Three decades of nothing: Seinfeld turns 34.
Often imitated, never duplicated, the beloved sitcom endures.
For something that lives on as a ‘90s staple, one episode of Seinfeld, the very first, actually aired in the 1980s.
Thirty-four years ago today, to be exact - July 5th, 1989 - and with the benefit of hindsight, it is, much like an omelette from Reggie’s (to use the show’s Superman-inspired parlance), bizarro.
Elaine, (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) for one, is nowhere to be seen: the character had yet to be created. The same goes for Monks, the gang’s much-loved coffee shop hangout and Michael Richards’ Kramer, instead called “Kessler”, is presented as something of an introvert, who, instead of bursting through, knocks politely on Jerry’s door before he enters - which is just so off-putting.1
Yet even in the Bizzaro World, you’re bound to find something familiar.
Seinfeld’s second episode, The Stake Out, wouldn’t make it to air until May of 1990, some ten months later. The pilot received, at best, a lukewarm reception and it seemed unlikely that it would be picked up.
Per Variety, the story goes that one NBC executive, the late Rick Ludwin, saw potential and lobbied hard on the behalf of co-creators, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, which was enough for a four-episode season order.
And re-watching that abbreviated season now, you can tell that things are… close but not Seinfeld. At least, not as we might remember it - but the building blocks are there.
Kramer, not yet the master of the hare-brained scheming that would become his calling card, was still the chaos element across the hall, arriving unannounced in the middle of the night to happily raid Jerry’s fridge.
Elaine and Jerry were perhaps the most well-defined from the jump, although the characters, fresh off their breakup, were still working to establish the “we used to go out but now we’re just friends” dynamic that would define them over the next nine seasons.
And while Jason Alexander’s George wasn’t quite the “short, stocky, slow-witted bald man” we would come to love and occasionally despise, he’d get there and we’d soon meet the greatest of television’s alter-egos: “Art Vandelay, importer, exporter. Architect.”2
It wouldn’t be perfect. After poor ratings to start the second season, the show was put on hiatus for two months. It wouldn’t break through on the Nielsen ratings until 1992, the same year that the Larry David-written, Emmy-winning episode, The Contest, would forever be known as the most inoffensive-offensive twenty-two minutes ever broadcast on American television.
By the spring of 1993, each episode was pulling in 20 million-plus viewers a night. It was everywhere. An institution.
Seinfeld. Not just “the show of the ‘90s” but one of the most acclaimed and influential properties in the history of the medium.
It wasn’t really about nothing.
This became the widespread perception, as the show’s unique structure, that of focusing mainly on the minutiae of everyday life, entered the collective conscious but as Larry David told Rolling Stone in 2014, while speaking on the show’s 25th anniversary, the initial idea wasn’t quite as abstract.
The premise of the show was going to be “how a comedian gets his material.” So, we would follow Jerry around throughout his day or week, and whatever he experienced in the episode, he would do a stand-up routine about it at the end.
Many episodes over the series’ nine-season run did focus on fictional Jerry’s career as a successful stand-up (“a minor celebrity causing a minor stir”, to paraphrase Kramer) and the opening and closing stand-up segments were a hallmark of the early years - though they would become less and less of a focus over time.3
No, ultimately, their driving force was within the power of its quartet: four friends, hovering somewhere in their mid-to-late 30s who blew through relationships like the wind and could care less for anyone who wasn’t in their immediate orbit and even then, each other, as they obsessed over the smallest and most insignificant of perceived slights (they’d also tackle the more serious in their own unique way, including birth control and abortion rights).
You would wonder sometimes, as they bickered, barbed and conspired against one another, do they even like each other?
It was in sharp contrast to their biggest TV-contemporaries Cheers, Frasier and later, Friends, where despite their differences and disagreements, their characters would often trade in the comedy, blue, black or otherwise for genuine sentimentality.
Not so on Seinfeld.
Larry David’s most prominent on-set rule could itself, incapsulate the entire ethos of the show:
Self-absorbed, egotistical, deceitful. They were misanthropes, liars and wholly vindictive. They didn’t learn any lessons, rarely had any moral backbone, nor did they feel any remorse for the consequences of their actions or the struggles of others.
They, simply, did not care.
And by God, was it funny.
Not too long ago, I was revising one of my dating profiles.
I try too, every couple months, if only to not let it get too stagnant. It is a tough discipline to truly master though, an impossible combination of truth, self-promotional bluster and complete and utter lies.
But as I struggled, a thought occurred to me:
“What would George do?”
Close, low and high-talkers.
Regifters, double-dippers and draping yourself in velvet. Baby-eating dingos. Himalayan walking shoes, Puffy Shirts and Festivus miracles.
Mackinaw Peaches, Marble Ryes, Beef-A-Reeno. Thirst inducing pretzels, muffin stumps and Junior Mints. “Non-fat” yogurt and swordfish from Mendy’s that was the very best (“the best, Jerry!”).
Erotic journeys from Milan to Minsk. Being a master of your domain, faking orgasms and being sponge-worthy. Shrinkage and virgins.
Yada, yada, yada.
I wasn’t alive when Seinfeld was on the air.
The show’s still-controversial finale, which drew an estimated 76 million people to their TV screens in the spring of 1998, was broadcast just under a year before I was born.
But I still grew up with the show, through syndication and VHS tapes (remember those?), as fluent in the lexicon of the Upper West Side, as I was in sports and superheroes (there was even a lonesome, offensive brute hanging on my wall).
The oddities and eccentric behaviour of its characters probably had a far bigger role in my social development than I’d care to admit (I was once told I was a perfect Frankenstein’s monster of Kramer, George and Jerry, with a dash of “Elaine dancing in public” energy: what to make of that assessment, I’m still not sure).
No doubt though, I wasn’t the only one.
The show lives on both in syndication and on Netflix, where a new a generation of viewers can experience it for the first time - alongside an incredible cultural impact that can’t be understated.
Without Seinfeld, you don’t have Friends or without Jerry Stiller, specifically, The King of Queens.
You don’t have It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or the The Big Bang Theory.
You don’t get “Bazinga!” without first going through “Hello Newman!” and “Serenity now!”
And you don’t get Curb Your Enthusiasm either.
After leaving Seinfeld at the end of the seventh season, (he would return to write the finale) Larry David launched his next project on HBO in the fall of 2000, the aptly-named, Curb Your Enthusiasm (the idea being, he didn’t want to set expectations too high, the next “big thing” from Seinfeld’s co-creator).
The premise was more-or-less what you would expect: Larry, like Jerry once did, playing a semi-fictional version of himself, George, in actuality, as now widely famous and successful post-Seinfeld, he got into misadventures throughout Los Angeles.
The catch was, the show was Seinfeld turned up to eleven. No longer held back by primetime network restrictions or the need to dance around more mature topics with innuendo, Curb’s characters were more vulgar, more vile and less constrained by supposed societal rules.
Seinfeld was never far away though.
The show’s stars would occasionally appear throughout the first six seasons, playing semi-fictional versions of themselves as well: long-time friends with Larry and grateful for their shared success but at same time, utterly sick of him.
The major story arc of Curb’s seventh season centred on the group developing a Seinfeld reunion special. Something they’d long pushed back against in real life, it seemed like a perfect opportunity: another show-within-a-show.
What would New York’s favourite oddballs be up too in the 2000s?
The answer was… not much.
They were still obsessing over the most trivial of everyday things, big and small, from restaurant etiquette to relationships. Because of course they were.
Some things may change, but Seinfeld will always be preserved in our mind’s eye, just as we left it. As we need it. Utterly insignificant, massively important, widely influential.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
As real-life inspiration, comedian Kenny Kramer, a former neighbour of co-creator Larry David, refused to let his name be used unless he was permitted to play the character, Kramer became “Kessler” before the pilot broadcast. Kenny Kramer’s request was denied and he eventually relented.
The show would later poke fun at the whole thing though, with Cosmo Kramer insisting on playing himself during George and Jerry’s attempt to get their sitcom, Jerry, off the ground during the show’s fourth season. And in later years, as the show skyrocketed in popularity, Kenny Kramer started “The Kramer Reality Tour” in an attempt to cash in on his big connection. Seinfeld couldn’t help themselves: they egged him about that one too.
In the ninth season episode, The Betrayal, a flashback reveals that Kramer’s name is incorrectly listed on his apartment’s buzzer (as Kessler) in an attempt to rectify the inconsistency.
Per his own admission, it didn’t click for Alexander that the character was inspired by Larry David until the second season episode, The Revenge, which greatly informed his creative choices going forward.
After Larry left the show, following the seventh season, Jerry took over as show-runner. Too busy with his new duties, in addition to acting, the stand-up segments were dropped. The framing device would return in the series finale.
Best Sitcom Ever. Did not know about beginnings. Thanks