A Seinfeld Chronicle

The lasting legacy of a show about nothing

“Like a frightened turtle.”

With those four simple words, I was hooked.

Seinfeld’s George and Jerry were trying to explain the concept of “shrinkage” to Elaine after George got caught with his pants down by Jerry’s girlfriend following a dip in a chilly Hamptons pool. I’d seen Seinfeld before, had probably been watching it for the better part of two years before that episode in the fifth season. But that exchange summed up the brilliance that Seinfeld could command.

I loved Seinfeld because I loved words. And in 1994, nobody on television used language like Seinfeld did. The dialogue had a different rhythm, a different beat.

It wasn’t as florid and literary as a show like Frasier, which in its first few seasons was the smartest comedy on television. But Seinfeld was marvelous for its dexterity. It was the rare show that could be both intelligent and lowbrow within the same scene. That’s what makes the dialogue so quotable. Whether it’s Newman dismissing broccoli as a “vile weed” or George expressing his discontent with his girlfriend’s male roommate with the line, “This bizarre, harrowing experiment must end!” many of the best lines in any Seinfeld episode weren’t necessarily the ones that most people would be talking about on Friday morning.

When I was in junior high school, my friends and I quoted Seinfeld more than anything else — with the possible exception of Monty Python, another example of brilliantly wordy absurdity. Seinfeld in its fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh seasons was on top of its game. Each week, they produced an episode that not only seemed like sitcom perfection, it topped the one that had aired the week before. The show took a season or two to rev up to full speed and fell off sharply in the eight and ninth seasons, but I’ll put the episodes from the middle seasons up against any other show of all time as examples of unrivaled sitcom writing.

For an eighth-grade boy in 1994, Seinfeld was all you could ask for. It was funny, irreverent, eminently quotable and, most importantly, just a tad naughty.[1] The storylines had an edge to them that was worlds apart from Home Improvement and most of the other stuff on television at the time. It seemed just a touch decadent, like something that should’ve been on much later than 9 p.m. on a network schedule.

The irony is, looking back, I didn’t even get half the jokes. I liked the phrase “master of your domain” because it sounded funny, but I’m not sure I connected it to masturbation until several years later. I certainly didn’t get the joke about Elaine’s boyfriend who didn’t do “everything,” or Jerry’s obsession with “the move,” until I was well into college. By 14, I’d barely kissed a girl. The concept of using oral sex to pleasure a woman was beyond my comprehension.

While the TV comedian Jerry Seinfeld may have been very much a man of his time, the character’s sexual appetites were out of sync in a post-Magic Johnson era. Seemingly each episode brought a new sexual conquest. While the sex wasn’t shown (this was still a network show, after all), it was certainly implied if not openly discussed. One of the few mentions of AIDS on the show came as a punch line, when Elaine tries to avoid a limousine driver’s small talk by pretending to be hard of hearing. Asked if she’s considered getting a hearing aid, she answers, “Am I fearing AIDS? Yeah, sure, I mean, who isn’t. But you’ve gotta live your life, you know?”

It’s certainly reasonable to argue that, as a comedy, Seinfeld’s mission was only to make people laugh. One of the things that separated the show from so many of its sitcom contemporaries in the first part of its run was its outright rejection of any sort of sentimentality. There was never a “very special episode” of Seinfeld, and that’s commendable. But the level of the gang’s sexual activity made the show feel slightly out of step with its time.

It’s hard to appreciate the true degree of Seinfeld’s innovation today precisely because the show was so incredibly influential. Seinfeld and Friends changed TV more than any other shows in my lifetime, at least until Survivor and American Idol, by moving sitcoms out of the single family unit of the Huxtables, Keatons and Seavers and into the make-shift family unit of independent young urbanites.[2] By 1995, it seemed like every show on TV had a bunch of young people sitting around an apartment. Audiences today may not fully understand how unique Seinfeld was because so many shows adopted its attitude, if not its success in pulling it off. Seinfeld was the show that made it okay for sitcoms to not be just sitcoms, to break the mold. You’d never have The Office without Seinfeld.

Think of the top sitcoms on TV when Seinfeld come on the air in 1989. Roseanne. The Cosby Show. Cheers. A Different World. The Golden Girls. The Wonder Years. Empty Nest. Who’s the Boss. Coach. Throw out A Different World and Empty Nest, which were just spin-offs of Cosby and Golden Girls, respectively. Add in shows like Growing Pains and Murphy Brown.

All of them are good to excellent shows in their own right. Roseanne may be the closest to Seinfeld as far as breaking the mold of what you could and couldn’t do on a sitcom. Cosby and Cheers are all-timers, the Ty Cobb and Cy Young to Seinfeld’s Babe Ruth. Wonder Years was one of the five greatest TV shows of my lifetime. Golden Girls, Growing Pains and Who’s The Boss were prototypical sitcoms, but watch them today and they still generate honest laughs.

Each of them was spectacular in its own way. But none of them was Seinfeld. They didn’t have the rhythm of Seinfeld. They largely followed the rules. Seinfeld broke the rules and set the standard moving forward into the last decade of a television era: the era before reality.

In an ironic twist, this most modern of ‘90’s sitcoms reflected a sensibility that was rooted in popular culture from several decades before. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David had clearly spent a lot of time observing and absorbing the pop culture of their ‘60’s and ‘70’s youths. While Seinfeld’s tone may have exhibited a postmodern ‘90’s sensibility, the show’s early seasons often mined those pop culture artifacts for laughs. Even the celebrity cameos were old-school. Bette Midler? Jon Voight? Mel Torme?

The plot of one episode involved George trying to sneak into a girlfriend’s apartment to snag an answering machine tape on which he’d accidentally left some angry messages while she was out of town. He and Jerry devise a plot by which they’ll pretend to bump into her outside her building as she returns, after which George will distract her while Jerry replaces the tape with a blank one. As a lookout signal, they decide that George will burst into Trini Lopez’s 1965 folk hit “Lemon Tree” if things start to go awry. What kind of cutting edge sitcom uses a Trini Lopez joke?[3]

In another episode, George relays the story of how he once broke a statue belonging to his parents while using it as a microphone as he sang along to the 1968 Richard Harris schlock-fest “MacArthur Park.” It was part of the charm of early Seinfeld that so many episodes contained those types of cultural nuggets, a sort of ’90s equivalent of a hotlink in a 21st Century online news story. Still, it seemed to fly in the face of the show’s critical acclaim for taking television in such a different direction.

Perhaps nothing epitomized Seinfeld better than its catchphrases. And there were some legendary ones: “Master of your domain,” “sponge-worthy,” “shrinkage,” “No soup for you!” and “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.” But eventually, they started to get out of control. You could almost feel the writers sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike with that one word or phrase that would have people talking on Friday morning. Eventually, the show seemed to strain for the water cooler “Seinfeld moment,” when before they had always seemed to happen so effortlessly.

Ultimately, Seinfeld may have become a casualty of its own success. As the show grew in popularity, the concept of The Seinfeld Moment became a cultural cliché. “Oh, that’s such as Seinfeld moment.” “You should’ve been there, it was a total Seinfeld moment,” became a form of social shorthand. One of my pet peeves has become people who start off every story with the words, “It’s like that Seinfeld episode where…”

As Seinfeld began to wrap up its run, much analysis and philosophical pondering began about its influence on the popular culture. While it was certainly a hugely influential show, much of the introspection seemed a bit overdone. Jerry Seinfeld himself seemed to try and play down the impact of what his show had meant to the zeitgeist. “We didn’t change the culture. We just reflected it a little more intimately,” he told Newsweek in a story about the show’s finale.

Indeed, many of the breathless analyses seemed to take on a quasi-academic tone, like this excerpt from the Museum of Broadcast Communications “Encyclopedia of Television”: “Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer instead lead a life of quiet absurdity. They appear always to be relentlessly superficial. Even to say they are friends would be too kind. If they do help each other, it is out of self-interest only. They create a comic world out of the banally cruel and amoral, of trivial lies, treachery and betrayal…Like comedy throughout the ages, they say the unsayable, do the undoable as they casually ignore sanctioned morality and recognized correctness.”

Like many Seinfeld fans (and certainly an overwhelming majority of television critics), I was unimpressed with the show’s 1998 finale. It just seemed too gratuitous and forced. The idea of bringing back all the old characters probably seemed like a good one in the abstract, but they weren’t nearly as funny outside of the confines of a unified plot line.

But the biggest mistake was moving the show out of its New York confines. In the entire nine years of the show’s run, the number of scenes set outside of Manhattan, Queens or the Bronx (specifically Yankee Stadium) can probably be counted on one hand, excluding the two-part “Smog Strangler” story arc that took place in Los Angeles. New York City was as much a character in the show as Newman or Puddy, and once out of their Gotham enclave, the characters seemed adrift. The concept of using the dialogue from the pilot’s opening scene to close out the finale’s final scene was inspired, but it should’ve happened in the usual booth at Monk’s rather than some vague Massachusetts jail cell.

But the bloated aimlessness of the finale was symptomatic of the larger reality of the show late in its run. The final two seasons of Seinfeld just weren’t very good. It’s not that they didn’t have some great moments. The Kenny Roger’s Roasters episode in Season 8 is one of my favorites, if just for the plot line in which Jerry and Kramer temporarily switch apartments and subsequently begin to take on elements of one another’s personalities. The episode that involves George’s “deal” with the pigeons to move out of the way when a human passes by was also a highlight. There were other moments of amusing lines or plot points over each season, but the show seems to have fundamentally changed its perspective with the departure of co-creator Larry David after the seventh season.

Without David, Seinfeld abandoned much of the sharp, observational humor that had made it so great in favor of a much broader, more surrealistic vein that had Kramer going to a vet to get treatment for a cough because it was similar to the cough of a dog in the building and subsequently exhibiting canine behavior. Really? Watching the last two seasons of Seinfeld was like watching Michael Jordan play for the Washington Wizards, after his second return from retirement. Jordan was still a very good player by NBA standards, averaging more than 20 points per night. But who wanted to watch Michael Jordan be just “very good?”

The Seinfeld finale, with its endless string of characters from previous episodes to testify against the cast or just observe their trial, was the perfect encapsulation of a problem that had dogged the show for its last several seasons: too much of a reliance on quirky recurring characters. In the beginning, the show was strong because it revolved almost entirely around its four-character core. Indeed, for the first few seasons, they barely left Jerry’s apartment.

The show was always strongest when the four leads were together, playing off one another. But as its run wound down, it seemed to rely more and more on its outside characters. There was Puddy, Banya, Tim Whatley, Jackie Chiles, Steinbrenner, et al. It’s not that these characters weren’t funny in their own right. More often than not, they hit their marks and served their intended purpose. But they were from a different show. Early on, there might be an occasional appearance by Newman, Frank and Estelle Costanza or Morty and Helen Seinfeld. But most of the classic episodes involved a character who would disappear from the Seinfeld universe forever after one or two shows: the close talker, the low talker, the Maestro. The recurring characters took away from the effectiveness of the show by detracting and distracting from the chemistry of the Fab Four.

The seventh season, which ended with the death of George’s fiancée Susan Ross, marked the end of Larry David’s association with the show until his return to help write the finale. If the main cast of Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards were the Fab Four, the easy analogy would be that Larry David was George Martin. But just as the Beatles were driven by the two-man partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Seinfeld was a result of the creative combination of Seinfeld and David. Just as Lennon added a dash of vinegary sarcasm to McCartney’s catchy melodies, David added an angry, sarcastic misanthropy to Seinfeld’s comic riffs. Neither was better or worse. They complemented each other. The chemistry and the balance is what made it work.

The Lennon-McCartney analogy continues post-Seinfeld. After the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney produced consistent hits with catchy, radio-friendly tunes, while Lennon’s music took a more edgy, political bent that won him praise from the cognoscenti but may have turned off some of the Beatles’ fans who weren’t ready to go that far. After Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld continued to be successful, selling out appearances and releasing the occasional comedy album. He was always funny, but pretty much middle-of-the-road. He didn’t work blue. Seinfeld may have been the raciest material he ever did. Meanwhile, David was the critical darling with the edgy HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. David, like Lennon, is divisive. He’s coming from a definite perspective, and you either like it or you don’t. The neurotic, curmudgeonly Larry David of Curb probably doesn’t appeal to every Seinfeld fan. But it was real, and it was funny.

Perhaps David’s greatest single contribution to Seinfeld was his influence on the most interesting Seinfeld character, George Costanza. The evolution of George — or, more accurately, the devolution — over the course of the show’s first few seasons is the most fundamental shift among the four main characters. In the pilot episode “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” George is presented as much more assertive than the nebbishy, neurotic mess that he became later. It’s Jerry who seems flummoxed and unsure of himself. He agonizes over the mixed messages of a woman he met on a road trip who’s coming to New York to visit, while George is the one dispensing the sage advice: “It’s signals, Jerry. Signals.”

What I liked about George is that David, Seinfeld and the writers kept so much of his character a secret. Other than a brief conversion to Latvian Orthodox, his religion is never really referenced.[4] Likewise, his ethnicity. Is “Costanza” Hispanic? Jewish? It’s not until the sixth season that we learn Frank Costanza spent his childhood in Tuscany with his cousin Carlo, meaning the Costanzas are presumably Italian. But the ethnic and religious backgrounds of George Costanza are as vague throughout the series as Jerry’s Jewish heritage is pronounced.

Ultimately, it was more than time to pull the plug on Seinfeld. Even the most classic of TV shows eventually run their course, and Seinfeld probably hung around at least one season too long. When the show started, Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine were all young city dwellers who could conceivably still have had the sort of freedom and independence they needed to make their hijinks work. But as the show neared its end, their suspended adolescence began to come across as unseemly. Seinfeld was always at its funniest when it was rooted in the real world. And one of the most inflexible rules of the real world is that everyone has to grow up sometime.

[1] “Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don’t stare at it, it’s too risky. You get a glimpse and you look away.”

[2] This was a change from the TV climate at the time, but it certainly wasn’t unprecedented. Shows like Laverne and Shirley, Three’s Company and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had existed outside of the traditional family dynamic long before Seinfeld.

[3] Not all of the dated jokes are the writers’ fault. In Season 5’s “The Masseuse”, Elaine tries to come up with a new name for her boyfriend Joel Rifkin because he has the same name as a notorious New York-area serial killer by flipping through a sports magazine. In an ironic twist, one of the new names she suggests is O.J. It was perfectly innocuous when the episode aired in 1993, but would become awkward a year or so later.

[4] Some Seinfeld mysteries remain unsolved to this day. Such as why George is the only one of the four with a New York accent, even though Jerry and Kramer both grew up in the Big Apple. Also, Jerry’s building has a buzzer to let people upstairs, yet people are constantly popping in unannounced.