412/Everybody Hates Me

Show Outline

Paul, for some reason, feels like everyone hates him. It's one of those, "no matter what you do it's wrong" things. Jamie feels like Paul thinks Ira's girlfriend is more attractive, so she changes her hair color; Ira thinks Paul telling his girlfriend (Sophia) the splinky story causes thier break-up; Paul says everyone on his film crew hates him; even Mark recalls hating Paul during his divorce from Fran. In the end it's mainly just jealousy and mis-understanding, but something they can all get through. "Look at this....everybody loves me".

Commentary

The "Splinky Story" is cute, but certainly not something to completely love this episode over. This is a play on one of the lines from this episode, and it fairly describes the feelings I get about it. I always have a hard time saying an episode of Mad About You is "bad", and I'm not saying that about this one. But it would be easy to say that this episode wasn't much more than 4th season filler. It had some cute, funny lines, but overall it was a bit pointless. I guess if they'd explained why everyone was so mad at Paul to begin with it would've been easier to understand this one. It gets a 6 and, for an episode of Mad About You, I'm being nice.