It’s rare when a half-hour TV comedy comes along that changes the face of television. It’s even rarer when one comes along that changes the way society thinks and talks. For nine years and 169 episodes, NBC’s Seinfeld did both, holding a magnifying glass to the mundane ordinariness of life in New York City as lived by four very neurotic, eccentric friends.
The show sprang from the brains of two very different standup comics, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, neither of whom had any experience creating a situation comedy. Seinfeld’s style is keenly observational and aloof, yet engaging. David’s style is keenly observational and aloof—and misanthropic and cantankerous. The result of the pairing was a sitcom like no other. The country called it “water-cooler television”—a series that had much of the workplace talking about what had happened on TV the night before. Seinfeld tapped into the psyches of young and older viewers alike who recognized themselves and their friends in affable Jerry (playing a fictionalized version of himself), obsessive loser George Costanza (Jason Alexander), plucky, aggressive Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Jerry’s enterprising hipster goofball neighbor, Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards), and George’s and Jerry’s parents and relatives. Kramer’s chubby pal Newman (Wayne Knight) also appeared frequently to taunt his archenemy, Jerry (whom Seinfeld would greet with a disdainful, “Hello, Newman”).
It most comedy series tend to depict events that are larger than life, Seinfeld was as small as life. The show’s inside joke, which soon became an enormously famous outside joke, was that this was a show about “nothing.” In fact, it was about everything, all at once—the tiny day-to-day minutiae, petty annoyances, and obsessions that we all cope with and complain about—an outgrowth of comedian/star Jerry Seinfeld’s standup act.
Though television was changed forever by All in the Family, Maude, M*A*S*H, and some of the other series discussed in this book, there were still a few taboos in place; human foibles and functions that remained verboten, not to be depicted on primetime network TV. Seinfeld pulled that last cork out of the bottle. They created—and NBC ran—episodes featuring oral sex, flatulence, masturbation, penis size, and “man-boobs,” among other things. Illnesses and infirmities like mental retardation, deafness, and cancer were made fun of. And all of it was executed with style and wit.
More than any prior show, Seinfeld exposed the artifice of the sitcom form and stripped it away. Anything deemed remotely warm and fuzzy was quickly tossed and replaced with cold and clammy. Characters growing and learning from their mistakes? Forget it. The show’s mantra: “No Hugging, No Learning.” They were so resolute about it they even made up jackets for the staff, bearing that motto. Seinfeld’s main characters shamelessly lied, schemed, cheated, and backstabbed other characters on the show, as well as each other. Romantic partners and potential suitors were dumped mercilessly, capriciously, and often, for the shallowest of reasons—like being too nice, having a big nose, or wanting to share a toothbrush—or absurd reasons, like having “man hands,” eating peas one at a time, or having breasts that were too perfect (they had to be implants … or were they?).
Selfishness, indifference, and bad behavior were celebrated: Jerry admits that funerals are great for dates (“She’s crying, you put your arms around her, you console her.”). George, sitting with Jerry and Elaine in Monk’s Diner, thinks he’s having a heart attack—yet Jerry and Elaine continue to casually banter. Kramer, trying to help Jerry get even with a laundromat owner they believe has found and purposely not returned Jerry’s money, dumps sixty pounds of cement powder into a washing machine. At a bakery, Jerry wants to buy their last marble rye bread, but a frail old lady ahead of him in line buys it first. No problem: Jerry mugs her, snatches the bread out of her hands, and dashes away with it tucked under his arm. Kramer and Jerry, munching candy while observing a surgical procedure, accidentally drop a Junior Mint into the open body cavity … and say nothing.
No TV show in history was as dark at its core as Seinfeld, which absolutely dared its audience to laugh at its callousness and lack of heart. In perhaps the most celebrated (and controversial) instance of bad behavior rewarded, George—a victim of cold feet on the eve of his marriage to fiancée Susan Ross—is actually relieved when she dies from licking too much of the toxic glue from the envelopes of their wedding invitations, which he had chosen because they were the cheapest.
Ironically, the series that’s now hailed far and wide as one of the greatest sitcoms of all time—the greatest, to many—didn’t begin as a series at all, but as a one-time NBC special called The Seinfeld Chronicles. “The essence of the show, originally, was my desire to transplant the tone and subjects of my conversations with Larry to television,” Seinfeld has said. “At first, the idea was to have two comedians walking around in New York, making fun of things, and in between you’d have standup bits.” NBC was fine with the idea, although not particularly enamored of Larry David initially. “Well, they liked him enough that they figured it was worth a pilot. I think they would’ve gotten rid of me in a split second if they could’ve,” David told The New Yorker magazine. “They would have gotten rid of me without even thinking about it.”
The show was born with very little fanfare and without any great expectations …
We had been using Jerry Seinfeld on about every show that we had on the air. He had been on The Tonight Show, he had been on the Letterman show as a guest, we had used him as the host of a show called Spy Magazine: How to Be Famous … we even used him on the Bloopers and Practical Jokes series. So, we knew him well.
My mandate from Brandon Tartikoff was to try to find the next Jay Leno, [someone who] had the potential to break open to a much wider audience. We thought Jerry was a potential person who could do that.
When we had our first meeting with Jerry and George Shapiro—I was there with Brandon Tartikoff, and Warren Littlefield, in my office—we said to him, “Jerry, what would you like to do in television? Would you like to do a late-night talk show? Would you like to do primetime specials? Primetime series? What is it that you would like to do? We’d like to do it with you.”
Jerry said, “One thing is, I don’t wanna play like an accountant or a shoe salesman. I’d like to be myself.” That’s pretty much what he came out of the meeting with.
He went back to New York three days later, and met with his friend Larry David at Catch a Rising Star,10 ’cause Larry was doing standup. They knew each other from the standup circuit. And then they went out for a walk, to a Korean deli, and started talking and making fun of stuff on the shelves … and said, “This is what we should do. Just two guys talking and making fun of things.”
The very first week we started Castle Rock, one of our film executives said to me, “Would you like to read a really funny script?” It was Prognosis Negative by Larry David, one of those legendary never-produced screenplays. And then it was only a year later that Jerry said the man he’d brought in to work with him was Larry David. And I’d actually read Prognosis Negative. So I had no objection to him, certainly. The network didn’t know who he was—well, some of them did know who he was, ’cause he’d had a very tempestuous year on Saturday Night Live.
A younger Larry David in a publicity pose from Fridays, one of ABC’s failed attempts to compete with NBC’s late-night juggernaut, Saturday Night Live. Michael Richards was a fellow cast member. © ABC Television Network
We found out later that Jerry had returned to New York and met with his friend Larry David—who I did not know at that point. He’d been a writer on Saturday Night Live … and although I was at NBC at the time, that was before I was in charge of late night. He’d also been a regular on the ABC late-night show called Fridays, and though I’d seen that show, I didn’t know Larry specifically from it.
I knew Larry from Fridays, which my client Andy Kaufman hosted a couple of times. It was like Saturday Night Live. Larry David was in it—and I loved him. He played Larry from the Three Stooges … and he played the valet for Howdy Doody:“This way, Mr. Doody! Oh, the door’s open here, Mr. Doody! Right this way, Mr. Doody!”
I used to have long talks with Larry, so I knew he was very funny. And anyone that could stimulate Jerry into getting interested in doing a show like that was good. I felt great about Larry David.
So, they had their legendary meeting in a Korean deli in New York, and then came back to us and suggested a show. That phrase, “a show about nothing,” was never used. At least I don’t remember it ever being used in the pitch meeting. The pitch was that it was to be a show about what a comedian does when he’s not on stage and where a comedian gets his material. And based on that pitch, we agreed to a pilot script.
At the time we met with NBC, my mind said, “Well, we have to have a production company.” Howard West and I would be executive producers, but we’re not capable of deficit financing millions of dollars.
So, I called Rob Reiner—who is my cousin—and I said, “Look, NBC is interested in doing something with Jerry. You think Castle Rock is interested?” Castle Rock was young, like only a couple of years old. He said, “I love Jerry.” And then I called Jerry and told him our feelings—Howard and I both agreed that Castle Rock would be good ’cause the executives there were young, creative guys that Jerry could relate to. Then NBC said, “You’ve got to have someone that’s experienced, to help them write the script.” Gary Gilbert was under contract to Castle Rock. So Gary Gilbert started working with Larry and Jerry … but they saw things so differently that Larry and Jerry said, “We have to write our script. We can’t do it his way.”
Jerry and Larry were so strongwilled about what they had done. Gary did sit in on the writing sessions and contribute a few thoughts … but there was very little for him to do, because truly Jerry and Larry were executive producing this. He bowed out gracefully. He knew there was no role for him to grow in once it went forth to a series.
Gary Gilbert wrote a script, and Jerry and Larry wrote a script—and it went to the Writers Guild. And “created by” went to Larry and Jerry. ’Cause they’re just not the normal sitcom beats—they’re just so different, as history has showed.
We loved the material from day one. We had creative input, but I loved the script from the moment it was written, and any notes or comments we had were very peripheral. I remember one of them was that on the page, before anyone was cast in a part; I felt that the characters—especially George and Jerry—spoke alike. They were very similar on the page, and shouldn’t there be some distinction among the characters in the series?
And Larry said, “Why would I be friends with somebody who wasn’t like me?”
Which of course went to the heart of all sitcoms. If we were that different, why would we be friends? And he really stumped me when he said that. But if you think about it—of course it’s hard, ’cause the casting is so indelible now—but the characters, including Elaine, are written very, very similar to each other. They can almost exchange lines. But in the end, they were different from each other, ’cause the casting made ’em different.
We needed Jerry’s kind of nebbishy best friend … a neurotic best friend based on Larry David. Jerry wanted Larry Miller, and he was really the front-runner. And then we had Jason Alexander go on tape in New York. I knew Jason from the days when I did this half-hour comedy called E/R starring Elliott Gould, George Clooney, and Mary McDonnell. Jason Alexander played this kind of snooty administrator.
When we put Jason on tape, he was the guy! He did it very much like Woody Allen, in a way, but he just had the cadence … the neuroses they were looking for. So I showed his tape to Larry and Jerry—and they were very enthusiastic about the audition. But still, it was between him and Larry Miller down to the end. I think Jerry was convinced that Larry was the guy, and Larry was convinced that it was Jason. It was difficult to make that decision.
Kramer was a whole other thing. When we started casting it, he was really envisioned as this sort of bathrobe wearing, shuffling neighbor who never left the apartment building. We were looking for someone funny but not particularly physical. And it really came down to two actors: Michael Richards and Steve Vinovich. In fact, Steve was a lot closer to the original conception of the character. He has kind of a hangdog face. But it became very clear … I mean, Michael sort of exploded into the room. He was extremely physical, and that was not at all part of what this character was—but he was just so much funnier. Michael really sort of brought it to a whole other level.
I thought the pilot was good. Did I know that it was going to ultimately be a series that would be called the defining comedy of the 1990s? No. No one involved had that foresight. We thought we had a good little show on our hands.
We loved the pilot. And so did NBC. Everything was great until the testing came in. I’d just been through this so many times, so it wasn’t like I was dumbfounded. Anything that’s really interesting, research is tough on. The general rule of thumb is—and this was said to me by no less a person than Brandon Tartikoff, who nevertheless was a slave to research—that research will always favor the familiar.
The research report? It said, “Pilot Performance: Weak.”
It said, “Who cares about people going to a laundromat?” and “None of the supports were particularly liked, and viewers felt that Jerry needed a better backup ensemble. George was negatively viewed as a wimp who was only mildly amusing—viewers said he whined and did not like his relationship with Jerry … Despite the slice-of-life approach, the program was considered only mildly realistic and believable, and many did not identify with the things with which Jerry was involved.”
The testing was very bad. The audience sort of rejected these people as not lovable, not likable, that sort of thing. And there was no Elaine.
The guy who wrote that research report always felt badly about it. ’Cause he felt it should’ve been categorized as a “moderate”—that it was on the borderline between “moderate” and “weak” … but the call was made by whoever was in charge of research at the time that it needs to be called “weak.”
That was The Seinfeld Chronicles … which was telecast, I think, in July. Anyhow, it looked like we weren’t going to be picked up. And then I got a call from Brandon saying it’s not on the schedule.
The show was dead. And it was burnt off that summer. They showed the pilot, y’know, which is the kiss of death usually. And we were dead. In fact, we took it to another network, and pitched it there. To Fox. They passed, too.
But I knew Rick was a great supporter, so I called Rick and said, “Is there any way we can do some episodes? Even if it’s like four episodes?”
I thought it was funny. I thought people could relate to this. I felt I could relate to it. It was different than what was already on the air. And I felt it was something we shouldn’t give up on. By the way, I wasn’t alone in that. There were people at NBC, my colleagues, executives here, who came up to me after the pilot originally screened and said, “You’ve got something there.” So it’s not like I was the lone voice. Because it got laughs at the screening—believe me, you know when you’ve got a bomb pilot. The lights come up and there’s this death-defying silence. And that was not the case with the Seinfeld pilot.
So what I did was, I went to Brandon and just said, “I’ll take two hours of my specials budget.”
I was doing primetime specials at that point, and we always had uncommitted hours in our budget—just because, in the specials area, sometimes things will walk through the door at the last minute, and you don’t want to have every single hour of your budget committed already. So I said to Brandon, “I’ll take two hours that are not committed to anything else, and we’ll cut those two hours into four half hours.”
And Brandon said, “Okay, alright. Go.”
One thing they were very insistent on was adding a regular female cast member. The guys said that makes sense—and then they came up with the concept of an ex-girlfriend. But during those first episodes, NBC wanted Jerry to have a relationship with Elaine, and Jerry really fought that. The fact is, Larry and Jerry admit that that was a good idea, having a recurring female role, but they stood up to the idea that Jerry get married or engaged to her.
The network wanted to add a woman who was very comfortable hanging out with guys. Could sort of be one of the guys. The scenes for the role were not that developed … they were really looking for a woman to come in the room and kind of own it and feel like she was comfortable hanging with these guys.
We saw pretty much everyone who was available. We had Megan Mullally audition—she was great. Rosie O’Donnell auditioned for it. She was terrific, very funny … but they just didn’t feel like they wanted to hang out with her. But she was hilarious. At the time, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was tied to another series. I kept calling her manager to try to at least get her in the room for a meeting. He was like, “Well, we can’t do that yet” … so the day that her option expired on the series, she came in for a meeting with the guys.
And that was it. They were like, “She’s the one!”
The famous quote from Brandon Tartikoff, which—obviously before he passed away—he was good enough to acknowledge and admit to, when he was explaining to me why we weren’t going to go forward with Seinfeld, was, “It’s too New York and it’s too Jewish.” Now, I have to put that in context: He was from New York and he was Jewish. But he felt that it was only going to appeal to someone like him; he felt it wasn’t going to be appealing to a wide enough audience that you have to have in network television to make a living.
Yeah. When Brandon was first mulling it around, he once said, “Who would care about four Jews running around New York?” Even though they weren’t all Jews … but it had that feeling. George Costanza is an Italian name, but his mannerisms—and Jerry Stiller’s—were Jewish. Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are far from Jewish. But you have to give Brandon credit, because he went with his gut.
I’m not Jewish, and I thought it was funny! It didn’t strike me as being too Jewish. I thought it was funny enough not to give up on, and that’s why I came up with this plan: Okay, we won’t buy nine, we won’t buy thirteen—okay, if you’re concerned that it’s going to be too expensive a commitment, then fine. We’ll just back off.
And as Jerry has commented over the years, “An order for six is a slap in the face. NBC ordered four.” To my knowledge, it’s the lowest number of episodes ever ordered for a series.
At a meeting that we had right after we met with Warren Littlefield—it was Rob Reiner, Jerry, Larry, me, and Howard in the parking lot right outside of NBC—Jerry and Larry said, “Look. We can do four episodes. We’ll be proud of the episodes we did, and we can move on, feeling good about it, doing it the way we wanted to do.”
Well, four episodes is a very tiny order. Some people might consider it an insult. But I was not insulted. We took the order. So, that’s how we got the initial four episodes. That’s all that was being ordered, but we seized on it as a breath of life, and we obviously hoped that there’d be more after that. We hoped that four would lead to more, which, as it turns out, it did.
The great part is that it didn’t go through the regular comedy department, where they have a bunch of people that give a lot of notes. This was Rick Ludwin, who’d never worked on a situation comedy! So it was a blessing, the greatest thing that ever happened, that the whole thing went through the variety department.
There wasn’t a lot of network interference. There wasn’t a lot of contact between myself and the head of casting at the network on it. They didn’t really see our choices until we had ’em approved! A lot of times, y’know, you go in and the network will see the choices and reject them, and you have to start over again. We got both choices—George and Kramer—approved at the same session. They said, “Go!” And then with Julia, they approved that—she didn’t even have to audition.
After the pilot, Castle Rock and the network decided that Larry and Jerry hadn’t had enough experience running a show, so they hired Fred Barron to be the executive producer. I had worked with Fred at MTM and at Warner Bros., and he called me and asked if I’d like to direct two episodes. I said, “Yes, I would.”
I hadn’t seen it yet, but I’d heard that it was a good show … and then, when I got there, the line producer had a better offer for more shows, so she left—and Fred said, “Will you produce it, too?” And I said, “Okay.” So I was supervising producer of the show: postproduction, casting, hiring the crew, and maintaining the budget, for five years. And after we’d done a couple of episodes, they asked me to direct the other two.
When we did the four episodes—if you look at even that first one, “The Stake Out,” which is where George and Jerry are standing in the lobby of a building, waiting for the girl that Jerry has met to come down in the elevator. They know she works in the building. You see, even in that first episode, the sort of style that the show would become. So, we filmed those four episodes … and it didn’t make the fall schedule for the second year in a row. Once again, it was deemed not strong enough to make the fall schedule.
They were made around December and January of the following season, with the thought that they go on the air in the spring. But then they didn’t, ’cause they tested badly again!
But the four episodes were terrific. And Brandon called me in March and actually said he’d give us a “Sophie’s Choice.” The choice was this: He said, “You can either go on next month, April, in a not great time slot after Dear John … but you’d be eligible then to be on my fall schedule if you do well. Or … you can hold off and not go on till the summertime—in which case you’ll have missed the fall schedule—but I’ll put you on after Cheers.”
I said, “I like the Cheers spot.” So we went on that summer in the good time slot.
I thought we were on track. I thought we were getting there. And even though it didn’t make the fall schedule, those four episodes played after Cheers on Thursday nights in late May into June of 1990. And the ratings were pretty good. There was a feeling we were onto something there … so based on the performance after Cheers on that Thursday night run, NBC ordered thirteen more episodes.
Let’s put it this way: I thought we were being fair to the show at that point. And if it made it beyond that, great—but even if it didn’t, I felt we were being fair to the people involved. That they were getting their shot.
Seinfeld was different, from the beginning. The stories, as seemingly insignificant as they were, had very little gentle emotion. I think Larry had said early on, “No hugging, no learning,” as a policy. They just felt different. And I was directing every week—I would’ve been happy doing that most anywhere, but this one was special. And even though they didn’t let Larry David run it the first four episodes, the series was always his voice.
We had never done a sitcom before, and people would say to us, “Well, do you have a bible?” Sitcoms usually create a bible, where they’d have all the characters broken down, and their traits, and their characteristics, and their motives, and their personalities. And we were like, “A bible? We don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” We would just do what we thought was funny, y’know? And almost wish that it would get canceled in some ways. Because we really didn’t know what we were doing. And we didn’t wanna really work that hard, and all that stuff—but we got kind of trapped.
The way it often got written was, it was just Jerry and Larry and myself, and eventually Peter Mehlman … we would just sit and kind of examine, and talk, and think about things and themes and ideas and dilemmas and morality and ethics. And in doing that, it was almost like a Talmudic examination of these ideas. So, it was a very intellectual process that seemed to come from that Talmudic tradition of the commentaries … of turning an idea around, and examining it and shining a light on it, and getting kind of a dialectic going about it. And then, eventually, those discussions turned into episode ideas.
Besides Larry and Jerry, Larry Charles was the most important voice on that show, because he is an exceptional writer. He and Larry David had been friends since they worked on Fridays together. Larry was able to find someone else’s voice and still not lose his own writing style. That’s very rare when you’re a young writer.
In some ways, working with Larry and Jerry, I felt like George Harrison working with Lennon and McCartney. They were totally in synch, and dominated, and I would just try to get a good song on the album, y’know? But what I was able to do was shore up certain kind of weaker sides of the show.
What I was able to contribute was, first of all, I was really able to almost be like the devil on Larry’s shoulder when Jerry was the angel—and kind of push him to go darker, which he had the instinct and intuition to do. And also, I felt very connected to Kramer, so I would push to make sure he got developed and expanded.
And just in terms of breaking the stories, Larry and I used to take these hikes in Fryman Canyon in Studio City, near where the show was done, and see if we could get these plot twists and turns in such a way that they would be endlessly surprising and fascinating, and almost, in a way, like you’d be able to go back and watch them again and again the way we saw the shows that we sort of liked.
We all shared an affinity for the Abbott & Costello TV show, we all shared an affinity for Superman, we all shared an affinity for the 1950s sitcoms that were on in reruns when we were growing up … like Honeymooners or Bilko and shows like that that were on WPIX in New York. And we all have watched those shows again and again and again, until they were ingrained in our brains. Even things like Jack Benny—shows where there was a blurry line between reality and fiction—or Burns & Allen … Danny Thomas … or Joey Bishop Show.
Seinfeld’s creators and writers were strongly influenced by 1950s sitcoms like The Abbott & Costello Show, in which famous comedians portrayed fictionalized versions of themselves. © CBS Television Network
Y’know, all those shows were about comedians who played themselves, and it was always sort of provocative in some way. It’s like, is it supposed to be real? Is it fiction? And the line was even being blurred back then. They’re very avant-garde shows that don’t get their due.
I wrote the first freelance script that got on the air. I had met Larry in New York a couple of times, and bumped into him out here in L.A. He said, “I’m doing this little TV show with Jerry Seinfeld. Maybe you can give me a writing sample.” And what I gave him was an “About Men” column from the New York Times.
It’s so funny, because so many people who I know—who knew Larry better than I did—got the same offer. And they would turn in their writing sample, and he would pass it on to Jerry. Y’know, Jerry always played the heavy. He never had any problem going, “Yeah, just say I wasn’t into it.”
Like a week later, I got a call from Larry saying, “Jerry loved your stuff and said sign him up.” Which meant, y’know, coming in to pitch an idea. So I pitched an idea, and Larry Charles happened to be in the room when I pitched it, and he gave it a nudge in a really good direction. Really, all I had was one storyline with basically two beats.
And they go, “Okay, go ahead.”
The great thing about them is they didn’t know anything. No other show in the history of the world would’ve sent me off to just write at that point. I mean, I remember going into that office, and it was in the afternoon … and Jerry is on the couch, going, “Y’know, I haven’t done anything all day. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
So, I was thinking now, “This is the place for me!”
Larry and Jerry are both very bright guys. They were smart, and willing to do what they had to do to make the show work. They knew what they were doing—they just didn’t know how to do it. I knew how to do it. I said to them right away, “If you can think of it, we can do it. I’ll shoot it if you write it.” And they did, and we did.
And we changed the way sitcoms looked. I had a note, in each of the first two seasons from the network executives: “Can you make it look more like a sitcom?” I said no … and they shook their heads and walked away.
The first four were particularly fun for me, because we were doing it in a way that you hadn’t seen before … and I was gettin’ away with it! I was the only one that knew what was going on. [laughing] Making it look different—not like a sitcom. And because we had the variety department at NBC running the show, they didn’t mess with us. So I was able to do some things I probably wouldn’t have been able to do had the comedy guys been there. I was shooting it—although with multiple cameras—and planning the shots as if it were a single-camera show, so it looked better.
The thing about comedy directing—and comedy anything—is there is a shorthand. It’s like jazz. You either hear the music or you don’t. So, for Larry David and Jerry, but Larry especially, when people outside who don’t hear the music and just don’t know it—network executives, managers, agents, all these other people—started giving input into the show, it drove them nuts! I remember Warren Littlefield at one point coming in and saying, “Y’know, I just thought of a wonderful line in the car on the way in” … and you’d see smoke go out of Larry David’s ears.
And he’d say, “See? That’s what I’m talking about! That’s what I mean! That drives me nuts!” Because what he’s saying is, they’ve examined the script like a piece of Talmud! They’ve gone through every cul-de-sac, every corner. I mean, yes, anyone can contribute a line. That isn’t what it’s about.
That’s where the frustration was. And they didn’t think much of the show at that time. It wasn’t doing well. Hadn’t hit its stride. But you could see where it was headed. And you know, the way in which they worked out to have three stories converge—they all meet at some point in a Larry David script—that was an invention of his and Jerry’s, and Larry Charles, and whoever else.
The shows became so densely packed with story … I mean, even in great sitcoms like All in the Family, there were basically three scenes. Four scenes. An amazingly ambitious All in the Family might have six scenes or something. And we would have shows with like thirty-five scenes in them!
People were going, “You can’t do a show like this. We don’t have the sets!”
We’d go, “They can just stand against the wall!”
Y’know, we didn’t care. And, kind of inadvertently, a style emerged out of that that was very densely packed. It just sort of evolved—because we didn’t know what we were doing on a certain level. We didn’t know how to write a sitcom, so we just tried to write a funny show.
People who got to create shows were always people who had been on other shows. And they maintained the same system of doing things. Larry and Jerry didn’t. Larry had never run a sitcom … so they just did it their way. There’s really no jokes in it. That’s what’s so great, there’re no jokes. It’s just people talking, and funny conversation. Especially, like, the conversation early on about Magellan:
George says, “That’s who you like? Magellan?”
And Jerry goes, “Sure. All around the world! Who do you like?”
And he goes, “DeSoto.”
“What did he do?”
“He discovered the Mississippi.”
“Oh, like they wouldn’t have found that.”
It’s all these little snippets of life. There’s a lot of importance placed on being observant and informed … and yet, they also talk about themselves—like in my first episode, there was this run in there. We had Jerry and George arguing about who’s a bigger idiot between the two of them, and each of them arguing for themselves! Y’know:
“I’m a much bigger idiot than you.”
And George going, “With all due respect, no one’s a bigger idiot than me.
The fact that we could get away with something like that was so great.
The most personal comedy will get the widest audience, always, because the audience can accept a personal opinion about anything. It’s the way in which news that’s subjective—even if it’s contrary to your opinion—is more valuable than phony objective news. It’s the same thing with comedy. Just give me your personal version—you don’t have to be black to appreciate Richie Pryor’s anger about the white/black world. You’re getting the humor of it. Cause you’re relating to the emotion, and the emotion is: “I’m pissed about something. And I’m gonna get myself heard about this.”
Same thing with Seinfeld: You’ve got very much Larry David’s sort of misanthropic view of relationships in the world … and you’ve got Jerry’s sort of centrist version of that, moving him back to the center. And that combination was exhilarating to an audience who’d never seen anything like that! They might not be able to define it, but they could just say, “Wait a second. This is genuinely funny, and everything else feels like fake funny.”
I think that was just very much Larry’s sensibility. He didn’t believe in the false morality of most TV shows, and I agree with him. And Jerry agreed with him, too. It was fake. And one of the things that I think was a breakthrough about Seinfeld was we did not traffic in that false morality, or happy endings, or contrivances of most sitcoms. We were willing to examine the darker side of the human psyche, and let it sort of flow wherever it might go.
I would describe those characters as a small community of outsiders that are just like you and me … they embody all of the sorts of emotional traits that everyone does—a little bit of larceny, a little bit of deception. And, at a particular age, I would say: They were thirtysomething. That group at forty-five or fifty would be very different.
One of the great things about the show is that it not only dealt with the world as it is, but it dealt with the world as the characters wished it would be. They were always looking for a perfect world.
I wasn’t on staff yet, but when they shot “The Deal”—when Jerry and Elaine try to make that deal where they can sleep together and still be friends—I was going to every episode, ’cause I was going to be on the show next year. So I was at that taping, and in the first scene, where they’re talking about how this can’t get in the way of that, I remember sitting there thinking, “This is the greatest single scene in the history of sitcoms.” The most beautiful, perfect, funny, real thing. ’Cause here are these two people just trying to succeed at something that people have been trying to do forever. That was a big theme, trying to make the world perfect. That, to me, was the best episode the show ever did.
Another Talmudic aspect of the show—and one of the ways that these issues and ideas and themes and conflicts could be explored—was our love of language. We always tried to find a way of talking about things that sort of had a flavor unto itself. Almost like a Noam Chomsky examination of how language works, and how we perceive and listen and hear and process those ideas, depending on how they’re written out and how they’re spoken.
One of the defining characteristics of Seinfeld was indeed its wordplay. Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and the others they brought in were wordsmiths of the highest order. These were writers who loved words, who adored them, and took sheer delight in turning a clever phrase and crafting dialogue that crackled. In “The Deal,” close pals Jerry and Elaine—former lovers suddenly finding themselves attracted again—attempt to negotiate terms that would allow them to resume sleeping together without compromising their friendship. The word “this” quickly becomes a euphemism for friendship, with “that” meaning sex:
Jerry: I mean if anything happened and we couldn’t be friends the way we are now, that would really be bad.
Elaine: Devastating.
Jerry: Because this is very good.
Elaine: And that would be good.
Jerry: That would be good, too. The idea is to combine the this and the that. But this cannot be disturbed.
Elaine: Yeah. We just wanna take this, and add that.
A second season episode, “The Chinese Restaurant,” was in fact nothing more than Jerry, Elaine, and George standing around for the length of the show, talking, joking, starving, suffering, and unsuccessfully attempting to bribe an inscrutable maître d’ into seating them for dinner. Though Seinfeld eventually grew quicker paced and more densely plotted, it remained dialogue-driven throughout, with so much of the series’ witty repartee becoming part of the national lexicon. People everywhere began parroting what they’d heard on the show, and referring to “Seinfeldian” moments in their own lives.
In “The Outing,” Jerry and George are mistaken for gay lovers … “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Learning that store supplies of her favored method of birth control are running low, Elaine must decide in “The Sponge” if her current boyfriend is “sponge-worthy.” George emerges from a cold swimming pool in “The Hamptons” and is instantly mortified when Jerry’s girlfriend briefly glimpses him naked and later dishes on the goods to the woman George has just begun to date—without taking “shrinkage” into account. And, most famously, Kramer, Elaine, Jerry, and George square off in “The Contest” to see who can abstain from doing “that” to themselves the longest, thereby remaining “master of their domain.” More than any other episode, that one showed how far network TV standards had evolved.
In the early years, we didn’t have any content that would be problematic. The only thing we ever heard from NBC was about “The Chinese Restaurant” episode—they didn’t want us to do it because it had no plot. We got a lot of static from NBC about doing that episode … that was our famous argument during the second season.
“The Chinese Restaurant” was a major departure for any sitcom. A sitcom generally doesn’t leave its own set for more than a scene or two—and this was the entire episode. Plus, Michael Richards wasn’t in it, because this is what happened to these guys in reality, and there was no Kramer there.
These shows came from things that had actually happened to them, like the masturbation contest. There was a contest. Larry was in a contest.
For reasons that are obvious, they didn’t let us know what the story for the following week’s script was. Normally, we’d sort of have an inkling of what the storylines are that were coming up … and for some reason, we were in the dark on that one.
One night, a bunch of the writers, Jerry, Julia, and I, a bunch of us went to the Tiffany Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, because Jason Alexander was doing a one-man show called Give ’Em Hell, Harry. And at the act break or at the end of the show, a guy who worked for me, Todd Schwartz, said, “I just found out what the storyline for tomorrow’s table read is.”
I said, “What is it?”
He said, “Masturbation.”
“Oh, man. Oh, man!”
Because that was unheard of, to do a topic like that!
Larry wouldn’t share the scripts any sooner than he had to, so I don’t think I saw it more than a week ahead of time. I was thinking, “Are they gonna let us do it?” There was some concern at the network.
I thought, “This is gonna be a rough week.” And so the next day was the table read. We read the script … and it was so clever and so funny—and the word “masturbation” was never used. I thought to myself, “Any viewer of this show is not gonna be offended by this.”
Y’know, I’ve learned over the years from the Standards department that one of the ways they look at broadcast standards is the audience’s expectation. When the audience knows what they’re going to get up front—what kind of a show it is—then you are more likely to be able to handle topics that might be considered over the line. And the manner in which the show was written, and the cleverness of it, made me think we’re going to be okay with this. I didn’t think this was gonna be a huge firestorm.
I remember reading it. Just before that I had written “The Virgin” episode, which went extremely well, and I was feeling fairly good about things. And then I read Larry’s script … and I walked in and said, “I just read ‘The Contest.’ I’m so depressed.”
And Larry goes, “That’s the highest compliment you can pay me.” Then he said, “You think they’re gonna let me do this?”
I said, “I don’t know … it’s very deftly done … you don’t use the word. It’s suitably subtle. And to answer your question, I don’t know if they’re gonna let you do this!”
I found out subsequently that Larry was prepared to quit. That Larry thought the network would not allow this episode to run—or be produced, for that matter—and that he was prepared to quit the show if that’s what happened.
That was the first episode that had anything in it to make you say, “Holy smoke!” in terms of content. It raised my eyebrows—but it was funny! And they dealt with it so well. Jerry and Larry were just operating at a much higher level than any sitcom I’d ever been involved in. Just turning out consistently strong scripts every week … frankly I’d never experienced it before. They worked their asses off. And it was a pleasure picking up a script—other scripts from other shows I’d sort of wince as I picked ’em up. Sort of, “Oh, brother.” But you always looked forward to a new Seinfeld script.
One of the things that I’ve always admired about Larry, and it’s a trait that I don’t particularly possess, is that he has a kind of intuitive sense of tone. He knows how far to take something, and how far not to take it—he knows where that line is, essentially, just intuitively.
It also had to do with the fact that Jerry is interested in being delicate with language. I’m told this was more Jerry than it was Larry. He took it as a challenge—and a fun sort of exercise—how to get over, around, or under this wall. And he did it for the sport! He wanted to find a way to do this in a clever, funny way, as opposed to just using the word as sort of a sledgehammer.
Larry and Jerry were very careful. Every single script that was done was completely rewritten … the last pass of the script was Larry and Jerry in the room together. They had this partners’ desk, where they looked at each other and went over every script. They read every line—’cause they’re both good actors, and every word passed through them.
Amazingly enough, if you can believe this, there were no notes from the network on “The Contest”! There’s not even close to a single bad word uttered. It’s done so discreetly, so brilliantly. But the network, at first, was like, “We don’t want to do this episode.”
At Castle Rock, we were discouraged. Y’know, those ideas—for “The Outing” and “The Contest”—had been knocking around for a year or two before we actually got a chance to do them. We were discouraged from doing those kinds of episodes. When we finally had a little bit more of the confidence of the network behind us, and we did them, they wound up being classic episodes.
But also, they were done in such a way that they didn’t offend anybody! They wound up being completely embraced, and even the censors were not disturbed by it.
If there were any changes at all, they were minor. As I recall, one sponsor dropped out of the show after we screened it, before it aired. But the show was then getting hot, and we were able to replace that sponsor rather quickly.
With “The Outing,” I think Broadcast Standards gave them the note that “you’ve gotta add some sort of line.” The issue was just the thought that the script could come across suggesting that being gay was an aberration, or that it was socially unacceptable … and that’s when Jerry added the line, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” That was a Standards note for some sort of line, which is what led to what’s now sort of a catchphrase.
By the time the show started doing storylines involving content that you might consider iffy, the show had reached a level of success in the history of dealing with stuff that we kept going along hand in hand—like the season of the masturbation episode. Warren Littlefield said that by then it was Seinfeld, and even though it seemed outrageous, he and the Broadcast Standards guy decided to let it go.
At the height of Seinfeld’s popularity, press coverage was all-encompassing. This 1998 caricature of the cast appeared in TV Guide, depicting (standing from l-r): Kramer (Michael Richards), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld). Seated on the sofa: George (Jason Alexander). © Glen Hanson
It really kind of went up in increments about what we could get away with. And things that would redefine the characters in a little way. Like in “The Junior Mint,” when Kramer was bugging Jerry to come watch this guy get an operation, Jerry—during a run-through—just happened to ad-lib a line. He said, “All right, all right, just lemme finish my coffee and we’ll go watch the doctors slice the fat bastard up.”
He said it kind of as a joke during the run-through, and everybody laughed so loud, we said, “Eh, let’s leave that in!” I think from that point on, Jerry became a little bit of a prick as a character. That really opened up another whole avenue.
I think that’s true. Jerry was very smart and very brilliant on many levels, and was also very courageous—which was against his managers’ and the network’s advice—when he finally embraced the idea that he didn’t have to come out smelling like a rose in every episode. That people would still love him because he had innate lovability—like Tony Soprano11, in a way. Look, Tony Soprano is a murderer, but people love him. Why? Again, it’s the “X” factors, it’s the variables. Love the actor, the way the actor projects that character.
And it was the same thing with Jerry. People loved Jerry, even when he was being evil … even when he became very dark. And once that was established, we were able to delve much deeper into these ideas. Look, he was the guy that was on camera, and he was willing to do that—and that was very courageous.
That sort of evolved. Really, George was the only self-centered one of the group in the pilot … and all these other people sort of evolved over time. They found what was really funny was the fact that they all had their own agendas—that they were friends, but they would happily backstab each other and be self-absorbed.
It was also a very unusual show in that Jerry was very generous in letting other people be funny around him. I’m not talking just the series regulars, but also, y’know, the Newmans and the parents … he would allow the other people to be the funny ones. The more outrageous ones. I think that’s really smart.
Jerry has that Jack Benny mentality. I was in writing sessions sometimes, and he’d say, “Give that one to Jason,” or “That’ll be good for Julia”—funny stuff that was written for him. I call him the Magic Johnson of the comedy world, ’cause he would pass off so great. Jack Benny was known for that. His cast got so many laughs. And Jerry loved that. Some stars want all the laughs—Jerry was never that way, and I saw it, even in the writing sessions.
There are four or five episodes Larry David wrote—some of them were just, like, I would never even think of something like that. But there were certain storylines that I either should have thought of, or I wished I thought of.
One that I wished I’d thought of was Jerry and his girlfriend being caught making out during Schindler’s List. Y’know, that’s a perfect story. Unbelievably funny, and it maps out the second you think about it. Because you think: Okay, they do that … that’s funny. Who would be offended most by that? Jerry’s parents. You can’t have them in the same movie theater, so how would they find out? Somebody would have to drop a dime on them. Who would drop a dime on them? Newman. It was the most perfect story.
The only one that kind of fell out of the sky for me, the closest I came to the Schindler’s List one, was “The Sponge.” Because I heard on the radio that the sponge was going out of business, and immediately I thought to myself if Elaine is a big sponge user and she hears about this, let’s say she tries to buy out as many as she can. So she buys out the entire Web site but she’s still got a limited number … that would have to change her whole screening process for who she sleeps with. So right there, boom boom boom. That one was very gratifying.
Larry and I were talking about it … and I remember saying, “They have to be worth the sponge.”
And Larry goes, “Yeah. They have to be sponge-worthy.” It was like a perfect creative process. Which is the exact reverse of “shrinkage.” Because Larry had the idea of, what if George goes in the pool and it’s cold. And I said, “Oh, you mean, he gets shrinkage?”
And Larry’s genius was saying, “Yes. Shrinkage. And use that word. Use it a lot!”
For seven seasons, Seinfeld flourished under the guidance of the Larry David/Jerry Seinfeld creative tandem. Throughout this period the show kept growing and evolving, adding unforgettable new characters to the mix, like George’s quirky father, Frank Costanza. Jerry Stiller, whose hilariously fevered shouting matches with Estelle Harris as George’s shrill mother threatened to steal every episode the pair appeared in, doesn’t even show up until the fifth season’s “The Puffy Shirt.” Jerry’s parents, Helen and Morty Seinfeld (Liz Sheridan and Barney Martin, taking over for Phil Bruns), had been seen as regular characters from very early on, but gradually grew more involved in storylines. Because Seinfeld took so long to make NBC’s regular schedule, and for its audience to find it, after seven years the show hadn’t grown tired yet … but one of its two creators surely did.
Larry David left after the seventh season. I think he was just exhausted. He wasn’t so sure they were going to be able to do the four after the first episode! He was always concerned about the quality of the show, and about making it the best it could be.
He had a notebook filled with little notes that he would make about something that happened in his own life, or just observations, and he would constantly go to that notebook for storylines or ideas. I think he really wanted the show to end after seven seasons, because he felt that they had done all the permutations they could do. And Larry was just tired.
Without Larry there, the types of shows started altering … the show got more postmodern. But there were some incredible episodes in those last two seasons.
It just got harder and harder to come up with really small stories. Stories based on tiny little observations of life. Those were the kinds of stories I always liked. So, you’d get to the point where you’d come up with an idea, and you’d tell somebody about it. And they’d say, “That’s so great!”—and then, “Oh, wait a minute … y’know, we kind of did that back in episode two. Remember that ‘B’ story about blah blah blah?” So it got harder and harder, in a way.
That’s why “The Yada Yada” was so gratifying, because all the stories in there were just really tiny. I loved the idea of somebody converting to Judaism just for the jokes! Because my best friend is a converted Jew. And as we were driving off the golf course one day, he made some Jewish joke … and for some reason, I’d never even thought of him as being not Jewish—but then I was thinking to myself, “I wonder how long it took him to feel comfortable making that kind of joke?”
And then I thought it would be funny if someone converted, and then like a day later they’re making those kinds of jokes. That’s such a small, little idea, and I just love that. Those are real hard.
It’s weird. What Seinfeld did was effectively kill the sitcom, in a way. Which was great. I mean, it went so against the prevailing wisdom, I think a lot of executives resented that and wanted to prove that the formula they had been using worked. And, in a way, they’ve continued to try to push that formula … and effectively have destroyed that genre, in a sense.
Out of that have come things like Curb Your Enthusiasm. I think that’s the direction that sitcoms took, almost inadvertently, as a result of Seinfeld. It was like, when you could no longer tell that kind of story in that sort of format, there’d have to be a new format to discuss these things. And in a sense, even Seinfeld, to some degree, is rendered quaint by Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Of course, Larry couldn’t have done a show like Curb had he not done Seinfeld first and had the clout. And HBO had the foresight, unlike a network, where they just said, “Okay, let’s let him do what he does.” And in fact, this improv form is written by Larry. It’s ironic that everybody keeps on talking about how it’s all ad lib. It’s all written except for the dialogue, which is the easiest thing to write once you’ve got your story broken. Now, Curb Your Enthusiasm is a very bold show, because it’s almost a Jewish W.C. Fields character that he’s playing. And what’s courageous about it is he plays rich—he plays that he has money! He goes against every single rule of what you do on television: endear yourself to the audience, make yourself likable, cuddly and all of that. Larry does the opposite.
While we were making Seinfeld, Larry, of course, was the mystery. People didn’t appreciate—as they never do—the writers. And I always felt that for a long time people didn’t appreciate Larry David’s incredible contribution, which was amazing. But now, everybody credits Larry—and I think they don’t appreciate how much Jerry did!
I mean, not only did he co-rewrite most of the episodes, but he acted in the show. And he wrote and performed all the standup himself. He was the hardest working man in show business during those years he was doing the show. It’s amazing what he did, in terms of writing, acting, and producing. He was incredible. I don’t know how he did it, but he was always calm and relaxed … an incredible force. And he could not have been nicer—he set the tone for the whole show.
Seinfeld changed the face of comedy. It opened the doors for other people to do things they never thought possible in multi-camera comedy. And now you see other shows doing things that we did first. I think that Larry and Jerry gave the world of comedy another way to do it. I think they were pioneers—and I helped ’em do that.
The show added phrases to the national vocabulary. People talk about a “Seinfeld moment”—and you know exactly what they mean. The show’s been off the air now for quite a number of years, though it’s still in reruns, yet you see it referenced in sports shows and everything. Sometimes, people don’t even know what they’re referencing anymore!
There’s a beer commercial where a girl says, “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.” Which is just a direct lift from our show. I assume the writers knew they’re lifting it from Seinfeld … but maybe not.
It was as wonderful an experience as anything I’ve ever experienced in television, from start to finish. And as unlikely, from the aspect of it not coming from the comedy development department, the fact that neither Jerry or Larry had ever written a sitcom before, the fact that our department had never developed a sitcom before, the order pattern in terms of the pilot, then four, then thirteen, and then the fact that it didn’t make the regular schedule until its third year out. And that it just flew under the radar for such a long period of time.
Every aspect of it, from start to finish, was as unlikely as anything I expect ever to be involved with in television. But what a wonderful, unlikely ride! There’s no question, if you’re lucky enough to be involved with a primetime show that turns into a Seinfeld—that becomes a landmark show, that TV Guide votes as the greatest show of all time—if you’re lucky enough to get involved with one of those shows in your career, you’re way ahead of the curve.
10 An extremely popular comedy club at the time, located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
11 Character portrayed by actor James Gandolfini on HBO’s hit series about a New Jersey crime family, The Sopranos.