Pilots and what could have been
JULY 6TH, 2016 — POST 184
On July 5th, 1989 — that’s basically 27 years ago to the day — the pilot episode of arguably the best sitcom of all time aired. Then titled The Seinfeld Chronicles, the world was introduced to Jerry Seinfeld and George Constanza, characters that would go on to garner tribal affinity for the next decade (and beyond). Even though, I’m told, by the mid-1990s you were either a “Friends person” or a “Seinfeld person”, Seinfeld notably took a few seasons to find its groove, both in time-slot and audience. Moreover, if you watch enough you can start to chart the topography of the show season-to-season as the characters are worn in, as the intersectional plot “thesis” is made leaner and more potent. When the paradigmatic Seinfeld form — arguably most evident in The Contest or The Marine Biologist — is embedded in a viewer, The Seinfeld Chronicles, the episode that made the show happen, looks weird.
The different theme music, for one, is uncanny. Instead of Monk’s, the coffee shop with a suspiciously free booth (well not as suspicious as the couch in Central Perk), we open in Pete’s Luncheonette. But most disconcerting is that Jerry and George resemble something like Kevin or Gene, Bizarro Jerry and Bizarro George from the late-series episode The Bizarro Jerry. George in particular is almost an aspirational version of the downtrodden, dim-witted boob that we get to know intimately. In the opening scene, George openly addresses the waitress, getting a female perspective on Jerry’s relationship woes, one he hopes to bolster his own theory. When has George been this sure of himself, this convincing? Not until The Opposite, the Season 4 finale, do we meet a George this put-together again. This is to say nothing of Kramer who appears briefly as a lobotomised loner, a far cry from the arguably libertarian entrepreneurial “hipster doofus” he blossoms into later.
The Seinfeld Chronicles might hint at a George who’s wings were clipped, but another iconic sitcom pilot shows that whole subplots and thematic undercurrents can too stripped away in seeking the nugget that will sustain a series. A Touch of Class, the Fawlty Towers pilot too has some odd inclusions for any indoctrinated acolyte of John Cleese’s and Connie Booth’s 1970s masterpiece. In rewatching last week, I was struck by an exchange between Basil and Sybil in which they discuss an ad Basil has taken out in a local paper. This might be the first and only time the status of the Fawlty Towers hotel as a legitimate money-spending-money-making business is acknowledged. But even more, it’s not just that an ad was taken, but that Basil had placed an ad with aloof copy in a high-profile magazine. Basil, forever wishing to punch above his class, is hunting distinguished clientele, utterly misanthropic at the middle class patrons. He’s smarter, he’s sophisticated, he’s enlightened. But he’s not. Seduced by a conman posing as a “Lord Melbury”, Basil is ruined in A Touch of Class, any chance of courting legitimate high status clients squandered — his impotent rage most animatedly taken out on a potted plant.
Whether it’s George’s proficiency or Basil’s class warfare, either the respective creative teams or executives deemed these to bloat the focus of either series moving forward. For us, these pilots stand as glimpses into the possibilities each show could have pursued, ones which, if other things were seen as chaff, might have seen keener focus and attention. Instead of a sitcom predicated on a hotel manager, in the people-service business, who can’t stand people, there’s a bizarro-world Fawlty Towers that is built around a self-loathing member of the middle class tirelessly crafting layer upon layer of high class artifice. For those of us enamoured with these shows as much for their evidence of their creators’ formidable technique, these pilots allow our eyes to be turned back to anything we’ve done as evidence of pre-focused product.
More than anything, they’re testaments to output over perfection. The value of a pilot beyond a mark on pop cultural history is a prescription for a process of refinement, a slice of the creative process that we’re rarely afforded.
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