I guess I don’t really see how the Michael Richards tirade some eight years after the finale would make viewing the series now problematic.
My wife commented that she-like others here–uses quotes from Seinfeld quite frequently for the annoyances of everyday life.
For example, in the episode where Jerry takes it upon himself to make sure the marathon runner doesn’t oversleep, he asks the runner how he overslept for his last race: “Was it AM/PM?” “No, No, No, not AM/PM…” We use that line every time we pass by an AM/PM convenience store. I don’t think I’ve ever been in one.
And whenever someone celebrates a birthday/farewell lunch/someone sick at her work, my wife inevitably sings the idiotic “Get well, get well soon, we want you to get well!” song…
And on those occasions when the kids/marriage get a little tough, we often diffuse the tension with Kramer’s speech about marriage “They’re prisons! Man made prisons! You’re doing time! And there’s no more eating dinner in front of the V, because it’s DINNER TIME!..You talk about your day! Did you have a good day or a bad day? Well what kind of day did you have?”
Aside from the Simpsons, I honestly can’t think of a series that has seeped so seamlessly into into our subconscious…
“It’s a Junior Mint. It’s very refreshing!”
“Too ethnic.”
Shooting pool pantsless to prevent wrinkles.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
George being mistaken for the neo-Nazi speaker and hurriedly ending a carphone call: “You know who’s to blame? …THE JEWS!”
Kramer pretending to be MoviePhone. “Why don’t you just tell me what movie you’re interested in?”
The farting horse pulling the carriage.
Urban rickshaws.
Fusilli Jerry.
ASSMAN.
George flips 'way to the back of the binder of sample wedding invitations to look at the cheap ones.
Kramer intervenes in the bris.
I’d seen all of the episodes, multiple times, over the years. This past Christmas someone gave me the final season DVD set and they are just a delight. Every episode, hysterical. My kids, who were born in 90 and 92, have been thoroughly enjoying them too, over and over.
Gold Jerry, GOLD.
It doesn’t make it more problematic. It makes it more ridiculous.
Whether or not a sitcom is a classic should transcend tastes. I don’t find I Love Lucy especially funny, but I can clearly see that it’s a classic. I think there are a few ways to gauge whether or not a show can be fairly considered a classic. Did it set trends that lasted? Is it popular years later? Did it change the industry in any way?
Cleary, Lucy is an unfair comparison. It literally rewrote the book on how shows were filmed, and what constituted a successful show. But, if you ask those questions regarding Seinfeld you will get a Yes each and every time. It’s still popular. People are still often quoting lines from the show. It opened the way for that generation of comics to have sitcoms.
According to that article one of the reasons it loses it’s place among the pantheon of classic sitcoms because the characters did not grow over the course of the series. They had issues, but did not become interesting. I don’t think that makes a difference when you are writing episodes that are so relatable to so many people. Without being contrived.
And, on a personal level. I can watch the show every day and still laugh pretty much every time. Like almost everyone else, the early episodes are my least favorite. I think the later seasons are better because they had so much to build on, and so many character quirks to work off of. Also, ancillary characters became more regular in the later seasons. Jerry Stiller was awesome. Elaine’s boyfriend Puddy never failed to amuse me.
I vote classic. And funny.
Actually, it doesn’t.
But that is the problem, it is contrived. I’m pretty sure they were aware that it was when they were writing it. However, what seemed irreverent at the time seems cartoonist in retrospect. The characters’ backgrounds are not fleshed out at all. In addition, the inconsistencies and contrivances are pretty outlandish.
The other thing that bothers me about the show is how narrow its focus is. It is basically an superficial examination of how idiosyncratic life can be, written from a urban (New York), white-collar perspective. I don’t think that makes it bad, but I think that’s part of the reason Seinfeld still does not appeal to a great number of minorities, and why all the ancillary characters outside that demographic are very poorly written.
Having said that, I still like the show, and can appreciate how it is classic tv show. I think it’s unfair to assess how much it has aged when society is not that far removed from that time.
Even better: “Jerry! It’s Frank Costanza! George is dead! Call me back.”
:dubious:
Frank Costanza has some of the best lines:
FC: “My George isn’t smart enough to <something something>”
Elaine: “You got that right.”
FC: “What the hell is that supposed to mean? You wanna piece of me?”
FC: “OK- you got the hen, the rooster, and the chicken. The rooster goes with the hen, so who goes with the chicken?”
Susan’s Dad: “The rooster. They’re all chickens, the rooster goes with all of them.”
FC: “That’s perverse!”
Another great lne that my gf and I use whenever possible:
(In Australia accent) “Maybe a dingo ate your baby!”
That one had me laughing out loud just now, because I KNOW people that would say that. My step-father’s family is from Long Island and that phrase could come from any of the men in that family.
The only thing that seems terribly dated on Seinfeld are the big cordless phones and the lack of cell phones. Other than that, they didn’t deal with popular music or TV shows much that I can recall. Well I do remember when Jerry and George were going to a meeting at NBC there were Blossom posters on the wall. But I think it holds up well.
I can watch Seinfeld over and over, there’s so much variety and good comedy there. I also have fun spotting all the actors from other shows that had a part in Seinfeld, like the dad on Malcolm in the Middle, Teri Hatcher, Daphne from Fraiser the mom from Smallville, etc.
It really doesn’t seem like it’s been ten years to me . . . but maybe that’s because I never watched it when they were airing new episodes. I watched the whole thing in re-runs in the early 2000s. (Now that I think about it, I’ve been weirdly a few years behind on a lot of fads. Like I got really into grunge rock for about a year – in 1996.)
I feel the same way about Seinfeld as I do about a lot of sitcoms – the early episodes are the best. My theory is that gradually the writers of any long-running sitcom start turning the characters into parodies of themselves. Friends was the most egregious example of this phenomenon, but it happened with Seinfeld too.
In particular, I really prefer the neurotic Woody Allen-esque George of the early episodes to the despicable, scheming George of the later episodes. My favorite episode of the show was Season 2’s “The Phone Message” Whereas in later episodes George was a jerk who deserved whatever he got, in this one I found him actually sympathetic. Yeah, he’s still nuts, but he’s driven by insecurity, not laziness or greed. And while his plan ultimately fails and his girlfriend hears the messages, it ends up not mattering because she found them funny. In later episodes, everything would have blown up in his face in the most humiliating way possible.
Maybe I’ve gone too far afield of the OP. I guess what I’m saying is the early episodes still hold up for me, whereas the later ones I never really loved that much to begin with. I may be an atypical viewer of the show, though.
Elaine, George, even Jerry: not consistently funny enough. Take away Kramer and the show would have lasted about a year or two.
Favorite episode: when Kramer has the cough and decides to get the medicine from the vet. Then he starts acting like a dog, e.g. when Jerry’s trying to get the pill down his throat.
I got accused of being a low-talker the other day. My sister and I call each other “schmoopy”. NajaHusband and I routinely fling out an anguished/enraged cry for “SERENITY NOW!!!” whenever something goes awry. Just the other day we saw a guy on a tricked-out Rascal and NajaHusband started snickering over the low-speed chase scene.
It’s not a show I ever think to purposely tune into, but whenever we catch it I laugh like a loon. Remember when Kramer simmers himself in butter? Or when he opens a smoking lounge, and then sees the effects of all that second-hand smoke in a mirror? “I’m hideous!”
Also, the Frogger episode is one of my favorites!
Snork. “Eat hickory!”
Around the office, I am begging for windows to be opened and fans turned on. Then I think of Jerry’s parents in Del Boca Vista “Please, the air conditioning!” “You’re hot?!? I don’t even know how to turn it on!”
And more than once something is analogous to “Who puts a bar there?!?”
Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum!
That was exactly the annoying thing about it. It just pandered to a demographic (and I technically fit that demographic, but didn’t share its apparent concerns) rather than being really funny, and I hate it when T.V. does that. “We’re going to continue to talk about the things you talked about in your dorm rooms, even though you graduated several years ago. We know your tune.” Sorry, it wasn’t my tune. It was pretty sophomoric.
Still, it was mildly amusing at times (the library book concept was good, but they kind of started beating a dead horse with the detective). It certainly was not the great revolutionary shift in the sitcom genre that some people say it was.
They just didn’t seem to realize the limitations of a premise, and from what the creator said in the Newsweek article, they never intended it to be.
Then there were the lame attempts at being “quirky”: Kramer’s appearance, the bass music between scenes–I didn’t fall for that.
I think that for something that was coming out when the Simpsons was coming out, it was pretty mediocre. Even to compare the two is ludicrous.
Also, to have a gratuitous stand-up routine in the beginning is really pretentious. What is Seinfeld doing now? Not much, but I guess he can afford to.
Frank Stiller has only one character, George Costanza / Carry Hefernans dad.
Thank god I love that character. He cracks me up every time I see him. He’s so nuts I just love it.
As far as Seinfeld goes, the Steinbrenner stuff didn’t hold up at all and as mentioned before, the last seasons were so far fetched and ZANY that they stopped being funny. The one that sticks out at me whenever I think of this decline is the one where Kramer rubs butter on himself for a good tan and Newman tries to eat him like a turkey. I would say the show starting stalling in general when it started hinging too many episodes on Kramers shennanigans.
I did like the Kenny Rogers Roasters ep. That was funny.