I love the storyline with Kramer and the car salesman test driving the car until it runs out of gas, because that’s like something I did as a teenager, around the time that episode aired. Well not exactly, but I kept putting off buying gas until I eventually ran out.
I almost had this pleasure a few years back. One of the digital free to air stations here shows a couple of episodes a night, running through them from start to finish, over and over, apparently until the end of time. I was watching one night and was amazed to see an episode that only seemed vaguely familiar. It turned out that I had only ever seen the last few episodes of season 3 when they originally aired. What a joyful week that was.
I don’t know if there are any episodes I can’t watch, but there are certainly some “meh” ones (but even they often have one or two good lines).
- The one with Farfel, of course.
- George and Jerry take O’Brien’s airport limo.
- Jerry takes a polygraph test about Melrose Place and Elaine tries to “convert” a gay man.
- Jerry offends a Native American woman with a cigar store Indian. (The crazy TV Guide guy who becomes obsessed with Elaine is kind of funny.)
- Kramer leads around a bunch of Japanese tourists and Elaine’s boyfriend thinks Jerry is poor. (The bit with “Desperado” and “Witch-ay Woman” is kind of funny.)
- Kramer shaves with butter and George’s boss thinks he’s disabled.
I thought Seinfeld was just OK in first run, when there wasn’t much else to watch, but find it unwatchable now. And having seen just 5 minutes of Curb Your Enthusiasm before noping out, I think I know why I can’t stand it. That man is absolutely unfunny to me.
You don’t have to like Seinfeld.
But they’ll still be showing reruns of it in fifty years. The acting may be wrought but the writing is right. People still use the show slang, a lot, though the last episode was over twenty-five years ago yada yada yada.
Seinfeld has probably the best structured scripts and many of the funniest lines of any sitcom. It’s also the one sitcom I reference most in real life (the second being Friends.) But it’s hard to rewatch. Why? Because in nearly every episode somebody is just too annoying. It’s not always one of the four (looking at you, Uncle Leo.) When it is though, it’s almost always Kramer.
So what’s the word on Jerry’s claim, “We couldn’t make Seinfeld in todays sensitive climate.”
I remember the show being as spicy as wet cardboard when it premiered, but that was many years ago and I have changed.
Exactly…If Seinfeld is similar to Friends than so is every sitcom centered around a group of people in large city…making claiming the similarity kind of meaningless.
The Living Single comparison to Friends is more accurate since there are actual characters and dynamics that are similar.
Jerry’s full of shit. Seinfeld is tame by today’s standards.
David Letterman once said something like “You could put melting cheese on between Friends and Seinfeld and it would still be a hit.”
I think the Kirstie Alley and Brooke Shields things were worse than melting cheese.
The 9:30 slot at least had Cheers. But then Kirstie Alley appeared …
Absolutely! Rolling Stone magazine rated Seinfeld #6 in in its survey of the 100 best TV shows of all time across all genres.
As I said earlier, re-watching it is a real treat since over the years I’d forgotten how good it was. I’ve just finished “The Doorman” in Season 6, and it was either one of the episodes I had never seen or had forgotten. It’s a brilliant confluence of subplots and has some of the best writing in the whole series. Seinfeld’s strength was that as the seasons progressed it only got better.
Whatever. This argument is getting tedious and wasn’t the purpose of this thread. If some want to say that a show conceived and launched when Seinfeld was at its peak of its popularity and featured exactly the same concepts that Seinfeld had innovated wasn’t a ripoff, OK. What I will say is that while Seinfeld was rated #6 in the above-mentioned survey of the 100 best TV shows, Friends was #49.
Played by the late great Sam Lloyd, who also played the hapless lawyer Ted on “Scrubs”.
Nitpick (and I wish my brain could clear up hard drive space by forgetting shit like this) Cheers was on at 9PM for it’s entire run, I think. During peak NBC Thursday night dominance, it followed Family Ties and preceded Night Court.
I re-watched the series this past year and enjoyed seeing all the guest actors that went onto bigger things, especially Walter White / Tim Whatley.
One thing that stuck me was how much Julia Louis-Dreyfus brought to the table – both delivery and acting. She didn’t always get the best storylines, but she could out act the other three combined.
Kramer inhabited his role, but that felt more like a possession than acting.
I remember The Contest episode generating a lot of outrage and claims of the end of civilization. It’s telling that in a few years, that episode wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
And then the show became worth watching.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus was excellent in her role, but so were they all (well, except Jerry, of course). As I said earlier, the superb writing and performances together is what really made the show. That was an astute comment about Kramer. I loved Michael Richards as Kramer, but I can understand that it may have been too much over-the-top for some. But I’d still put Jason Alexander’s portrayal of the neurotic self-absorbed George Costanza over Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Elaine.
Jason Alexander had the advantage of having Larry David right there to emulate. I read someplace that after reading the script of one episode, he asked Larry David, “Did you really [do this]?”
That’s the (only) thing I liked about ithe finale.
For the entire run, I was listening to my friends quoting Seinfeld lines and playing "Remember when George did THAT?"
And I’d want to say “But George was a horrible person!” And then I realized that everyone was! Every character (except Elaine’s “Bizarro friends”, who stood out by being kind, caring people).
And along comes the finale to say “Yes, the writers and Jerry and Larry and all the actors know that these are selfish, immature, self-centered people. They’re not role models, they’re to be laughed at.”
If I recall correctly, it was the episode where George sneaks into the apartment to replace the answering machine message he’d left.
Alexander said “nobody would do that!” and Larry David said he had in fact done that very thing. That’s when Alexander realized who George was patterned after (before that, he was thinking more Woody Allen).
Here’s an interview where he recounts the change, but can’t recall the episode (he says it’s within the first 8). The tape switch episode is #9
Well, alright then. Checking: Cheers was on at 9Th it’s whole run except for one episode. It only overlapped with Seinfeld during their resp last/first seasons with Seinfeld on at 9:30.
(And I was also mentally misplacing Night Court in time and slot.)
Sometimes the 90s is such a blur.