90s Sitcom Proves Seinfeld And Friends Are Set In The Same Universe
Before Disney made shared universes the expectation and not the exception, it was always a delightful surprise to see surprise cross-overs between different shows. From Steve Urkel flying away on Family Matters to crashing on the Step by Step picnic table, sitcoms of the 90s were filled with cross-overs, but one show brought together the two biggest sitcoms of the decade. Mad About You, a boilerplate series that hit every possible trope, connects Friends with Seinfeld, making it clear all three take place in the same version of New York City.
Kramer’s Landlord Revealed
Mad About You stars Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as Paul and Jamie, a newly married couple struggling to get by in the Big Apple. In Season 1, Episode 8, Paul goes to check on an apartment he’s been subletting, which just happens to be Kramer’s exact apartment from Seinfeld. Jerry’s bizarre neighbor is, if anything, even more bizarre when shown in a different series, with Michael Richards taking Kramer’s madcap energy taken to a whole new level.
After Paul explains he’s signing over the lease to Kramer, they go off to celebrate, and Paul asks about that guy who lived down the hall, which causes Kramer to explain that “he’s writing a sitcom for NBC.”
Ursula The Waitress
A more substantial cross-over appearance happened entirely by chance. Before she was Phoebe on Friends, Lisa Kudrow played Ursula, a waitress at Jaime and Paul’s favorite restaurant on Mad About You. Absent-minded and ditzy, Ursula appears in 24 episodes of the series and eight episodes of Friends, where it’s explained that she’s Phoebe’s twin sister.
Phoebe’s Evil Twin
In reality, Kudrow was cast for Friends after appearing as Ursula, and since, again, both sitcoms were produced by NBC, the showrunners embraced the potential for a crossover to explain how she could appear on both shows. It worked out for the best, as Ursula had a few great moments in Friends, including “The One With Two Parts,” where Joey started dating her. That goes over with Phoebe about as well as you’d expect.
A Strange Side Effect Of The Shared Universe
Mad About You was a decent-sized hit for its time, arguably peaking with the episode in which Helen gives birth to their daughter, Mabel, and Paul has to break into the hospital to see her. Aiding him is Bruce Willis as….Bruce Willis, suffering from a head injury while filming a Die Hard movie, and a little convinced he really is John McClane. Willis is clearly having the time of his life playing a bizarre version of himself in the super-sized Season 5 finale, which came about as he was a mega-fan of the sitcom.
It also means that, in the world of Seinfeld and Friends, Bruce Willis is a real Hollywood action star.
The Only One With A Revivial
Amazingly, out of the three sitcoms, Mad About You is the only one to come back with a revival series. In 2019, an eighth season aired featuring Paul and Jamie as empty-nesters, with Mabel off to attend college. The revival was, as with the original, a decent hit, but some fans were upset that it retconned the finale of the original series.
So if anyone complains today about all of the different interconnected universes that are hard to keep track of, not just the Marvel universe, but even the world of the Chicago procedurals or Grey’s Anatomy, bring up the NBC mid-90’s New York universe of Mad About You, Seinfeld, and Friends. Crossovers are nothing new; the only difference is that they used to be a pleasant surprise.
