Seinfeld on DVD

Season 9, good grief, has some absolute corkers, but it has some stinkers too.

Of the ones that are already released, get season 2. The Chinese Restaurant, The Pony Remark and The Apartment, etc etc.

I kind of agree there's no reason to buy the DVDs in the US though...

The show’s pivotal moment came in the third season, in 1991. Charles remembers walking with David from the “Seinfeld” offices in Studio City up to Fryman Canyon to try to break a story: the library-cop episode, in which Jerry is investigated for keeping a book out for twenty years. “We had a couple of strands, and I don’t know if it was the oxygen from the walking, but we were very exhilarated,” Charles said. “We went, ‘What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?’

“Suddenly it’s like—why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany—quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story—no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like—oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.”

Season 1 is kinda painful

but i disagree! i love 'em all!!! the busboy is a stone cold classic! and the pony remark is great, too. and the chinese restaurant. and the revenge! sure, you can see how the series undergoes changes from being jerry's schtick to becoming an organic mess of them all four, but seasons 1-2 are still GREAT. even the pilot:

Jerry's friend: "I can't wait to get on that boat!"
Jerry: "Me too!"

"MAYBE THE DINGO ATE YOUR BABY!"

"What did you say?"

Funniest damn line in the first 3 series if not the whole thing. Just about coughed up a lung first time I watched that ep.

the stranded is a classic, too.

Stockholm syndrome right there.

I guess it was around season 4, which I feel is the peak of the show's creative output, with the (in)famous "masturbation contest" that the show became a watercooler show that blew up in popularity and became a mainstream smash.

Most of us Seinfeld fanboys monomaniacally insist the best years were 1-4, before the series broke into the stratosphere. Its just like the whole indie rock thing, when your favorite band breaks and you run around sniffing that "yea, they are really great, but you should have seen them before they got big, when they had nothing to lose" or something like that.

I think what I love most about the show, particuarly in the early years (there I go again), is the organic braininess due mostly to the vision of Larry David. It's the same quality that makes me revere the first 5 seasons of MST3K with Joel Hodgson and lose interest as the show got bigger and less intimate.

My favourite cameo actor was the wooden rabbi. Was that a later or earlier episode?

Very true - or, as louis-dreyfus says on the commentary track on one of the first episodes on the dvd, when she sees herself:

"Those over-sized clothes - it's painful!"