Doesn't Seinfeld gets credit that Cheers deserves?

Cafe Society
21

I’m not sure which set of definitions I subscribe to, Larry Mudd’s have merit, but there’s room to move.

One could define shows as “formulaic” comedies, those which allow for a simple paint by numbers plots. Three’s Company, Bosom Buddies, Diff’rent Strokes and The Cosby show are good examples.

Then the “siutuational” comedy would be the ones in which the episode by episode variations are built upon strictly defined plotlines that are proffered and solved by the end of each episode. I’m picturing Get Smart, Moonlighting, Happy Days and such.

Perhaps the definitions are pedantic, but many ofthe previous shows were easy to fit in specific buckets.

Cheers, while built on a pretty basic premise, wasn’t quite as formulaic as some others. It’s was sorta like Seinfeld at a embryonic stage, lacking the bravado to really be different.

Cheers was revolutionary in one way, to my mind, in that it used an extended cast of recurring characters and was a broad ensemble. It, unlike most all shows beforehand, didn’t have a strictly defined cast of 4 or 5 people. They also had a pretty wide range of characters that made frequent short appearances, this was pretty rare. On The Cosby Show, when one of Theo’s friends showed up or one of the boyfriends the show revolved around them. On Cheers any one of the lesser bar patrons could pop in with a one-liner and be gone. This led the way to guys like Newman, Jackie Childs and the wide cast of characters you’d see in passing to add depth to each episode.

Cheers succeeding in being a show where the characters were more important than the plots, though it still had a bit of a formula. Seinfeld did away with it all and made it wholly about characters without any limitation of formula or situation. The step Seinfeld took was a bigger and more significant than the one Cheers did.

22

But the four characters on Seinfeld weren’t naturally antagonistic toward each other. They were practically the same character, filled with neuroses, shallow, and petty.

Consider the situation on Family Ties: hippy, consciencious parents have a Reaganite for a son and a vapid cheerleader-type for a daughter. Hijinx ensue! Contrast that with Seinfeld, where you basically have four Mallorys.

Define the underlying situational premise of Seinfeld. This should involve an ongoing, self-evident source of friction on the show. Seinfeld simply has nothing of the sort, because it actually has no premise.

23

I’m not sure that I can be any clearer without repeating myself, Nonsuch. It has nothing to do with geography – I guess it’s more literary theory.

Every other episodic comedy before Seinfeld had a premise – an initial situation from which the jokes were expected to flow.

Picture yourself as a network executive, listening to pitches for shows. Traditionally, the first and most practical question has been “Okay, so what’s the premise? Where does the comedic tension come from?” You typically expect something that can be summed up in one sentence:

“It’s about a straight-laced astronaut that finds a sexy genie in a bottle – she falls in love with him, but he has to hide her from his superiors.”

“It’s about a hippie couple who get married and hope to pass on their liberal, left-wing values to their kids, who turn out to be three different flavours of Conservative.”

“It’s about a simple, dirt-poor family that strikes oil, becomes incredibly rich overnight, and moves to Beverly Hills, where they don’t quite fit in.”

“It’s about a sad-sack working stiff with one hopeful eye on his version of the American Dream, who is taken for granted by his incredibly dysfunctional family.”

“It’s about a nasty old junk (or rag-and-bone) man who lives and works with his grown son, who has pretentions of rising above his station.”

“It’s about a sensitive and funny man with roots in inner-city Brookyln, who takes a job as a teacher in the school where he spent his troubled youth, hoping to help a new generation of wise-assed juvenile delinquents make something of themselves.”

Seinfeld doesn’t have a premise. It was unique that way. It has characters, but it’s not even really mainly character-driven. The writers were allowed to work more with what worked in the creators’ stand-up routines – Jerry Seinfeld’s observational humour about the minutiae of American life, and Larry David’s outlandish “anecdotal” humour.

24

Where would MASH fit into that?

25

I thought the underlying premise in Seinfeld was that it was about a stand up comedian and how he finds comedy routines in the adventures of himself and his friends. At the beginning of and end of the show, they show the routine that resulted from the adventures contained in the episode.

I’m not sure why there needs to be a conflict. What is the conflict in The Cosby show? Doctor marries lawyer and they never hire a babysitter?

Seinfeld never seemed like a show about nothing to me. I thought that was just a joke from the show.

26

It’s about two irreverent and iconoclastic (but moral) surgeons who must of necessity work with two rigid rules freaks who sometimes suffer from their own moral weaknesses. Their commanding officer is conflicted because he sympathizes with the iconoclasts, but his duty obliges him to defer to the rules freaks, unless some way can be found around it.

This premise is so fundamental to the concept of the program that, should an actor who plays one of the rules freaks leave the show, his character will be replaced by another fastidious rules freak – and if the actor who plays the CO should decide to leave, the new commanding officer character will also be mostly sympathetic and quietly pleased when the iconoclasts find their way around the rules freaks.

Yup. That is where the dramatic tension from most episodes comes from – from the pilot, where Theo decides he doesn’t want to go to college and Denise starts running around with a rough character, right on through, it’s a show about parenting, whether it’s “Is Theo doing drugs?” or “Can the kids tolerate Cliff’s cooking while Clair puts in extra hours on a case?” or “Can Cliff tolerate his daughters’ boyfriends?” The comedic tension is incidental to each episode, but the show definitely had a premise and a formula: Some family crisis of varying degree presents itself, and they come together and sort it out in a half-hour. They’d change it up a bit, especially later,by having Cliff or Clair play parents to the community-at-large from time-to-time.

27

MAS*H and Taxi did this as well. Personally, I think Cheers owes a lot to Taxi.

In addition to a lot of the good points in this thread, I want to echo RumMunkey’s earlier comment. It is really easy to overlook in 2005, but Seinfeld really pushed the envelope back in 1993. There was a lot of outcry in the fourth season – especially, but not solely, about the masturbation epsiode. Sitcoms were pretty tame up through the early '90s. But by the mid-90s they were all trying to push the limits (e.g. Friends, The Drew Carey Show, etc.). The sitcom landscape quickly moved away from Who’s The Boss style to Friends style shows.

Also, I don’t think making the Seinfeld characters unsympathetic was the original intent; I think that came later in the series. The series definitely started out with the characters being harmless and sympathetic. Perhaps after the success of George’s transformation from a Woody-Allen-knockoff to self-absorbed loser, the creators decided to move all the characters in that direction.

28

Couldn’t you include Green Acres in there too? You’d have some oddballs pop in and out, annoying the hell out of Oliver?

29

I don’t think George was ever a Woody Allen figure. He’s a stouter, slightly-exaggerated version of Larry David, and I don’t think Larry David ever tried to imitate Woody Allen – some subtle teratogen in the NYC water supply just produces neurotic, self-absorbed writer/comedians. :smiley:

30

Would MASH even be considered a sitcom though? I’d think of it more as a drama with some comedy mixed in. A Dramady?

31

MASH was more “sitcomish” in its early years, with heavier emphasis on madcap antics and Alan Alda’s Groucho Marx impression. Of course there were always serious elements, (hell, the lyrics to the theme song are about suicide, even if they never made it into the series,) but they didn’t really begin to dominate until years into MASH’s run, when “Mr. Sensitivity” Alan Alda got some creative control.

…and then all those episodes that still make us cry into our beer started coming. :smiley:

32

“It’s about a stand up comedian living in New York who lives through the plots of his stand up routines with his three immature friends.”

How’s that any less a “situation” than your description of Sanford & Son? I couldn’t even recognize this description:

“It’s about a sad-sack working stiff with one hopeful eye on his version of the American Dream, who is taken for granted by his incredibly dysfunctional family.”

I really cannot guess what show that was. That’s no more a situation than my description of Seinfeld.

33

I think that by that rule, Seinfeld is a show about being a stand up comic in the “observational humour” style. How does Jerry Seinfeld notice all those things that he talks about in his act? By hanging out with his friends and observing how everyday things can be funny. It might not have a lot of tension, but what’s the tension in shows like Laverne and Shirley or One Day at a Time? I think Laverne and Shirley were supposed to be an “Odd Couple” and that One Day at a Time was supposed to have the gimmick that the mom was single, but I don’t really see how the Seinfeld gimmick is any less of a premise that determines how every show will unfold than any other sitcom.

34

Again, what creates the tension in the Seinfeld “premise”? The hecklers?

Laverne & Shirley is the standard Odd Couple formula.

Three’s Company has the single mom and two very different daughters. Sisters fight, and single moms have to be sassy. (It’s the law.)

But friends who are very similar to each other? I just don’t see any tension. When George moved in with his parents, that would have been a decent premise for a sitcom. But it was only tangentally used as a premise, and not for very long.

35

I meant “One Day At A Time”, not “Three’s Company”, obviously.

36

Good point. When George played a neurotic, Jewish guy from NYC, I might have bridged the gap myself to Woody Allen.

What about this sitcom premise? Guy gets in a car accident and has no insurance. So the judge rules that he become the other guy’s butler. Now that would be a great sitcom…

37

It doesn’t carry information about what we can expect to happen in the episodes. The plots don’t follow from who the characters are, from their default situation, or how they relate to each other.

To be honest, I don’t know Sanford & Son well, and was describing Steptoe and Son, on which it is based. Anyway, for either show, the situations in the episodes follow from the premise. The son treats his father to a night out for his birthday, but the old man complains the whole time because the son’s idea of fine dining and theatre is foreign and boring to the old guy. The son is outraged because his cranky old father has been throwing out the bills, and now they’re in trouble with the creditors. The son is having fits because the old man won’t keep their shack tidy, so they divide it in half with a line down the middle. The plots depend on the premise.

No so, Seinfield. None of the plots, such as they are, are driven by anything established in the premise of the show.

Well, it was probably overcompressed. Married… With Children, or The Life of Riley. Take your pick. Anyway, the things that happen in Married… With Children conform to the premise, which could probably benefit from a few more sentences in the description. Eg; Al is in crisis because he can’t buy an anniversary present for Peg. It’s not that he’s heartbroken about it, it’s that he knows he’ll get a ton of abuse from her if he doesn’t come through. Of course, the reason that he can’t get her a present is because she’s taken his credit cards and run them up to the limit. It follows from the premise. Hell, the title sequence shows the poor schmoe sitting there looking miserable while every member of his household comes and takes money from him.

There’s nothing about the “situation” of Jerry being an observational comedian that gives us any indication of what to expect from a Seinfeld episode, or how any particular episode will develop or resolve. The action of the episodes stands on its own, and the stand-up at the end is just an afterthought that conveniently keeps the network affiliates from running bumpers over the credits (most of the time.)

That valet stinking up Jerry’s car was the episode. He didn’t stink up his car because Jerry was a comedian, and Jerry didn’t react to in any way that reflected his line of work. The protagonist had his car permanently tainted by a dirty guy who parked it for him, and the stink started to spread through his clothes and into his apartment, forcing him to abandon his car. Having the guy shrug and say “What’s up with that?” at the end does not make this action follow retroactively from a premise. There is no comedic or dramatic tension inherent in “The things that happen in a guy’s daily life inspire jokes in his nightclub act.”

My brain hurts. That sounds vaguely like I should recognize it…

38

That’s the premise that Jerry and George successfully pitched to NBC. Of course they’re poking fun of standard sitcom themes.

I didn’t watch Cheers much post-Diane. Were the Rebecca epsiodes built around a “situational premise”? Or had it morphed into a bunch of guys in a bar?

39

After Diane left, there were more plots based on the other characters, especially Woody. Sam and Rebecca were antagonistic with very little sexual byplay between them (although there were occasional bits). Also Frasier Crane and Lillith Sternin joined the cast and that brought in some “fish out of water” bits with the uptight intellectuals rubbing elbows with guys like Norm and Cliff.

40

I still can’t see a difference between this and many other shows. Take MASH for example. Hawkeye doesn’t get a cold because he‘s a surgeon. And he doesn’t get a cold because he’s in the army. And he doesn’t get a cold because he’s in Korea. He gets a cold because he is a human being. And it’s not like a cold was a specifically chosen plotline. Most MASH plots were trivial things that happen to anyone. A hole in the shoe. A snoring roommate. A hot babe who won’t go out with him. Trying to get someone to let him borrow a car (jeep). The only thing funny in those things is the way that Hawkeye reacts to these normal human experiences. If Hawkeye wasn’t an anti-authoritarian army surgeon in Korea it wouldn’t be the same show.

In exactly the same way the valet may not have stunk up Jerry’s car because he was a comedian but it was only funny because of how he reacted. If Jerry wasn’t a callous, shallow mildly neurotic comedian from New York it wouldn’t have been the same show.

It just seems to me like it’s an artificial distinction. Seinfeld involves the attempts of a self-absorbed, neurotic bachelor with a slight superiority complex living in New York to deal normally with everyday experiences. That inherently provides comedic tension in exactly the same vein as the attempts of a self-absorbed neurotic alien living in Los Angeles/Boulder to deal normally with everyday experiences. Or the ttempts of a self-absorbed, neurotic married man running a Torquay hotel to deal normally with everyday experiences. All the characters react inappropriately/overreact to daily life and hilarity ensues.

Seinfeld, Mork/Uncle Martin and Basil Fawlty are all examples of dysfunctional people coping with normal problems in bizarre ways. The spacemen are more dysfunctional than Fawlty who is arguably more dysfunctional than Jerry, but in all cases the comedic tension is inherent in that description “dysfunctional”. If Jerry wasn’t dysfunctional the show wouldn’t be amusing at all. That dysfunction is what provides the amusement value and the comedic tension.

I’m not at all a Seinfeld fan (I’m totally ambivalent towards the show) but couldn’t we sum up most Seinfeld episodes as follows: Something happens to a dysfunctional stand-up comedian and he spends the entire show trying to decide whether his reaction to it is ‘normal’ or what the ‘normal’ course of action should be? That seems sum up the episodes I’ve seen, and thanks to re-runs I’ve seen parts of most if them I think.