I could have lived with the whole assholes acting out in ways that were darkly comedic. Given my usual likes I probably would have found it wildly funny. They were whiny, shallow, completely unlikeable assholes responding to what seemed to be wildly trivial. I didn’t like the show the first few times I saw it when it was new. I tried again later because of all the buzz and social pressure. Kramer at least had an eccentric vibe so usually I was just mildly annoyed with him. Elaine didn’t need to morph to establish that she’d alienated everyone else in my mind. I already wanted to choke her just to make her shut up in season 1. The annoy-o-meter was at 11. I wanted everyone else in the show to break the bounds of convention and be over the top assholes to the main characters.
We sympathize with Tony because he’s charismatic underdog (and at least he’s not a commie!), not because he doesn’t do evil things. He murders another man at the start of the movie for a green card.
And it seems like many didn’t lose their sympathy for the character. While he did murder his best friend, this same best friend secretly married Tony’s sister after being told to stay away from her. Tony came to his Manny’s house and only saw Manny in a robe, and his sister at the top of the stairs naked underneath another robe.
He still refuses to kill women and children and because of that, he has to go up against a Colombian death squad by himself, once again, the underdog.
I agree. Seems like it happened around season 6.
I really hated the series finale and thought it didn’t fit with the tone of the series at all. They weren’t supposed to be assholes who ruined peoples lives. Yeah, they could be selfish at times, like we all are, but lots of their “first world problems” were easy to relate to. Jerry was successful at dating but he never got tied down because that would ruin the show. Lois seemed to be a perfect match for Jerry but we never saw her again after “The Race.” But later the writers retconned Jerry’s persona to be a guy who always finds fault with his girlfriends because he’s immature.
When I first saw Jerry and co laughing at the guy getting robbed it seemed forced and out of character for all of them.
I get that they wanted Elaine to break out from the possibly clichéd nice girlfriend role. But by making her too mean she became very different, and very unlikable. I always thought that a part in the increase in her popularity to her being made to look more attractive and less mousy. She was originally a nice balance to the other characters, but I really started to dislike her towards the end.
I never saw them as jerks early on. They usually made mistakes that regular people might make.
What about Married with Children, Night Court, or Cheers? I never saw it as an intentional meta-commentary on family friendly sitcoms. I think the examples of the show you later cite were just the writers trying to be funny and different, not trying to show a contrast to other sitcoms for the point of commentary.
Well, yeah—it’s not like the four main characters are the only jerks, surrounded by sympathetic, innocent victims of their jerkishness.
ftg said the characters are like children. There may be an element of truth to that, but overall, I disagree. The characters’ behavior is guided, when it’s guided by anything beyond self-absorption, by manners without morals or heart. Their decisions on how to act are based on what’s “done” vs. “not done,” not on what’s “good” vs. “bad” nor on any love, compassion, or empathy. This is not, in general, true of children.
I can watch Seinfield episodes and be somewhat amused, but the show never gave me a true ROTFLMAO experience. Maybe it’s because I don’t get sarcasm (which is kinda funny, seeing as how Seinfeld says he doesn’t either) or I’m just not in a NYC state of mind or I just didn’t find any of the characters likeable, especially Jerry…but it really wasn’t my show.
On the other hand, I can watch episodes from the Martin, which had a superficially similar set-up (urban comedian with a motley crew of friends), and laugh my head off. There is certainly a lot of meanness in that show. But it wasn’t a signature.
Married with Children was another intentional parody of the formula, although it didn’t stray as much as Seinfeld. Night Court was schmaltzy as hell so I’m not sure what comparison you’re making there. Cheers was great but they didn’t do a whole lot “different” so much as they did it very well.
I meant that there were already popular sitcoms that didn’t revolve around the traditional family format like Family Ties, The Cosby Show, and Full House. Is there a quote from the Seinfeld creators where they mention they were intentionally doing commentary about the phoniness of family sitcoms? Married with Children seems like it was trying to do the meta-commentary thing, especially since it starts out with a family format but everything from then on out is the opposite of what you’d expect.
He didn’t say they were all sitcoms about families though (though the ones he cited were family-based sitcoms). Even the office-setting style, in which I’d include Cheers, sitcoms were usually full of Special Moments and Lessons. Night Court was probably one of the worst of these where it felt like 40% of the show was some quasi-miraculous moment showing the gang that there is Real Goodness in the world.
I’d say Senfield went even further than Married With Children since they still went out of their way to show the Bundys defending one another or acting against their usual insulting nature to help one another out. There were plenty of studio audience "Awwww…"s in MWC, but none in Seinfeld.
People often compare American TV unfavorably to British TV. I think a problem our shows have is American audiences want to like the characters. British audiences are okay with watching unlikable characters as long at they’re entertaining.
Seinfeld, in this sense, was a British show - it was willing to make its characters unpleasant.
Honestly, I never saw them as jerks period. For whatever faults they had, there was always somebody around that was even worse than them. Often multiple somebodies.
I liked some things about the finale, but I agree with you that the “laughing at the guy getting robbed” absolutely was forced and out of character. It was a bit of lazy writing, I think. Having the four of them tried in court was a decent idea in that it made the reappearance of so many characters plausible–but the ‘standing and laughing’ as the reason for the prosecution just didn’t work. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer had never been established as being sadists (or even ‘schadenfreude enthusiasts’).
This is pretty much how I saw them. They weren’t good, but they were only a little more selfish and petty than the average person. But all of the situations were driven by that little bit of extra selfishness and pettiness.
Yes, that’s a perfect way of putting it. Sure, they’re self-absorbed and narcissistic, and (especially George) try to see what they can get away with, but they aren’t purposely hurtful to others. Many of the episodes are centered around them trying to help someone or doing the socially acceptable thing, whether they want to or not, even if they are complaining the whole time.
The whole concept of Seinfeld is that, whatever they did, good or bad, it would always come back to bite them in the ass in some wonderfully contrived full circle merger of the plot lines. Anyone else who got burned was just collateral damage, an unfortunate problem of being involved with the Seinfeld gang.
Exactly. Now that’s a show I like, too, but find much more uncomfortable, and the characters just ring true to life. I never saw the Seinfeld characters as real. It was a bit of a farce, so I never really had a reaction to them as real human beings. It’s somewhat similar to the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia characters. Love that show, and they’re the biggest assholes on TV, but their assholery is so absurd that it can’t really be believed.
Also, for me, Seinfeld has gotten funnier with time. I didn’t watch it much first run, but now it’s one of the few shows in syndication I’ll actually watch.
The Bubble Boy episode is my strongest memory of the show. Only the nasty Seinfeld characters could get in a fight over Trivial Pursuit.
Best episode is George changing his bathing suit. Shrinkage. That’s Seinfeld at its best. I like it when the comedy is at the expense of these self absorbed characters.
Bingo. The “edginess” was pretty much a facade, as far as I’m concerned.
Except that it wasn’t particularly funny, because the jokes themselves–the construction of the jokes–was pretty much par for the course. Whatever little parody value there might have been couldn’t save it from that.
Yes, it thankfully did away with the idiocy of the standard sitcom narrative arch, which definitely made the show bearable. And the characters? They weren’t really all that bad. They were just human, which partly accounts for the appeal of the show. I personally didn’t find them particularly interesting–especially not Jerry–and I never bought into the overblown conceit that it was “edgy.”
The humor itself, however, was run-of-the-mill–nothing new, really.
But that had them making fun of the ugly baby, Kramer stealing lobsters from a trap, George trying to get revenge by walking in on Jerry’s girlfriend when she’s changing, George making eggs with lobster for Jerry’s kosher girlfriend (making both her and Jerry upset), etc.
There was an era on the show (around the “Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that.” episode) where George is so vile and immoral that I was astonished that anyone would be friends with him. Very early and much later, he had his useful points. But not around then.
BTW: Does anybody know what episode the OP is talking about? I don’t recall it.
