Seinfeld (#2)

A show about "nothing" just misses the top ranking on my list.

I’m old enough to remember when Jerry Seinfeld was someone I saw doing standup on late night talk shows, and the excitement I had when I’d heard he got his own TV show. At the time, Seinfeld felt like a secret to me, one of those comedians you liked but wasn’t a household name or a burgeoning movie star.

And when that show started it was … a bumpy ride. George Constanza (Jason Alexander) was basically doing a pretty weak Woody Allen impression. Kramer (Michael Richards) - we didn’t know his first name was Cosmo yet - was just weird, without that crafty genius he’d develop in time. Elaine Benes (Julia-Louis Dreyfus) was still adorable, but she was extremely secondary in those initial episodes. And Jerry was really, really awkward. (Truth: He never got great as an actor, but the show figured out how to make it work.)

But pretty soon, it hit its stride and I think it’s fairly clear became the best sitcom of all time.

The last episode of Seinfeld was aired on May 14, 1998. That’s more than 24 years ago from the time I’m writing this and I swear I hear (or make) a reference from that show almost daily. For a show this popular, it’s kind of idiotic to try and sum up what it is about, but it’s honestly a show about comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his friends. That’s … it.

Famously, the show called itself a “show about nothing” but of course each episode had a plot - they just weren’t traditional sitcom plots. Instead, they were about waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, trying to get the last chocolate babka at a deli, looking for a car in a mall garage … and so forth.

As it turns out, the show had a LOT of plotlines that no longer make sense in todays world. Most of them could be solved with a simple cell phone, so the show in some way is trapped in amber - but in other ways, it’s timeless.

SO much of Seinfeld is part of our daily pop culture, leaking into everything - look at this pairing from the US Amateur event recently:

(Newman, of course, is Seinfeld’s neighbor and enemy, played gleefully by Wayne Knight.)

People celebrate Festivus, a made-up holiday by George’s father, which includes the Airing of Grievances and the Feats of Strength. “NO SOUP FOR YOU!” is commonplace now, even for people born after the show completed its run. Many folks thought the J Peterman catalog was just a plot device, and are delighted to find out it actually exists.

Shrinkage. Art Vandelay. Mulva. Sponge-worthy. “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.” These are all super random things that shockingly few people need context for.

The New York aspect of the show was also fairly niche, and yet brought so much mainstream. Things like the black-and-white cookie, babka, or a good mulligatawny soup are things that most folks were barely aware of before this TV show. The episode where Kramer gets “lost” in the Village is really funny IF you’ve ever realized how structured most of the city’s streets are and then head into the chaos that is the Village and south of there. But importantly, it’s funny even if you DON’T know that.

Seinfeld is part of us. And it’s because it was so impossibly funny. Clearly, the show started as a vehicle for Seinfeld himself, and those initial few years interspersed segments of standup that framed the episodes, a device they quickly got rid of. But the rest of the gang were just as funny - or funnier. Kramer was big and bold (him singing the Hennigans song, running Kramerica, hitting Titleists into the ocean, I could easily go on), but the true comic genius of the show was George Constanza. In time, we learned that he was really a proxy for co-creator Larry David, who showcased this in his own wonderful show, Curb Your Enthusiasm. But that doesn’t deter one iota from how great Constanza is, and how he’s in many ways the heart of the show.

Critics of the show tend to point out that the four main characters weren’t … very nice. That’s true but it’s not something that ever really occurred to me - they were funny, they were neurotic, and they were very New York in the best ways. I have truly barely scratched the surface here - George as a hand model, the mania that is the Costanza parents, the Del Boca Vista, etc. I’ve seen every episode multiple times and I’ll likely see them all again in due time. It’s the funniest show and it’s stayed funny despite so much time going by

Why yes, that’s a LEGO set of Seinfeld’s apartment. Why do you ask?

It’s why it’s EASILY my 2nd favorite show of all time. What’s first? You can probably guess … but you’ll need to wait a week. Oh, indeed.