-year-olds I saw nodding off together to Tom Brokaw every night. There was great love between them for sure. But it must have been somehow different fifty years ago. What happened to those people? How did they become these people? My guess is it didn't happen overnight, but gradually, imperceptibly. Like a glacier of routine and compromise. We end up the sum of all the things we do, and -- for whatever reason -- don't do. Day after day, year after year, we become all the words we never speak, the trips we never take, the effort we never make and the love we never share.

Dammit, I wish I'd written that.