Seinfeld: Classic or Dud

this show is chicken soup for my soul, desert island tv. it also takes me back to my parents pre-divorce show the show is intrinsically tied to my idyllic youth. its pretty much impossible to look at it subjectively for me.

i enjoy how the leads are mostly making fun of each other for being jerks. lots of shows do this now but are LOOK WHAT WE ARE DOING AREN'T WE CLEVER while Seinfeld was way more artful about it. the cast was Marx brothers level unbeatable.

Seinfeld the TV show and Curb Your Enthusiasm are still v. popular amongst the 20-30 somethings I associate with so yeah obsolete is a stretch. That said I don't think any of them really give a damn about Jerry Seinfeld the Comedian.

Hey, guys: The Marriage Ref. Just thought you'd appreciate being reminded of that.

I think I get more enjoyment out of modern-day Jerry being an asshole than trying to be funny.

Seinfeld is still awesome. I think it holds up better than any other sitcom from the 90's. I think the fact that Jerry is basically unlikeable was a huge reason why the show worked.

Yeah they def pushed the "they're all assholes" angle, less & less subtly as it went on (George's self-centredness literally got someone killed!) I'm def in the it's still great camp; the sex and dating stuff almost never came from a planet I recognise and the racism was always off the charts even for a 90s show imo

Thinking about Seinfeld the standup is just depressing. I remember a couple of years back when he had that appalling joke(?) about those transgenders they have now and it was like, not only is this a shitty thing to say but just on a comedic level you're thinking "this is maybe the most successful standup alive and he has all day every day to come up with this shit". The casual bigotry sucks most obviously but the laziness is pretty sad on its own

i don't think i understood how astronomically selfish all the characters were (probably because i was busy being an astronomically selfish teen/20-something)

jerry's standup act had occasional moments of brilliance (why don't dogs carry money? no pockets) but in general was pretty standard - which is why it worked so well as the basis for a sitcom character imo

wrt to Seinfeld's stand-up being pretty standard/unremarkable, isn't this to some extent a case of him being a victim of his own success? "what's the deal with [banal thing]" is a cliche in comedy now, but the line I generally hear is that he pioneered it (in that particular form at least)?

Seinfeld the series was psychological realism to anyone who's lived in NYC for at least 3 months

things are much worse now

Have we really reached Seinfeld challops now? The show will always be classic

Some of the bits in the show are really good but I assume the writers had some input into that? It's obvious he's skilled even when the material is tepid xps

fwiw when I said he was obsolete I meant as a comedian

then again based on world events I could probably have just taken the challops one step further and said "comedians: obsolete"

I'm finally digging into Broad City and getting my own NYC-life-recognition buzz off that. Seinfeld for me was more like trying to grasp what adults did and how they lived. Hard to really reset my brain and read the characters as "like me" even though I'm now pretty much the same age or older than they were when the show started, and it's just as much a show about people being young-adult screwups getting into often-childish situations while more conventional grownups look on in horror at their failure to have mastered normative social behavior. Jason Alexander was barely thirty for season one! Bizarre. I think the outfits, Real Jobs, and the notion that they all had one-bedroom apartments do a lot to keep me from really seeing them as peers - Kramer is a bohemian "hipster doofus" but this makes him a figure of fun and ultimately it seems hard to understand why he's hanging out with these comparative squares.

my roommate was watching the Chinese restaurant episode (sort of starring Lo Pan himself James Hong) and it was just non-stop solid lines like George screaming "You know we're LIVING in a SOCIETY!" so utterly classic at capturing the surreal absurdities of everyday life (waiting for a tale at a restaurant as microcosm of the human element vs unfeeling beauracracy) that are at the heart of David's comedy. Seinfeld himself seems like a doofus at times but i get the sense from interviews he realized this as well.

the final season def got more cartoony, they ended it right before it started to suck. best move ever, and the Curb reunion was brilliant!

Seinfeld chollops cos there is a generation that didn't grow up w it and i remember older tv shows from before i was born always looked like crap when i was a kid so i get that. also tbf many chollops are from people that may not have ever watched it.

i lived in NYC for a year during peak Seinfeld times (1995-1996) and Morbius is otm.

it was probably i think for a lot of people their first exposure to everyday Jewish culture, not the more strict religious upbringing but just it being around the margins, like how going to church as a child or certain ceremonies from my youth must seem second nature for me and i don't even notice them, even as they are part of my life today.

my wife and i often have this conversations where we attempt to explain certain aspects of our religion to each other and it's a comedy act over here. "so wait you've got a realistic model of a dead body with blood streaming from it hanging on a cross on a wall and you stare at it for an hour?" etc etc.

This site is a goldmine:

Seinfeld Scripts

I would like to add that thinking back on Seinfeld and saying to oneself “it wasn’t THAT funny, and Jerry is an asshole” is hopefully a lagging, rather than leading, indicator that we are living in Peak Cynicism

i still think old seinfeld is funny! but it's not cynical to point out that show was pretty much about them being weird assholes, or at least it evolved into that by the end.

Jason Alexander was barely thirty for season one!

And Julia Louis-Dreyfus was two years younger than Ilana Glazer is now

they ended it right before it started to suck

One of my all-time favorite shows, but I've gotta disagree with that -- final two seasons sucked. I haven't watched those episodes enough to tell how much of it is the acting and how much is the writing, but the drop in quality was pretty dramatic.

the cast was Marx brothers level unbeatable.

you have a lot of insane opinions but this is next level

Everyone in old movies and tv shows look 15+ years older than they actually were.

I marvel at how I am the age of the Walshes and the other kids' parents in 90210, they look like they come from a different planet.

I think the hardest thing to identify with about Seinfeld the show is how often attention is drawn to Seinfeld the character needing to spend lots of money, but never ever enough to affect him negatively.

"oh well guess I gotta buy new washing machines for the laundromat"
"installed this new kitchen but it sucks, rip it all out"
"I've got to fly to Florida like 4 times this week! Yeesh"

I mean they did have that one scene where Kramer is shocked by how well Jerry is doing, but I always was distracted by how much money Jerry was comically forced to spend in the background and foreground most episodes without any financial consequence.

It definitely got weaker or less consistent in the last couple seasons, and the canonical classic eps are pretty much all in seasons 1-5. There's lots of good stuff later on but it got goofier, more surreal, and more aware that any little thing they included was practically a catchphrase already. Also the ground-level parking-garage observational stuff and comedy-of-manners material started taking a back seat to high-concept hijinks. The latter were still pretty well-done and I don't think it ever hit anything like the lows the Simpsons found after its peak, but it was definitely good that it wrapped when it did.

i still like the last couple seasons a lot, though any further move in that direction would have been lame. i actually think the first few seasons are the weak spot.

my recollection of Seinfeld's run was that like the Simpsons, the first couple seasons are fine, but it really peaks for those five seasons in the middle. it seemed like for awhile there every single episode was outstanding, pretty much.

it definitely dipped a bit towards the end but i think unlike the Simpsons it did trend back up a bit as it finished.

Season 8 is great, I think that's when the show was at peak surreal humor. There's a scene in "The Yada Yada" which is I think is brilliant, Jerry's in the confessional booth and George just randomly bursts in at the end and says, "Jerry I've got to talk to you". Always found that hilarious. Plus the Bizarro Jerry episode. Season 9 doesn't quite hold up as well but I think they're still plenty funny. I mean I definitely don't think the show should've ended sooner than it did.

and yeah if you haven't seen it the Curb/Seinfeld reunion season is amazing. I actually wish there was more fanservice stuff there, it's odd to bring back so many characters and only give them like one line. but the amount of meta-referencing that goes on there is incredible, beyond anything Seinfeld attempted even in its "fake pilot" days

I still think season 4 (where Jerry and George are working on the pilot for Jerry's show) is one of the best seasons of television ever.

I still think season 4 (where Jerry and George are working on the pilot for Jerry's show) is one of the best seasons of television ever.

― this is ridcolus (Old Lunch), Wednesday, September 27, 2017 11:29 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i find season 4 a weird outlier. they've fully established the characters and they're now perfectly formed, which took at least a couple of seasons to really happen. but the narrative arc throughout the season seems odd to me, it's not really what I'm looking for out of Seinfeld. also the joe davola stuff is too scary lol

and by ever you mean since 1980

xp

I'm finally digging into Broad City and getting my own NYC-life-recognition buzz off that. Seinfeld for me was more like trying to grasp what adults did and how they lived.

thank god seinfeld doesn't have weed smoking dubstep montages

xpost Well, since tv before 1980 wasn't generally interested in constructing season-long arcs, yeah, that is what I mean.

(Plus that thing where tv wasn't even good until, what, the mid-'90s?)

yadda yadda yadda

eff arcs

stand-alone episodes forevah

pictures morbs watching the phil silvers show and sugarfoot constantly

xpost I mostly only watch Rockford Files and Alfred Hitchcock Presents these days so I am largely inclined to agree with u atm.

the 70s columbo episodes are a lot better than the 80s/90s revival episodes. maybe morbs is right

lol Sugarfoot, that's a nice one jim but i have never seen it

the past week i have been bouncing between Twin Peaks 1990 and Dick Van Dyke

George wanting his coworkers to start calling him "T-Bone" is the funniest thing to me

Speaking of Seinfeld season 4, I just saw this supercut the other day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXvOFYCgtJY

they ended it right before it started to suck
One of my all-time favorite shows, but I've gotta disagree with that -- final two seasons sucked

i meant in the context of, say, The Simpsons, which just kept going. in a way i agree and those last seasons of Seinfeld are pretty bad but not _really bad_. certainly they were sliding in quality and getting more cartoonish. i think the tail end of "golden era" Simpsons had a lot of crap on the level of the last two seasons of Seinfeld (certainly Homer/Kramer parallel sliding further into surreal mascot status).

both were headed to the same arc, what do you do with these characters who already have hundreds of stories, whose characters have catchphrases and fans and expectations? maybe they parachuted out right as plane was starting to crash.

re "since 1980," i have seen and loved plenty of classic tv and seinfeld is right up there w/ the best of it, i'd rate it as the finest ever u.s. sitcom just behind the honeymooners. season four is glorious because the various little story arcs really do deepen the comedy and lead to incredible moments (like george's dumb story idea about the guy sentenced to be someone's butler -- and then a couple episodes later, george becomes that guy) whereas on other, lesser sitcoms it'd just be some soap-opera shit. and yes, elaine trapped in joe davola's apartment is genuinely scary and actually kind of hard to watch.

i had an eerie realization a while back: seinfeld ended in may 1998, the same month they aired the last episodes of simpsons season 9, which is probably the last gasp of "golden era" simpsons before the rot really sets in. now imagine if seinfeld were still on the air in 2017, with the same cast but all-new writers, and that's how bizarre it really is that the simpsons is still chugging away almost two decades later. puts me in mind of the stephen king story w/ the kid who gets stuck in limbo for millions of years and goes insane.

There’s a certain point where if you’re making too much money doing something you start to suck at it.

well, unless you're Spielberg

Ok, I'm on that script website, and looking over the episodes from the last two seasons "sucked" is probably too harsh -- remembering lots of decent bits and some great lines from them now, though as I replay them from memory the humor is blunted somewhat by the actors really over-doing their characters. The car dealership episode genuinely sucked.

I think I do agree they ended at the right time, noting that season 8 was fantastic.

I think the hardest thing to identify with about Seinfeld the show is how often attention is drawn to Seinfeld the character needing to spend lots of money, but never ever enough to affect him negatively.

"oh well guess I gotta buy new washing machines for the laundromat"
"installed this new kitchen but it sucks, rip it all out"
"I've got to fly to Florida like 4 times this week! Yeesh"

I honest to god never ever wondered about this. Perhaps because Jerry is the most 'cartoonish' character of the show (more so than Kramer even imo). It's part of the deal between the viewers and the creators; in order for it to be so good and so surreal at times, it's 'allowed' to not have to account for things like this. And for "a show about nothing" they spent way more time and detail on the mundane, the "excrutiating minutiae" to make up for leaving this be.

well, unless you're Spielberg

true, he sucked from the beginning