Okay, nobody watches the show for realism. But there are a few things that would never happen in real life…
[ul]
[li]Jerry’s pickup lines are ridiculously weak. Seinfeld the sitcom star is funny. Seinfeld the stand up comic is pathetic. No woman would allow the person who uttered “You might not know it to look at me, but I can run really fast!” an extra second.[/li][li]Speaking of the same episode, the Festivus one, the “two face” girl looks exactly the same in the “bad light” and the “good light.” If he finds her repulsive in one setting it should be that way in all of them, 'cos she looks the same![/li][li]George gets women far out of his league. Which is not to say that he couldn’t attract very good looking women, but it seems to me he’d date more women who’d look more like him.[/li][/ul]
Jerry is understandable as he would be a minor celebrity and makes a lot of money. George and Kramer are harder to understand. George can afford a $2,000 a month apartment in Manhattan so at some point his income has gone up.
As for Kramer most of the women he dates are have some degree of unusualness about them that would make them undateable to others.
[li]Speaking of the same episode, the Festivus one, the “two face” girl looks exactly the same in the “bad light” and the “good light.” If he finds her repulsive in one setting it should be that way in all of them, 'cos she looks the same![/li][/QUOTE]
Nope, she looks different. Watch it again. They alter her make-up and hair noticeably for the bad lighting. Her eyes looks sunken. Her hair is limp. Her skin is pallid.
Now, given all that, in reality she still looks okay–definitely not hideous or anything. But they couldn’t make the difference TOO large or it wouldn’t have been even remotely feasible that bad lighting was the cause. Plus the whole point of Seinfeld is that the characters niggle over the tiniest details in their lives. I think the show handled the two-face change just right.
You might be right, but Kramer had a gambling addiction. It’s possible that he won a lot of money, and then decided to call it quits. Possible, but extremely unlikely.
The “real” Kramer that lived next door to Larry David is said to have lived off of money from a patent relating to disco balls, if I recall correctly. I always thought it was suggested that the sitcom Kramer was similar. In one episode George says Kramer “falls ass backwards into money”. At some point the announces that he’s retiring because his coffee table book was optioend for a movie. I agree though that the beauty is in the lack of explanation.
This is the part where I have the most trouble suspending my disbelief. He’s not rich, he’s not good-looking, he’s not kind, he’s not deep, yet he’s always dating nice,* pretty, employed, non-drug-addicted women.
*Excepting the Unemployment Office woman’s daughter.
I have the same problem. I love the show and watch it all the time in syndication, but some suspension of disbelief or the characters’ neurosis bother me because of their extremism. Jerry especially has all these little traits that, while funny on TV, I would hate in a real life acquaintence.
For example, entire episodes would be excised from the show if he had simply stopped and asked a simple question of the women he has problems with. Like “Why do you wear the same dress all the time?” instead of snooping in her closet first. Or “Why did your friends think that me taking you out is like a charity case?” Or my most annoying one, he could have just told her “I’m sorry, I knocked your toothbrush into the toilet.”
Each time the question was either not posed or posed too late.
I think it was more or less implied that Kramer had made a lot of bank from his coffee table book.
The “two-face” thing was a comic exaggeration of a real phenomenon in that some people can go back and forth from looking attractive to looking bad – it’s a highly subjective thing, of course, but the Seinfeld characters were largely defined by their preoccupations with petty, nitpicking “flaws” in the people they dated.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic that Jerry - a minor celebrity in the context of the show – would be able to charm women with silly pickup lines.
I agree that it wasn’t realistic for George to able to get the women that he got. I can’t fanwank that one.