Mad at you

Is someone in the boardrooms of NBC Universal still mad about you, Paul Reiser?

In the '90s — as a contemporary of "the greatest television show of all time," according to TV Guide — your sitcom, Mad About You, was kind of a "Seinfeld Lite," a successful, whimsical series set in New York about the absurdities of everyday life, married-style. You lasted seven seasons, won a passel of Emmys, a Peabody Award, became the darling of Viewers for Quality Television. Your TV wife, Helen Hunt, used her experience alongside you to develop into an Academy Award-winning actress. Detroit's Don Was even helped compose your theme song, for pity's sake! You were extremely cool.

Your ratings made a buttload of money for NBC back in the day. They adored you, Paul. Isn't that enough? Can't you rest easy on those laurels? Apparently not, because as Dolly once sang, here you come again, this time with The Paul Reiser Show premiering at 8:30 p.m. tomorrow (Channel 4 in Detroit). A dozen seasons since your face last occupied a prime-time series, you seem determined to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong: You can go home again, but will anybody be there to welcome you back? Like that leering geezer at the end of the bar on Jerseylicious, you remember how to do it. It's just that nobody knows if you have the stamina to actually pull it off.

You are older, not necessarily wiser. But you are Reiser, since this time you're playing yourself. If we are to believe the new show's premise, in the years since Mad About You ended, you've been content to live a quiet life in L.A. with your real wife (played by A Serious Man's pretty, quirky Amy Landecker, not your real wife) and family. Yet you're still a bit of a player in the entertainment biz, enough so to retain a pair of clueless suck-ups as your management team. The part of the workup that rings truest is that as a father of school-age kids, your closest everyday friends often aren't lifelong chums or college buddies but the dads of other kids who attend your child's school.

In that regard you have amassed a United Nations of adult playmates. There's Habib (Omid Djalili, Gladiator), the Middle Eastern import-exporter with a warehouse chock-full of questionable goods; Fernando (Duane Martin, a personal favorite ever since Patti LaBelle's comedy Out All Night in the '90s), an African-American restaurateur who acts as peacekeeper of the group; Jonathan (Ben Shenkman), the tightly wrapped nebbish, and Brad (Andrew Daly), the WASP-y village idiot. Welcome to Men of a Certain Age: The Sitcom.

You certainly must have been watching a lot of TV during your sabbatical, because The Paul Reiser Show seems to have, uh, borrowed so many components from other series. Besides MOCA, it has the buddy-buddy, behind-the-sceney vibe of Entourage, the disjointed household high jinks (if not the outstanding writing) of Modern Family. You even open each episode with a short monologue, probably to remind us you are a comedian, just the way Mr. Seinfeld used to do. Mostly, though, your show has the pace and feel — not to mention the Yiddish violin soundtrack — of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, a comparison that isn't eased by David appearing as guest star in Thursday's premiere.

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