100 Favorite Shows: #13 — Seinfeld
“Every ten minutes we pore over the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event!”
When stand-up comedian star Jerry Seinfeld rose to prominence throughout the 1980s, NBC decided to capitalize on his talents by giving him free reign over his own sitcom. An observational comedian, Seinfeld combined what he knew best in the realm of humor with a creative premise from fellow comedian and writer Larry David. Together, they created The Seinfeld Chronicles, which bowed in 1989 and navigated a winding path to air. The anti-sitcom pilot was met with poor reception, sparse viewership, and just a five-episode order for season one. Renamed Seinfeld, the series received extra support from Castle Rock Entertainment and it eventually landed a twelve-episode second season. Over time, word of mouth built that Seinfeld was unlike anything in television history — and this was a good thing. The premise of four New Yorkers hosting meandering conversations and steadily demolishing the lives of those with whom they came in contact was neither eye-catching nor palatable. But through sharp writing, intersecting storylines, and lived-in performances (Seinfeld played a version of himself; Julia Louis-Dreyfus was his ex-girlfriend, Elaine Benes; Jason Alexander was his childhood best friend, George Costanza; Michael Richards was his next door neighbor, Cosmo Kramer), Seinfeld endured over nine seasons to become one of the most popular (and best) television series ever made.
(Spoilers about nothing (and about Seinfeld) are in this essay.)
“The second button is the key button. It literally makes or breaks the shirt,” Jerry tells George in both the pilot and the finale of Seinfeld. It’s a meaningless conversation about the “rules” surrounding buttons, as the two characters ascribe attributes and senses of purpose to their shirt adornments like they are the role players on championship teams. Debating whether or not Daniel Theis is an impact player for the Boston Celtics or where Yadier Molina should bat in a lineup are seemingly meaningless diatribes, but a button? This is the sort of conversation you’d typically hear on The Poscast as something that would only fascinate a sociologist.
But on Seinfeld, assigning a role to a button and making an argument for the purpose of one of the five to seven buttons on a shirt were the daily factors for the foursome, who found it possible to have an opinion about everything in their world, no matter how innocuous. Characters quickly came and went from Jerry’s apartment or their booth at Monk’s Café. Their back-and-forth dialogue about “nothing” was clever, if not pointless. Together, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer constantly assigned names, monikers, and biographies to the social foibles and tropes of menial daily life. (When Elaine returns to David Puddy (Patrick Warburton) in “The Voice,” Jerry observes that their “bump-into” will lead to a relationship “backslide,” as if it is some well-known hallmark of a functioning society.) That was Seinfeld.
These recurring, cyclical moments of inanity were always played brilliantly by the show’s four actors, each perfectly cast in the roles that emanate from various facets of Jerry’s and Larry David’s real lives. What set them apart was the sincerity. One could watch Seinfeld and genuinely feel that the conversations between Jerry and George were based on real-world dialogue between Jerry and Larry David or Jerry and Jason Alexander or Jerry and whomever. It felt excruciatingly real and yet, this quality helped Seinfeld remain endlessly accessible to those who found its heightened reality occasionally insufferable.
After all, the characters on Seinfeld were each individualistic narcissists who forced themselves to act like they cared about things like human decency and the well-being of others, simply because that is what society demanded of them. Most of the time, they were each their own worst enemies, but that never stopped them from acting entirely untouchable.
Because of how fully-realized each lead figure is on Seinfeld, it’s almost impossible to name a favorite character. Every day, based on my mood (think “morning mist”), my favorite changes. As a lead, Jerry is underrated (typically because of the prevailing narrative that Seinfeld is a bad actor, as many ignore how dynamite he was in this specific role), for all of his observational bends and specific interests (affinities for Superman, Yoo-hoo, Tiny Toons, and breakfast cereals are as crucial to Jerry’s identity as his occupation as a stand-up comedian). The stocky, miserable, miserly George is an endless trove of hilarity, as he constantly pins himself against his own lies. Elaine is egotistical, short-tempered, and honest to a fault with a demeanor that is “so beautiful” and a personality that is “so interesting,” as she fantasizes for herself when daydreaming of her ideal man in “The Rye.” And Kramer, the breakout character, is an absurdly successful, vagabond “hipster doofus” who acts — at all times — like Goofy in the animated short film, How to Play Golf. They’re all so perfect, so iconic. Can’t it just be a four-way tie for favorite?
The full depiction of each of the four helped contribute to Seinfeld’s status as being more than just a sitcom vehicle for a successful stand-up. (Yes, there was still plenty of stand-up attention, as many episodes began with Jerry on the stage, observing social mores that are still relevant today (his acknowledgement that people “need” a flashing red light on their answering machine reminds me of how I feel when I see a red envelope on my Reddit account) and funny to club attendees in the 1990s.) Instead, Seinfeld’s desire to build a show around himself combined with Larry David’s creative ideas to depict a show with “no learning,” no redemption, and the high-concept plotting of intersecting storylines. Seinfeld was revolutionary because it was like nothing seen before, even though it was firmly grounded in a day-to-day reality. Painstakingly so.
The definitive example of Seinfeld’s intertwining narratives is the fifth season’s “The Marine Biologist.” Working for Pendant Publishing, Elaine is tasked with enticing the acclaimed, fictional author from Russia, Testikov (George Murdock). However, when she offends him with the ceaseless beeping of her electronic organizer (which she obtained from Kramer), Testikov hurls it out the window, where it collides with the skull of Corinne (Carol Kane). In response, Corinne dials one of the phone numbers in the organizer, which winds up being Jerry’s, and he immediately takes to Corinne and uses his privileged knowledge to tease Elaine.
While out and about, though, Jerry bumps into Diane (Rosalind Allen), a woman from college with whom George was once infatuated. Again deciding to mess with his friends, Jerry claims George is a marine biologist, after George proclaimed his love of whales earlier in the episode. Conversely, Diane is attracted to the profession and asks for George’s number. Immediately conflicted (George adores Diane, but is more comfortable lying about being an architect (named Art Vandelay) than lying about being a marine biologist), George accepts the date and tries to find a palatable way to break the news to her. However, he’s not able to tell the truth before they’re walking along a beach where passersby call out for the help of a marine biologist to remove an obstruction from a whale’s blowhole. The obstruction? A Titleist golf ball, hit into the ocean earlier that day by Kramer, who sought to hone his golf game.
Granted, Kramer winds up swallowed by sand in his clothes (pricking his spastic body and lack of concentration, once more), so his golf game might have been handicapped by the driving practice instead. However, he hardly seems to care. Kramer feels no remorse when George reveals the golf ball (after his story, which began, “The sea was angry that day, my friends”); he’s mostly just shocked it was his doing at all. New York City is such an expansive metropolitan area where millions of people live, but because of the selfish, I-am-the-only-person-who-matters-in-the-world attitudes of these four, the city becomes a little smaller, considering they’re the ones wreaking havoc across it.
Over time, as we understood the Seinfeld formula and characters better, so too did the characters in the show. Few moments are as funny on Seinfeld as those when Jerry plays the role of a bemused observer to the antics and mundanity circling his orbit. (Yet, these moments had to be earned by episodes upon episodes of character repetition. The better we knew Seinfeld, the funnier it would become when characters voiced their exasperation at their own behavior.) After all, when his life revolves around meaningless, fake Leo Tolstoy trivia and the t-shirt canonization of yellow clothing named “Golden Boy” (specifically in “The Marine Biologist), a man in his mid-to-late thirties has to ponder what exactly he’s doing with his time on Earth.
Jerry can often predict what Elaine will do before she does it; he’s able to “ballpark” the amount of time Kramer wastes in his apartment; he’s frequently frustrated by his status as a human being. The best of these moments comes in “The Engagement” when Jerry and George dine together at Monk’s and George mentions that he has the feeling of a haircut on the back of his neck, but he didn’t actually get a haircut that day. In response, Jerry sighs, sputters his lips, and buries his head in his hands before asking, “What is this? What are we doing? What in God’s name are we doing?” He continues, “What kind of lives are these? We’re like children. We’re not men.” George can do nothing but sheepishly agree.
On most contemporary shows at the time (save for The Larry Sanders Show, perhaps, which depicted frequent irritation between Larry, Artie, and Hank Kingsley), the characters expressed a genuine fondness for one another, especially when they’re friends. Not on Seinfeld, though. Jerry and George are friends, but they also understand one another’s shortcomings and find more fun in toying with one another than in supporting.
Take “The Caddy,” for example. When George locks his keys in his car, stranding the vehicle at Yankee Stadium, he winds up impressing the head of scouting, Wilhelm (Richard Herd), and the owner, George Steinbrenner (Lee Bear and Larry David). Because they think he’s working harder than anyone in the team’s front office, George winds up on a shortlist to become assistant to the general manager, prompting Jerry to remark, “That’s a hell of an organization they’re running up there.” It’s not that Jerry sees George’s own depravity, though. Rather, George acknowledges it too, suggesting that his presence at the stadium could only hurt his chances at the job and agreeing with Jerry that locking his keys in his car was the “best career move” he ever made.
However, the episode also contains another moment of Jerry’s self-awareness after George, taking a self-appointed vacation, asks him to drive to the stadium and clean the flyers and bird droppings off his car. (Kramer accompanies him, after he skiddishly enters Jerry’s apartment, prepared to agree to go on any adventure proposed.) Of course, it’s not an adventure, though. It’s just cleaning someone’s car in a parking lot so they can get a promotion they didn’t earn. “This is quite a life I lead,” Jerry remarks, as if he hates himself for perpetuating the pointlessness of his youth, but is also too resigned to his own personality to do anything about it.
Like “The Marine Biologist,” “The Caddy” is another example of storylines interweaving with one another. However, it’s not just one character’s A-story crowding the Venn diagram of another character’s B or C-story. So much is happening in “The Caddy,” but in just twenty-four minutes, Seinfeld managed to pull off the collision of two A-stories.
On the one hand, there’s the story of George’s potential promotion, which (after Jerry and Kramer crash his car en route to clean it) turns into the belief from Steinbrenner that George is actually dead. The cartoonish depiction of the stodgy Yankees owner is a hilarious hallmark of Seinfeld, depicting the larger-than-life figure as being exceedingly passionate and impulsive, in equal measure. Believing George to be dead, he travels to his parents’ home (Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris portray Frank and Estelle Costanza, respectively) to tell them the news. Estelle is instantly shattered and tearful (even if she’s skeptical about George’s work ethic, as Steinbrenner describes it), but Frank is preoccupied with coming face-to-face with the owner of his beloved team. He takes the opportunity to tell Steinbrenner, “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing!” after the Yankees traded away Jay Buhner. (This isn’t even Frank’s best line in the episode, as he leaves a message on Jerry’s answering machine, “Jerry, it’s Frank Costanza! Mr. Steinbrenner’s here! George is dead! Call me back!”)
George winds up not getting the promotion, but his attempt at leaving the car in the parking lot to attain it did result in Jerry and Kramer being deposited directly into Elaine’s side of the story. Considering how ingratiated into the ’90s landscape of New York Seinfeld was (with the flowing button-downs, street corner eateries, and obsession with local baseball teams), most of the “bump-into” moments were met with the characters forcing themselves to be genial. In “The Caddy,” Elaine bumps into a friend of hers from high school (whom she secretly resents), Sue Ellen Mischke (Brenda Strong).
For the characters on Seinfeld, everyone they encounter always has some irksome trait that they wind up fixating on for the entirety of the episode. For Sue Ellen, it’s the fact that she refuses to wear a bra that drives Elaine insane (as Jerry observes, she’s Elaine’s “Lex Luthor”). However, as faux-polite as Elaine is when running into Sue Ellen Mischke (who is also the “heiress to the Oh Henry! candy bar fortune,” which is just a perfectly Seinfeldian touch to a character creation if there ever was one), she’s still a bold, brash woman. When Sue Ellen jokingly asks for a birthday gift from Elaine, Elaine does not hesitate to send her a bra, which is a pointed illustration of Elaine’s greatest resentment.
However, Sue Ellen Mischke instead decides to wear the bra as a top, subverting Elaine’s expectations and frustrating her exponentially further. The intersection between the A-plots occurs when Jerry and Kramer observe Sue Ellen walking down the street in only a bra and distractedly crash George’s car (which is why Steinbrenner believes George is dead). Considering Sue Ellen’s wealth and the fact that his loyal caddy, Stan (Armin Shimerman) believes he won’t be able to golf anymore, Kramer decides to sue Sue Ellen. And when you need a lawyer on Seinfeld, Jackie Chiles (Phil Morris) is the man you call.
Chiles himself is a clear send-up of Johnnie Cochran (in another Seinfeldian swipe, Chiles employs “delicious,” “scrumptious,” and “outstanding” as adjectives for Oh Henry! candy bars, illuminating the showy bluster of O.J. Simpson’s real life lawyer) and the threads set in motion by the decisions of each of the four characters come to a satisfying close when Stan advises Kramer to push Sue Ellen on wearing the bra (just as O.J. was asked to wear the gloves). Of course, they don’t fit and everything that happens in the episode was for nothing. No character pushed their lives further. No one learned anything. Reset and try a new scheme next week: that was the way of Seinfeld. It was all about the hilarity along the way.
Of course, the comedy on Seinfeld was always paramount (and for good reason, it’s one of the funniest shows ever created). Frequently, we laugh and grin along with Elaine, as she bears witness to Jerry’s systematic put-downs of George, or shake our heads along with Jerry, who can’t believe his apartment has become a den for misanthropy in New York. But even though the humor on Seinfeld was a patented combination of what Seinfeld and David were most intrigued by in other humans, Seinfeld was still influenced by comedians that came before them.
The excitable, high-pitched line readings of Jerry (“I don’t wanna be a pirate!,” “I don’t know, Kramer!”) are made even more hysterical when arguments are resolved with Elaine hitting him (“Get! Out!”) or Kramer putting his hand up and muttering, “Ahh!,” in a manner that distinctly recalls Abbott and Costello’s classic routines of quick dialogue and physical affronts. (It’s also evident in “The Bubble Boy,” when George and Jerry attempt to convince Kramer to accompany them at George’s fiancée’s (Susan Ross, as played by Heidi Swedberg) cabin and they go back and forth naming every berry they can think of.) Even Kramer’s physical comedy (I think of “The Slicer,” which sets up an all-time great potato joke after Michael Richards instituted a classic pratfall for the character) harkens back to that of the Marx Brothers or the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy.
Seinfeld and David have an obvious reverence for the comedy that preceded them, but they were also hellbent on forging their own trail in the realms of humor and television. Through the “fantasy corporate world” of Kramer and his Kramerica schemes (“Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you’ve selected?”), specific character creations (the Soup Nazi (Larry Thomas), the Low-Talker (Wendel Meldrum), the Sponge-Worthy pharmacist (David Byrd)), and a larger cultural lexicon (“shrinkage,” “schmoopy,” “double dipping”), Seinfeld has become as much a part of everyday life as everyday life was part of Seinfeld. I can’t think of movie theater candy without imagining Elaine’s Jujyfruit detour from her ailing date (Marty Rackham). When I was getting my license, I thought of Kramer’s test drive that tested the limits of an empty gas tank in “The Dealership.” Even when I traveled to Washington, D.C., I was determined to find the Puffy Shirt in the Smithsonian Museum of American History, only to wander aimlessly, unable to find it, as if I was in an episode of Seinfeld myself. It is everywhere in our world.
This endless drumbeat of minutiae is distilled most aptly in the preeminent bottle episodes of Seinfeld, “The Parking Garage” and “The Chinese Restaurant.” The premises of both installments could be boiled down into a quick, relative line from a stand-up set of Seinfeld’s. “You ever lose your car in a parking garage?” or “You ever can’t get a table when you’re in a hurry?” Seinfeld managed to find comedy in the monotony of a dull, unremarkable parking garage and the interminable waiting area of a Chinese restaurant, the latter of which resulted in one of my all-time favorite Seinfeld episodes.
The elements of Jerry’s stand-up are apparent in the installment, as Elaine whines about how happy people get when their names are selected for a table, as if they’ve been royally chosen. “It’s enough to make you sick,” she snaps, exemplifying the term, “hangry,” before it ever entered into the lexicon. Throughout the episode, she hates everyone and everything she comes into contact with and she can only think about eating. (Elaine even snaps at Jerry, who refuses to browse a menu until he’s at a table, one of his many quirks that prompts Elaine to state, “Everything has to be ‘just so’ with you.”) Throughout, the host at the restaurant (James Hong), insists that their wait will be just “Five, ten minutes.”
Elaine’s not the only one burdened by the time constraints of the restaurant lobby. Jerry, consistently wishing he had called ahead and booked a reservation, keeps checking his watch to see if they have enough time to eat and make it to a screening of Plan 9 from Outer Space. However, he made these plans with Elaine and George as a means to avoid a dinner with Uncle Leo (Len Lesser), which backfires when he runs into Lorraine (Judy Kain), who works with Uncle Leo. Jerry goes through the obligatory motions of feigning surprise in his recognition of Lorraine, but is only thinking about the chain reaction of phone calls between Uncle Leo, his parents, and their Floridian retirement community that his decision will kick off. If only he’d made a reservation.
The bottle episode ingenuity of “The Chinese Restaurant” does not stop with Jerry and Elaine, though. For the duration, George attempts to call his girlfriend, Tatiana, with the payphone in the restaurant, but is steadily rebuked by rude “phone hogs.” To Jerry and Elaine, George festers his resentment and remarks about how much he hates both of them before he eventually explodes and shouts, “You know, we’re living in a society! We’re supposed to act in a civilized way!” (Alexander was deft at vocalizing his frustration, as with the “Summer of George,” which has spawned myriad memes.) He talks a massive talk about revolutionizing the system and norms around a public phone, but as soon as the first hog (Michael Mitz) apologizes, George caves and tells him there’s nothing to worry about. Instantly.
The agony of the wait in the Chinese restaurant festers beneath all three characters to the point where their entire area begins to warp into a surreal hellscape from which they cannot escape. A man named Mr. Cohen (David Tress) enters and is seated immediately because he’s “always here,” according to the host, leaving Elaine to stammer in disbelief as she slinks back to Jerry and George. When Tatiana eventually phones the restaurant, the host calls out for “Cartwright” and offers no apology for flipping the name with “Costanza,” leaving George stunned and speechless with no recourse. The entire feeling of the waiting area becomes one of disbelief, a shady aura of uncertainty and dreaminess. Yes, it’s heightened for comedic effect, but it still captures the feeling of being stuck in an interminable waiting room, feeling like you’re being gaslit, and assuming you’ll never be able to eat. But when they finally leave, their names are called for a table. How else could this Seinfeld episode conclude, after all?
While the experience of “The Chinese Restaurant” can be an infuriating one for viewers, there are still a few moments within the installment that bring about the underappreciated sense of fun Seinfeld possessed at every turn. After all, just because their main foursome acted like sycophants to everyone they encountered (embracing a clique status of ascribing nicknames and feeling superior to others in a way that Community and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia would later champion), they were still friendly with one another. In “The Chinese Restaurant,” for example, Jerry and George dare Elaine to march over to another table and eat an egg roll off one of their plates for fifty dollars. (George claims that, for fifty dollars, he’d stick his face into their soup “and blow.”) More than anything else, Jerry is keen on having fun with his pals. In “The Bubble Boy,” he orders Elaine coffee and broiled chicken at a northeastern diner (even though she only ordered water) because she teased him into signing a headshot for the waitress. In “The Voice,” Jerry sacrifices his relationship with Claire (Sarah Peterson) because he’d rather mock her with his friends by doing an exaggerated, Jeffrey Tambor-esque impression of her stomach (“Hellooo! La la la!”), an action with an origin that is never clearly explained, but doesn’t really matter.
The reasons why the characters on Seinfeld behaved how they did were beside the point. What mattered was that, even though Claire gave Jerry multiple opportunities to stop doing the voice and date her instead, he chose to not only have fun with his friends, but to actively humiliate this woman in public. The more their cliquey inner circle acted this way (with very few repercussions), the more they became deaf to how others would react with shock and disgust upon learning of how they go about their daily lives.
The most famous example of this has to come from “The Contest.” We all know how this episode transpires. George is caught masturbating to a Glamour magazine by his mother, prompting him to swear off the act forever. Finding such a notion laughable, Jerry challenges him to a bet about who can hold out longer. Quickly, Elaine (giving them odds) and Kramer join in on the wager and so begins the honor system challenge about who can remain the “master of his (or her) domain” the longest. (The episode also brilliantly implies masturbation without ever actually saying the word, leaving the story in an even more hysterical capacity than it otherwise would have been.)
The voyeurism of a naked woman across the street ends Kramer’s hopes instantly. Exaggerated physical sulking over John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s presence at Elaine’s gym only lasts so long before she caves. George frequently visits his mother in the hospital to watch a nurse give a patient a sponge bath through the silhouettes of a curtain. Jerry, dating Marla (Jane Leeves), a virgin, explodes with the notion that “something’s gotta give” in terms of his sexual frustration.
For them, it’s just another day in their lives, as they’ve become so desensitized to their own depravity and so comfortable around one another and their faults that they can’t fathom how their behavior could be perceived so negatively by those outside the clique. That’s exactly what happens when a shocked Marla learns of their contest, breaking up with Jerry instantly and chastising Elaine for speaking to her.
“The Contest,” even though it’s an episode that features Marla’s dismay, also manages to speak comfortably — in a highly public manner — about a part of life everyone has experience with, but no one feels secure enough to speak so openly about. It’s not just an example of Larry David pushing the boundaries of network television; it’s an example of Seinfeld’s barrage of sociological experiments, run through these four characters. When days pass by with characters as the rulers of their own castles, only Kramer manages to sleep soundly, while everyone else becomes progressively more irritable.
Seinfeld, as a whole, was almost run like a sociological experiment of what would happen if you put the four worst kinds of people into every conceivable social occurrence just to see what would happen. Sometimes, that manifests in a minute moment of gender norm flipping (as in “The Chinese Restaurant” when Elaine slips the host the bribe money, instead of Jerry). Sometimes, that manifests in a competition to see who can go the longest without masturbating. Almost always, it manifests in the egregious offending of the people they meet and the occasional ruining of their lives.
In “The Voice,” Kramer’s “assistant,” Darin (Jarrad Paul) winds up in prison for the inadvertent dropping of an oil balloon on top of Claire’s head (Jerry winces and knows there’s no way to help her, remarking only, “This is going to be a shame”). Babu Bhatt (Brian George) sees his entrepreneurship and immigration status tanked by Jerry. In “The Handicap Spot,” Lola (Donna Evans Merlo) is gifted a faulty wheelchair by George and Kramer, leading her to roll downhill to injury.
Yet, these characters were much more infrequent than some of Seinfeld’s favorite recurring stars. The only lives that remain somewhat intact by the end of Seinfeld belong to the characters who racked up many appearances over the nine seasons, as opposed to Darin, Babu, and Lola, who appeared only sparingly. David Puddy (played so deadpan by Warburton), for example, thrives when he carves his way out of Elaine’s life. The bluster of Elaine’s boss, J. Peterman (John O’Hurley), leads him to ignore her debauchery in favor of his own pontificating (he compares Sue Ellen Mischke to Zelda Fitzgerald in a delightful bit of O’Hurley pensiveness) and a life comparable to that of The Onion’s depiction of John Kerry. Even Newman (Wayne Night), the recurring character who appeared more times than anyone (sans Monk’s Ruthie (Ruth Cohen)), finds his karmic balance stronger when he separates himself from assisting Kramer and antagonizing Jerry.
Sometimes, the deplorable nature with which the Seinfeld characters interact with others is not entirely unwarranted. Yes, Jerry always manages to invent the dumbest possible reason to break up with women, but sometimes, you can kind of see where he’s coming from. In “The Bubble Boy,” for example, he strays from Naomi (Jessica Lundy) because of a laugh that sounds like “Elmer Fudd on a juicer” (he suggests watching Holocaust documentaries instead of The Naked Gun, too). However, this is not even the most justified bit of skeptical retaliation in this particular episode. That honor belongs to George.
For the most part, we understood that anyone who opposes George Costanza (a self-described “weed in Hitler’s bunker,” who is more concerned with the logistics behind superheroes’ secret identities than by the fact that all of his coworkers tell him to “go to hell”) is probably in the right, considering he’s the worst upper-class human imaginable. However, in “The Bubble Boy,” when Jerry promises a “make a wish” type visit to a boy (Jon Hayman) with a blood condition rare enough to leave him inside of a protective bubble from the outside world, George’s choice to accompany his friend quickly goes awry.
Obsessed with making record time to Susan’s cabin and the Bubble Boy’s home detour, George speeds away from Jerry, who relied on his friend for directions to the respective locations. Too selfish to return (this is a man who shoved children, clowns, and the elderly out of his way when a fire alarm rang at a birthday party), George ends up being the one from their group tasked with entertaining the Bubble Boy in a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Yet, when the Bubble Boy repeatedly sexually harasses Susan and comes across as little more than a demanding asshole to his parents and to George and Susan, Seinfeld fans could feel only reassured to know that George’s own levels of spite were bubbling beneath the surface. And when the Bubble Boy was ready to cruise to victory by answering “the Moors” for the final question, George took full advantage of a misprint and insisted that the answer was, in actuality, “the Moops.” Most of the time, George acting this way would be a source of cringe and disappointment from the viewers. But in “The Bubble Boy,” it was entirely justified.
These moments on Seinfeld were rare, though, as — for the most part — the characters on Seinfeld were in the wrong. That much is evident by “The Finale,” which depicts a ceaseless parade of iconic characters from the series’ previous 179 episodes, each of them eager to testify against the foursome and have them locked away in prison for general negligence for the well-being of their fellow human beings. This episode, like most of the Seinfeld installments by the end of the series run, required viewers to have a well-versed knowledge of Seinfeld’s characterization, formula, and relationship with sociology. It’s all so baked into the series that anyone who happened to check in on the series midway through its run would be completely lost. Fortunately for Seinfeld, it was one of the most popular comedies of all-time (and, selfishly, an all-time favorite of mine, too).
At first, the unprecedented structure of the comedy (with meta arcs, like when the fictional Jerry Seinfeld pitches a sitcom starring himself to a fictional version of NBC) was off-putting to audience members. (Even by the final episode, there were still some fans who believed set leaks that Jerry and Elaine would get married in the series finale, rather than what actually happened: an acknowledgement of the truth behind how these four operate in society.) By the end, though, Seinfeld became a highly influential comedy, especially in the mainstream.
The series was a transition away from what we felt could offend or shock people to an extent that they would still feel the need to tune in next week. (What network comedy before Seinfeld could have gotten away with George feeling nothing but relief when Susan dies from stamp poisoning?) While Curb Your Enthusiasm might have truly unleashed the potential of Larry David, Seinfeld remains a masterclass in pulling off impossible arcs of misanthropy on a national scale. From 1989 to 1998, Seinfeld was the master of its domain.
