“The Show About Nothing”
When a sitcom pilot entitled “The Seinfeld Chronicles” debuted on Wednesday night, July 5, 1989, few in the viewing audience could have ever imagined the impact the show would have on both television and the abiding popular culture. Top NBC executives were anything but enthralled with this very distinctive brand of sitcom but reluctantly gave it a shot—albeit not much of one—by ordering four more episodes. This paltry number, by the way, represents the smallest quantity of shows ever ordered for a sitcom’s inaugural season.
The Patron Saint of Seinfeld
With programming whiz kid Brandon Tartikoff sniffing that the show’s concept was “too New York” and “too Jewish” to succeed, the future prospects of Seinfeld were considered suspect from the get-go. Even studio audience members who watched “The Seinfeld Chronicles” live weren’t sold on the show’s merits. They offered opinions that raised numerous red flags with network bigwigs, who worry at the drop of a hat anyway, and who are inclined to paint doomsday scenarios of anything “outside the box.” Sentiments like these were commonplace: “You can’t get too excited about two guys going to the laundromat”; “Jerry needs a stronger supporting cast”; and “Why are they interrupting the standup for these stupid stories?” Jerry himself was perceived as “powerless” and “naïve.”
Despite the network’s initially gloomy prognostications, creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David would eventually see their brainchild—renamed Seinfeld because of a competing show on ABC called The Marshall Chronicles—succeed and become both a blockbuster hit and cultural phenomenon. But it could very easily have never happened. Television writer and producer Phil Rosenthal noted that Rick Ludwin, a young programming executive with genuine foresight, was the man chiefly responsible for Seinfeld being born in the first place, and for the show not dying a premature death. Like so many first volleys before it, it very nearly ended up in the overcrowded pilot-episode graveyard—television’s equivalent of Potter’s field.
Rosenthal, creator and executive producer of the CBS hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005), wrote in the Chicago Tribune: “Without Ludwin, there would have been no Seinfeld. He commissioned the pilot, took money out of his specials budget to keep the show alive, and oversaw the program for its entire run.” Indeed, monies that were slated to produce two one-hour variety specials for the network were budgeted for Seinfeld—one starring eighty-four-year-old comic legend Bob Hope. Warren Littlefield, who headed NBC Entertainment during the 1990s when Seinfeld reigned supreme, concurred. “Rick goes down as an NBC patron saint,” he said. (NBC reportedly grossed over two hundred million dollars in annual profits from Seinfeld, which had Littlefield and other network suits atwitter.)
Seinfeld is one of those rare shows that one can watch over and over again, even if one knows the episodes’ myriad plotlines backward and forward. The Seinfeld Scene It game combines trivia questions and clips from the series on DVD.
The Seinfeld Embryo
In 1976, at the tender age of twenty-two, Jerry Seinfeld appeared on an HBO special starring put-upon, hangdog comedian Rodney Dangerfield. A mere five years later, he performed on the crown jewel of late-night television, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. As he garnered more and more national exposure via further appearances on The Tonight Show as well as Late Night with David Letterman, The Merv Griffin Show, and other television venues, the NBC network VIPs took a real shine to the young comedian. After hosting Jerry Seinfeld: Stand-Up Confidential on HBO in 1987, an hour-long broadcast that blended standup with sketch comedy, the suits appreciated his potential even more.
The fact that Jerry Seinfeld’s standup bits were simultaneously very popular and very clean—in other words: television fodder—had them wondering if the comedian could develop an idea for a possible primetime sitcom. “NBC asked if I had any ideas for a show, and I said no,” Seinfeld recalled in DVD commentary. “Then, a month or two later, I bumped into Larry David at one of the clubs in New York and I was telling him about the meeting. We were walking around near one of those little Korean fruit stands that they have in New York, buying some late-night groceries, and we were making fun of some of the products there. Larry said, ‘You know, this is what the show should be: just two comedians making fun of stuff, walking around, talking.’”
Indeed, Seinfeld was originally described by a Castle Rock Entertainment press release as an “innovative comedy which explores the question, ‘Where do comedians get their material?’” Castle Rock, which is owned by Warner Bros., is the company that produced the show and controls its licensing, etc., in perpetuity. Believe it or not, Seinfeld was never pitched or described as a “show about nothing.” Considering that the phrase was a joke employed in an episode many years later, Jerry Seinfeld expressed bewilderment at its staying power during a Reddit.com “Ask Me Anything” Q&A. “Larry [David] and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show,” he mused, “because to us it’s the opposite of that.”
Art imitates life. Jerry and George, just like Jerry and Larry, pitch a “show about nothing” in this esteemed New York City locale.
Photo by Thomas Nigro
The Odd Couple
To say that Jerry Seinfeld’s standup material and stage presence were at odds with Larry David’s would be the understatement of the century. David’s brand of humor on the club scene was notoriously edgy, cynical, and frequently dark. He was the master of the madcap while performing—mercurial and impulsive—in sharp contrast with Seinfeld’s decidedly composed, well-prepared act.
Divorced from environmental activist Laurie David (producer of An Inconvenient Truth, an Academy Award–winning documentary on the effects of global warming) after fourteen years of marriage, and the father of two daughters, David was asked by Rolling Stone magazine about the possibility of remarrying at some point in the future. “It would be a silly thing to do,” he answered straightaway. “Why would I want that contract? I already have kids. The best situation is being a single parent. The best part about it is that you get time off, too, because the kids are with their mom—so it’s the best of both worlds.” This is Larry David’s patented unsentimental world view and, really, his approach to humor in a nutshell. It proved fundamental to the Seinfeld concept and was liberally infused into the show’s scripts through season seven.
Among David’s multiple writing credits on the show was “The Contest,” which won him a Primetime Emmy Award. That particular episode, which features Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer in the challenge of a lifetime—of who can go the longest without masturbating—was bestowed the number-one spot on TV Guide’s 2009 list of television’s “Top 100 Episodes of All Time”—no small accomplishment. Courtesy of its pioneering plotline, the episode was, not surprisingly, steeped in controversy. Upon reviewing the script, the nervous Nellies at NBC naturally had the jitters, but let it run as written because the M-word was never once uttered, although euphemisms galore were, including “master of your domain,” which immediately became part and parcel of the ever-growing Seinfeld lexicon.
Conversely, Jerry Seinfeld’s stock-in-trade was wry and observational humor, which likewise became essential to the Seinfeld brand. There were never any F-bombs or gratuitous raunchiness in his standup routines. He earned laughs the old-fashioned way and continues employing the same playbook to this day. In the Reddit.com Q&A, a questioner noted that Seinfeld employed an acronym—“A. H.”—for a certain cuss word, even when typing his response on a keyboard. In contrast with Larry David’s more pessimistic and disdainful comic material, Seinfeld’s jokes were more on the plane of: “I was the best man at the wedding. If I’m the best man, why is she marrying him?” and “Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women—a little bit of support and a little bit of freedom.”
While the Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David creative marriage was considered something of a Hollywood odd couple, it was nonetheless an unbeatable synergy of comedic genius that exhibited a willingness to mine the ordinariness of everyday life and everyday problems with characters highly adept at the urban art of deceit and perfidy. “I like taking the worst qualities that a person has and trying to make something funny out of it,” David quipped on the Seinfeld DVD commentary. “Doesn’t everybody do terrible things and have terrible thoughts? Just by trying to be as funny as you can, you’re going to deal with a lot of things that are real—so the show’s really about something. The whole thing about the show being about nothing is ridiculous.”
With the notable exception of Rick Ludwin, the NBC network executives were somewhat perplexed when they viewed “The Seinfeld Chronicles.” (The pilot episode was originally entitled “Stand Up,” then “Good News, Bad News.”) It was not quite what they expected. What, pray tell, were they expecting? After they grudgingly consented to a so-called first season of Seinfeld—four measly episodes—Warren Littlefield offered suggestions on how to improve the show’s overall concept and reach a larger demographic. (The pilot had scored a 10.9 in the Nielsen ratings and an audience share of 19, which reflected the percentage of television sets tuned into the show.) For one, Littlefield wanted Jerry and Elaine to be an item—engaged in the series. This way, they could eventually get married, which would, of course, attract a big audience. Yada, yada, yada. Essentially, he wanted the show to adopt a more traditional sitcom formula. But Seinfeld wasn’t Rhoda. Larry David refused to knuckle under, and his co-creator, Jerry Seinfeld, backed him up to the hilt. Their united stance in refusing to tinker with the essence of what made the show different was an act of courage because it could very easily have meant that the Seinfeld debut was also its swan song.
Behind the Seinfeld Allure
Sure, Seinfeld was postmodern—a palpably different kind of sitcom than what was on television at the time, and totally unique when compared with virtually everything that came before it. But very few of us were tuning in to the show because it had been dubbed “postmodern,” because, for one, very few of us knew what the term meant—or, for that matter, cared what it meant. No, there was something else at play—something perhaps a little easier to relate to—as to why the show caught on as it did with the primetime television viewers.
Where, though, was the appeal in Seinfeld’s four chief protagonists, who were, individually, the embodiment of the anti-hero? We didn’t really care—one way or the other—if said characters met with hardship or got knocked around by life’s slings and arrows. The true lure of Seinfeld—and why it not only amassed increasingly healthy ratings over the first few years but became the talk of the town as well—was its uncanny ability to make chicken soup out of chicken feathers. Here’s the secret: unlike prior sitcoms dating back to the 1950s, Seinfeld unearthed meaning from the seemingly meaningless. Week after week, we gleefully tuned in to watch the Seinfeld troupe engage in what they considered the ordinary, humdrum slog otherwise known as life. We, though, knew better, identified with it all, and came to the conclusion that the ordinary, humdrum slog—common to us all—is actually rather extraordinary on some higher level. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer confirmed this time and again.
Episodes of Seinfeld, remember, didn’t typically deal with super-important happenings in the main characters’ lives. The pre-Seinfeld sitcom almost invariably revolved a central plotline involving a “big deal,” of sorts. The Seinfeld gang could just as easily be found going out to dinner, visiting a friend, or venturing home from a baseball game. Seinfeld somehow elevated the commonplace, which at once struck an important chord and collective funny bone with an ever-expanding and extraordinarily loyal viewership.