What’s the Deal With Seinfeld?

[Ubiquitous]

I too am watching Seinfeld. Sometimes I come across an episode I
haven’t seen before, but mostly, I’m rewatching it, revisiting the
familiar characters, their reliable frailty, the comedic timing so
finely calibrated it becomes formulaic. It’s absurd, in a moment where
there is so much other content vying for my attention, that I would
turn to a 30-year-old sitcom to entertain me. But because Netflix
acquired the exclusive streaming rights to Seinfeld (for reportedly
more than half a billion dollars) and began hosting the show in
October, it’s supremely easy to throw it on in the background and let
its rhythms wash over you.

So easy it’s almost dangerous. Seinfeld is like the anti-binge show, a
series very much designed to be watched amid all the other crap on TV
on a Thursday night. In single half-hour chunks, its characters are
like a balm, implicitly forgiving you for every unkind word you’ve
considered saying, for every time you ranked getting laid over showing
up for your loved ones. But for more than a few episodes at a time,
these people and their concerns—so self-absorbed, so entitled, so
stupid—are a little deadening to watch.

Seinfeld’s leads are a tiresome quartet; in the show, everyone who
meets them ends up deeply regretting it. Still, from their vantage
point as bottom-feeders, they find ways to skewer conventions. I don’t
think I’ve bought a present for a host in my life without thinking
about the chocolate babka debacle in season five’s “The Dinner Party,”
a comedy of errors about what goes into the effort of showing up at
someone’s door with something nice.

Co-creator Larry David has continued to explore these modes in his HBO
series Curb Your Enthusiasm, which premiered in 1999 and just this week
produced another episode so funny it’s practically painful. But
Seinfeld had network television machinery behind it. Each episode of a
classic multi-camera sitcom—like Friends, The Office, and The Big Bang
Theory, which have all starred in staggering streaming-rights
acquisition deals over the last few years—is a carefully calibrated
unit of content designed to go down as easy as possible. These shows
produce consistency as a perk—life is unreliable, but TV doesn’t have
to be.

So Seinfeld is not just a show: It’s a whole state of mind. Every
episode sounds the same: The opening lip pops and tongue clicks, the
way George Costanza (Jason Alexander) exclaims “Jerry!” with that
perfect aggrieved tone, the singsongy punch lines from Jerry Seinfeld’s
stand-up. It gets so that you can easily create a Seinfeld mood in your
own life—tack on a “Jerry!” at the end of a complaint; repeat a
question with different inflection; do one of those big Elaine (Julia
Louis-Dreyfus) groans at a restaurant table; throw open the door to the
apartment you don’t live in, like Kramer (Michael Richards). Indeed,
the show invites you to participate in the lexicon of the characters,
which is why so much of what I know about Seinfeld comes from other
people quoting it.

But sometimes the show’s machinery is so seamless it’s slick. In my
current rewatch, I’ve just finished season four; I’ve grown so tired of
Seinfeld’s increasingly inane opening monologue that I wish I could
just skip it. As the show became more popular, some of the balance
between the characters’ foibles and the consequences of their actions
was lost in favor of comedy that gets gimmicky. With an audience that
cheers and claps wildly when the characters are at their most venal, it
feels less that Seinfeld is subverting expectations and increasingly
like the show is pandering to them.

Even so, I’m still watching it. And to be honest, these days when I’m
watching Seinfeld, most of what I’m encountering is my own age. I grew
up knowing the show as a ubiquitous fixture of NBC’s Must See TV, and a
must-see in our house. (I don’t think I understood a lot of what was
happening, but I remember thinking it was very funny when Jerry told a
tightrope walker to break a leg, and then he really did break a leg.)
Then came the series finale, in 1998, and the way it made everyone mad
—on the way to school the next day, even the shock jocks on the radio
were complaining about it. When I got to college, Seinfeld setups and
punch lines seemed to arise out of every other drinking night. I’m not
sure you can escape a four-year liberal arts education without having
to listen to some guy shout “shrinkage” as everyone else collapses in
laughter.

Now I’m hearing from people who are watching the show for the first
time—both young viewers who don’t remember the original run and older
viewers who never got around to it. It’s prompted me to try to
disentangle Seinfeld from my own personal history, to unmoor it, even,
from the decade in which the show is so firmly based. It was the ’90s;
oh, was it ever the ’90s. The show’s anxieties are inextricably tied to
the that decade—answering machines, VCRs, the discomfort its straight
characters feel upon encountering queer people. (“Not that there’s
anything wrong with that!”) I’ve also been watching Impeachment:
American Crime Story—another window to the ’90s—and marveling at how
the endemic misogyny of Seinfeld’s moment was distilled and refracted
through Elaine Benes—and how brilliantly Louis-Dreyfus manages meet and
also refute the expectations placed on her character, even as she
remains underwritten for most of the show’s run.

At the same time, the show is sometimes weirdly prescient, especially
about the future of TV. The entire fourth season, which showcases
George and Jerry selling their pilot of a show about nothing to NBC,
feels to me like the beginning of the end of network television. It has
a snake-eating-its-own-tail meta quality that is both brilliant and
supremely weird—and seems to serve as a vehicle for the show’s veiled
critiques of its own sausage-making process. When NBC head Russell
Dalrymple (Bob Balaban) leaves the TV business to join Greenpeace to
impress Elaine (who, among her other disjointed character traits, is
sort of an activist?), it feels like a harbinger of things to come.

But if network TV were dead, maybe its last gasps wouldn’t be so damn
watchable. I have Seinfeld on DVD somewhere, but it’s not really the
same; one of the reasons I’m watching Seinfeld now, on Netflix, is
because I know others are watching it too. Seinfeld is like an
extraordinary device that communicates the things about humanity we are
most ashamed to acknowledge. Shame is a social emotion; it requires
other people to function. Seinfeld is a show that is dramatically
enhanced when shared with a viewing audience, even if it’s just an
implied one. It’s imperfect, watching a broadcast show 30 years later
on a streaming platform—but it’s either this or TBS reruns of Seinfeld,
and those don’t seem to have quite the same reach. Maybe society has
changed a little since the heyday of Seinfeld. But in the last few
decades, the sitcom—and how we watch it—has changed entirely.

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Let's go Brandon!