Everyone in the show seemed to be much more attractive to romantic partners than anyone I know in real life who is remotely similar in looks or personality. George wasn’t Jerry when it came to dates but it wasn’t like he was close to hurting for companionship.
I wouldn’t say they were presented as attractive. More like, they were typical everyday qualities that the average person doesn’t even think twice about. They can’t be bothered to feel guilty because, hey, this is how they live their lives, y’know?
There wasn’t much competition back then. Lots of people still had antenna TV and were limited to a half dozen channels.
When it comes on now it’s not really that good a show by modern standards.
And I think the biggest change in TV sitcoms was when they decided to lose the laugh track, and stick with it being gone. Takes quality actors to give useful reactions to a punchline that aren’t just waiting for us to stop laughing. Things like Moonlighting and Malcolm in the Middle, although there are probably earlier examples – I think Molly Dodd also didn;t have a laugh track, but she ended up mugging during pauses. I know MASH *tried to lose the laugh track, but CBS couldn’t handle it.
On occasion he got lucky, but it was usually with women like a failed lesbian or one who didn’t even speak English. As soon as any other woman got to know him and his patterns of behavior, they were driven away and dumped him.
Seinfeld also went after topics like homosexuality, cunnilingus, masturbation, etc., which was far from mainstream network sitcom themes at the time. Having a contest about masturbating? And getting it past the censors? Genius.
Yeah, but Drew Carey dated way more hotties than a portly man with glasses and a buzz cut ought to have. He had a girl looking like Jeri Ryan (but not her, I checked) up in his bedroom once.
We seem to be getting off topic, but not really, there was a lot of innovation at this time, but day to day, anything could be made into a sitcom, typical fare with one or two weird hooks.
I’d say Green Acres, like many other sitcoms, had running gags, not references to a specific incident in a particular episode. ***Seinfeld ***had this many, many times.
Seinfeld was funny and evolutionary in a good way, but if you want a comedy show that was truly influential and revolutionary, you have to go back to the dawn of television sketch comedy. You’ve got to go back to Your Show of Shows.
This article sums their influence up quite well: How Your Show Of Shows invented American TV Comedy
YSoS was a perfect storm of stellar comedy writing and acting. They pretty much invented situational comedy. And their movie spoofs were brilliantly executed, showing Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca could nail pathos as deftly as comedy. Their movie parodies remind me of a live-action MAD magazine spoof in MAD’s heyday. Example: A Streetcar Named ???–Caesar does a better Brando than Brando. 
Their TV spoofs were also spot-on: This is Your Life
They excelled at pantomime, too: 1812 Overture
And they did it live, 90 minutes a week. Many sketches exceeded 15 minutes. If mistakes were made, the cast had the improvisational skills to roll with it and make it even funnier.
Also groundbreaking in that they gave a woman (Imogene) equal billing. No offense to Lucille Ball, but Coca should be known as the First Woman of Comedy, IMHO. Her influence can be seen in many who came after, most notably, Carol Burnett. The difference is Desilu shot on film and only kinescope exists for most other classic TV.
NBC really dropped the ball when they split the team up in 1954. Nanette Fabray was OK, but she didn’t have the comedy chops of Imogene Coca.
Not much comedy can stay relevant and humorous after ~70 years, but YSoS does: Health Food Restaurant.
These guys were real innovators. They took the past generation’s simplistic vaudeville and transformed it into high satire.
The Dick Van Dyke show actually set up the ending of the show in the 4th season with Rob deciding to write a book and in the final episode it got sold as a TV sitcom instead about writing for a variety show. (Rather Meta for the time) It had multiple called backs to Rob’s time in the Army and meeting and marrying Laura.
As to arcs, even I love Lucy had some arcs. They mostly dealt with Ricky & Lucy in Hollywood or the European Trip but for the beginning of TV, arcs were already happening.
Back to Seinfeld, Seinfeld at times made the claim it was the first sitcom about nothing. They were wrong, The Burns and Allen show was basically about nothing and with more 4th wall breaks than even Gary Shandling managed to put into his show.
Flashbacks, sure. But that’s not the same as, e.g., George saying offhandedly to a casting director “You don’t have to worry about me; I won a contest” or Kramer telling a homeless guy “I once knew a horse named Rusty” years after these things happened.
If you hadn’t seen those episodes, you probably wouldn’t have known what they were talking about.
Actually the flashback episodes tended to tell a story of their past. Unlike lets say the Odd Couple that also did a lot of flashbacks but had no consistency. DVD also did call backs. For that matter, so did Barney Miller. Barney Miller did a lot of callbacks.
Flashbacks are usually used as filler in bottle shows, normally put together near the end of a season just to meet airtime requirements.
Can you name any Seinfeld-type “callbacks” like
**JERRY: **Oh, look, there’s Dolores.
GEORGE: Who?
JERRY: “Mulva.”
GEORGE: Oh, yeah.
on either ***DvD ***or BM?
Barney Miller did, DVD not that I recall.
It will be hard to describe some of them due to my memory but an early episode had Wojo confusing Amish & Orthodox clothing, years later when a Orthodox man came in to report a robbery, Wojo made a point of telling one of the other cops that he was Orthodox and not Amish. It was funny if you remembered the earlier episode.
Barney Miller had a largish group of repeat characters. There were many callbacks with these characters over obscure things from prior episodes.
Thought of 2 more, years later HQ sent up a detective to replace Sergeant Amenguale. Also a few years after Sgt Yemana was gone they came up to remove his desk.
Right, that’s the kind of continuity I’m talking about. And you appreciate it much more (if at all) when you’re familiar with what came before.
You can’t compare the kind of nothingism in Seinfeld to that in Burns and Allen.
What Seinfeld meant by “nothing” was building humor out of the common occurrences of everyday life, like waiting in line at a Chinese restaurant or trying to find your car in a parking garage or wondering what would be the consequences of parking in the handicap spot “for just a few minutes.” It was basically like Jerry’s “observational” standup humor.
Burns and Allen was totally different. It was simply surreal, with houses that were obviously sets and George providing running commentary from the side of the stage when he wasn’t involved. What little plot there was existed only to set up Gracie’s wacky remarks. It was really a cross between a skit show and a sitcom. (Jack Benny’s show was even more so, with the “plot” stopping for musical interludes.)
Luckily, Seinfeld didn’t influence series finales. It was pretty awful.
One thing about Seinfeld that I think is unique is that most sitcom episodes were centered on one main story. Most Seinfeld episodes had two or three subplots that had little relation to each other. Earlier in the series run, there were some episode arcs, but that declined later in the show. The sudden, rather jarring death of Susan in the show marked this disregard for long-term narrative. This very fragmented approach paved the way toward many more recent shows.
Seinfeld was a good show, but the real game-changer came just after with the rise of single-camera non-laugh-tracked comedies starting with Seinfeld’s “cousin”, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Malcolm in the Middle in 2000, Scrubs in 2001 and arguably most importantly, the American version of The Office in 2005.
Note that being a “show about nothing” was a pitch they made to NBC. The show definitely had plots and so on. Some story lines lasting as much as a season. It didn’t break any ground in this regard.
So they ignored their original pitch and just did what they wanted. (Although it took far too long to ditch the bookend standup pieces. These were supposed to tie into the plot of the episode and that became problematic.)
The key thing about the pitch premise vs. the show was that Jerry being a standup comic quite often didn’t have much to do with the plot of an episode.
One thing that sitcom creators have to do is not have a limiting premise. Make the premise generic and just focus on characters and storylines. Look at Bosom Buddies. The stupid premise seriously limited the story and by the time they got rid of it the show was already doomed.