Today, we look at the time that Paul Buchman on Mad About You gave his apartment away to Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.
This is Somewheres in This Universe, a feature examining when characters from TV shows make guest appearances on other TV shows (in non-crossover stories), thus establishing that the two shows share a universe.
November is Someewheres in the Universe month!
When Mad About You launched in 1992, Seinfeld was entering its fourth season, and so the producers were able to work out a prominent cameo from Michael Richards’ Cosmo Kramer in an early episode of Mad About You. Mad About You, of course, was about a newly married couple, Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser) and Jamie Buchman (Helen Hunt). Well, in Season 1’s “The Apartment,” Jamie discovers that Paul still has the lease on his apartment that he had before they moved in together and got married. She is displeased with the implication that Paul is still holding on to his old apartment “just in case” he and Jamie don’t work out.
She asks him to get rid of the apartment, and after some hemming and hawing, he agrees. He then visits the apartment to get the last of his stuff that he has in the apartment (why he had anything in the apartment still is beyond me. You’d think they could have come up with a better reason for why he had to go to the apartment) and it turns out that he has sub-leased his apartment to Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.
He then tells Kramer that the apartment is all his, and there’s a fun bit where Paul asks what his old neighbor, Jerry, is up to, and Kramer tells him that Jerry is writing a sitcom for NBC (a plot at the time on Seinfeld), and Paul is quite dismissive of the idea…
Of course, a later Seinfeld episode showed George and Susan watching an episode of Mad About You, so that contradicted this episode’s continuity, but whatever, things like that happen a lot.
Feel free to e-mail me at brian@poprefs.com for suggestions for other good non-crossover guest appearances by TV characters!
This was because MAY was created in part to be a “running mate” for Seinfeld. This didn’t really work out and MAY was moved to a different night.
While true, it actually moved WITH Seinfeld from Wednesdays to Thursdays later in the year, with Mad About You moving to the 8pm slot and Seinfeld taking the 9:30 slot (and Homicide: Life on the Street taking their original 9-10pm Wednesday time slot).
Man, that Kramer scene goes on about twice as long as it needs to.
I just realized that Seinfeld later contradicted this scene in another way later on. In the season 9 episode “The Betrayal” (aka the backwards episode), the show ends with a flashback to Jerry’s first meeting with Kramer 11 years before (which since the episode aired in November of 1997, would mean 1986). But they show it as happening when JERRY moves into the building and Kramer is already living across the hall. So unless Kramer moved out and moved back in again, there never would’ve been a time where Paul Buchman was actually neighbors with Jerry Seinfeld. (And if MAY established that Paul & Jamie first moved in together sometime after 1986, that’s ANOTHER contradiction!)
This has been another episode of “John Finds Continuity Errors in 30 Year Old Sitcoms.” Collect them all! 🙂
Whoops, I meant to also include the Seinfeld scene I referred to above. Here it is:
https://youtu.be/XdAa07h0Uxo?si=lKztP4Rahl9DISng
Holy shit, it’s SO LONG for NO REASON, right? I guess they just figured, “More Kramer equals more better.”