#1 Pilot
#2 The Man Who Knew Too Much
#3 Sometimes a Fritter is Just a Fritter
#4 Four Colds and a Funeral
#5 The Lyin' King
#6 Fish out of Water
#7 Engaged to Be Engaged
#8 The Stalker
#9 The Dance
#10 Coffin to Go
#11 Christmas Cheerleader
#12 The Crush
#13 My Bodyguard
#14 The Hypnotist
#15 Therapy
#16 Secrets & Lies
#17 The Grade
#18 The Pigeon


Executive producer Steven Levitan, Co-executive producer Jeffrey Richman, Consulting producer Alan Kirschenbaum, Supervising producer David A. Goodman, Producer Gayle Abrams, Producers Brian Buckner, Sebastian Jones, Producers Lyn Greene, Richard Levine, Co-producer Eric Zicklin, Produced by Pamela Grant

#1 Pilot: Aired Thursday, September 23, 1999

Henry, a very anal, paranoid, meticulous book editor, gets paired with a horror writer named Ian stark. Although they can't stand each other, somehow Henry is the only person that can get Ian to write again after his first successful book.

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#2 The Man Who Knew Too Much: Aired Thursday, September 30, 1999

Ian, trying to pull yet another practical joke on Henry, hunts Henry's girlfriend down at her work place. He introduces himself a sex therapist, and gets Tess to open up about her boring sex life with her boyfriend. He pass on the info to Henry, and takes Henry shopping for sex toys. When Henry decides to show a Tess a more wild time, Ian realizes that he was speaking to the wrong Tess, because two Tesses work at the same place. He is too late to stop Henry from totally alienating his girlfriend.

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#3 Sometimes a Fritter is Just a Fritter: Aired Thursday, October 7, 1999

Henry goes to a diner near the Chrysler building to see why Ian walks all the way there for breakfast every single morning. He meets a waitress named Renska, the same name to which Ian just changed the name of the heroine in his book, and assumes that Ian must have a crush on her. He tells Renska and her family this, and Ian loses his much-treasured anonymity at his favorite diner. Jake goes to Maddie's philosophy class to take notes for her. It turns out there's not only a test, which Jake aces, but professor evaluations. Jake's evaluation in Maddie's name is so amazing, that Maddie's professor shows up at her bar and hits on her.

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#4 Four Colds and a Funeral: Aired Thursday, October 14, 1999

Henry is afraid that it was his cold that killed his favorite childrens' author.

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#5 The Lyin' King: Aired Thursday, November 2, 1999

Ian helps Henry concoct an elaborate Hallowe'en scare to help Henry get back at his cousin for a childhood prank. Maddie gets a date with a midget that she thought was a humpback.

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#6 Fish Out of Water: Aired Thursday, November 4, 1999

Henry's attempt to make a good impression at Audrey's dinner party goes awry when he endangers the her husband's rare fish.

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#7 Engaged to Be Engaged: Aired Thursday, November 11, 1999

Henry and Tess get engaged to be engaged, and Henry goes out with the guys to celebrate. When he's passed out in Ian's apartment the next morning, Ian convinces Maddie to get in bed with Henry and pretend that they slept together. Unfortunately, Tess walks in on the performance. She kisses Ian to get back at Henry, then finds out that Henry is innocent and they make up.

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#8 The Stalker: Aired Thursday, November 18, 1999

One of Ian's obsessed fans, who is obviously insane, wants to be Ian's new editor, and cuts the power to Henry's elevator, stranding Tess with a sweaty man with a bag of smelly garbage. Ian defends the fan to Henry, sympathizing with the fact that the man is slightly different than the rest of the world. Ian convinces his fan that he can never take Henry's place, so instead the fan churns out his own 600-page book in two days, and Ian insists that Henry edit the drivel until he reads it himself and realizes how silly he's being.

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#9 The Dance: Aired Thursday, December 2, 1999

Tess is jealous of all the time that Henry spends with Ian, so she tries to hook up Ian and Maddie so that Ian will be kept busy and Henry will have more time for her. She tells Maddie that Ian likes her, and tells Henry that Maddie said she likes Ian, which Henry passes on to Ian. Maddie stops by to teach Ian to dance for his niece's wedding, and they're both suddenly acting like idiots around each other. Tess tells Henry what she did, and Henry insists they set things straight. Just after Ian and Maddie share an awkward kiss, Henry and Tess burst in and tell them what's going on. Ian and Maddie end spending the rest of the night dancing happily together as friends.

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#10 Coffin to Go: Aired Thursday, December 9, 1999

Ian buys a coffin for his living room, and is amused when Henry is terrified of it. When the open the coffin, the realize that there's actually a dead body inside. Ian calls the mortuary to come pick up the body, and then has to leave for a Charlie Rose interview, so Henry stays with the body. He's just starting to get comfortable when an ancient mortuary employee shows up to pick up the coffin. Disaster ensues, in which the body fall out of the coffin and Henry has to help get it back in. The corpse ends up grabbing Henry and scaring him half to death, at which point he realizes that the old guy is really Ian in disguise, and the corpse is someone from the bar that he hired.

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#11 Christmas Cheerleader: Aired Thursday, December 16, 1999

Tess's parents, usually very traditional on Christmas, decide to go skiing in Aspen this year, and so Tess and Henry are left with nothing to do for the holiday. Henry decides they should attend Ian's annual party, but Ian's anti-Christmas style clashes with Tess wish for a traditional merry holiday. After Tess has a nervous breakdown over plum pudding, Ian points out to her that she's really just as much of a misfit as everyone else at his wacky party.

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#12 The Crush: Aired Thursday, January 6, 2000

Ian writes an anonymous love letter to a beautiful woman he sees in the bar, and Jake delivers it. The woman spots Jake delivering it, and finds him at the bar. Jake doesn't know that the woman picking him up is Ian's crush, and so he takes her home and they have mad sex all night. The next morning, Henry clues Jake in. Jake feels awful, and tells Ian what happened. Later, the woman comes back for her lost address book, and Ian realizes that she's a completely dumb blonde. Jake tries to dump her and give her to Ian, but Ian doesn't want her at all anymore, so Jake goes chasing after her.

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#13 My Bodyguard: Aired Thursday, January 13, 2000

Henry, Tess and Ian are mugged, and when Ian head butts the guy and gets Tess's purse back, Henry becomes insecure because Tess has a sexual dream about Ian. Ian is frustrated when Henry keeps harping on the incident, so he hires a friend of Jake's to take a hit from Henry to make him feel better. Instead, Tess ends up kneeing the guy in the balls, which only makes Henry more insecure about his masculinity. Finally, Henry ends up taking out his aggression on an annoying coworker. Maddie tries to teach Jake how to be the perfect fake boyfriend when she needs to avoid being hit on at the bar, but then he thwarts her attempt to get a date with a cute swimmer.

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#14 The Hypnotist: Aired Thursday, February 3, 2000

Maddie is concerned because she has a date, and the guy wants to cook her lobster, but she hates seafood. Ian writes about a man being hypnotized into believing he committed a crime, and Henry doesn't buy it. Ian says he knows all about hypnotism, and it's definitely possible. Maddie asks if Ian could hypnotize her into liking seafood. Ian says he can, and it would be proof for Henry. It works, and at the same time, Jake and Tess accidentally go under. Ian continues his demo to Henry by making Tess do a sexy dance for him, and then hypnotizes Jake and Tess into believing they're Romeo and Juliet. Henry is really impressed, and while he and Ian are talking about the book, Romeo and Juliet escape to get married. Ian and Henry track them to the Friars Club, trailing a seafood-scarfing Maddie. Ian and Henry find out that the runaways were "married" by a "friar," and they realize that according to the story, they will then go back to Tess's place to have sex. They get there just in time to stop Romeo and Juliet from consumating their "marriage," and when Ian brings them out of it they don't remember anything. Meanwhile, Maddie's hypnosis gets accidentally reversed during the chase, and she is again disgusted by seafood.

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#15 Therapy: Aired Thursday, March 2, 2000

Ian wants to put a couples counselor in his book, so he and Henry go to visit one for research purposes. The couples counselor ends up analyzing Ian and Henry as a couple, and then when they leave she pulls Ian aside to talk to him alone. Henry thinks she told Ian something about them as a couple, and demands to know what she said. Ian finally tells Henry that the counselor told him to treat Henry gently since he's paranoid. Henry starts being paranoid about being paranoid and can't even enjoy dinner with Tess. He goes back to the counselor to ask her why she diagnosed him as paranoid, and it turns out she's having a date with Ian. She really pulled Ian aside to ask him to dinner. Henry pretends that he's really upset and needs to talk to her as a counselor to ruin Ian's date as revenge. Maddie loves the new bartender, Scott, because she has him convinced that she owns the bar so she can go on a permanent break and have him wait on her hand and foot.

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#16 Secrets & Lies: Aired Thursday, March 9, 2000

A Yale student named Pryce is interviewing Henry for the Yale Alumni Magazine. Maddie develops a crush on the boy who is much too young for her. While interviewing Ian, Pryce uncovers a lie about where Ian was for eighteen months in the early '80s. Ian claimed he was on a Hopi reservation in New Mexico, but there are no Hopi reservations in New Mexico. When confronted with the lie, Ian admits to Maddie, Jake and Henry that he was in a mental institution. Henry tells Tess who accidentally tells Pryce who sells the story to the New York Times. Henry is terrified of how Ian will react, but he is surprisingly calm. Henry is confused, and so does some research and figures out that the mental instituation story was also a lie. He finally gets Ian to show him what he was really doing during those 18 months: dancing with a cheesy group in Florida.

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#17 The Grade: Aired Thursday, March 16, 2000

Ian and Henry more or less write Maddie's term paper for school when she has an assignment on Ian's book. When she gets a B, Ian is upset that the paper didn't get an A, while she's just excited because now she can go to NYU instead of her current community college. Ian's ego gets the best of him and he confronts the professor, admitting that he wrote the paper. The professor changes Maddie's grade to an F since she didn't write it, so Ian gets Henry to go and tell the professor that that was actually an Ian Stark impersonator. They almost pull off the scam when the professor starts to rant about the grammar in the paper, which puts Henry on the defensive. The end result is that Maddie has to go to summer school. Jake's girlfriend Kit buys him a big ugly necklace, and he wears it to make her happy, but he hates it. He comes up with the idea of buying her a big ugly necklace so that she won't want to wear his present and then he doesn't have to wear hers. He gives her a big ugly red plastic necklace, but she doesn't have her contacts in, so they both attend a party with all of Jake's friends looking like idiots. The next day, Kit isn't wearing the necklace. Jake asks her what happened, and she says she traded it in for another present for him: the matching bracelets for his necklace.

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#18 The Pigeon: Aired Thursday, July 13, 2000

Ian accidently knocks a pigeon nest full of eggs off his terrace, and the mother pigeon starts stalking him, stressing him out. Tess works one of her old boarding school connections, a girl named Brooke Sterling who had a big crush on her. Tess gets Ian an audience with his hero, Brooke's father, Terrance Sterling, and possibly a quote for his new book jacket. Henry can't stop thinking about the fact that a girl had a crush on Tess in boarding school, and is even more excited when he finally sees the two of them together. Sterling is a recluse and very particular about his work space. He is so anal that he notices a paperclip missing that Ian stole off his desk. When he goes out to get a phone call, the pigeon comes to Sterling's office stalking Ian, and Ian destroys Sterling's office trying to get the pigeon. Finally, Ian tells the pigeon that the nest falling was a mistake and he's sorry, and the pigeon flies away, leaving Ian in the wreckage of his hero's office. Maddie gets a cashmere sweater in the mail that isn't addressed to her, but when she tries it on it feels so good she can't take it off. The woman who ordered it comes into the bar looking for it, and Maddie finds out that the sweater was ordered for the woman's dog.

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