TELEVISION-USA: ‘Seinfeld’ Ends – Much Ado about Nothing

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 26 1998 (IPS) - World events in the tumultuous last weeks of May – with India testing nuclear weapons, Indonesia tottering on the verge of collapse and the historic peace vote in Ireland – certainly hit the headlines in the United States. But for millions of Americans, the biggest story of the month was the fate of four popular television characters famous for conducting idle conversation.

The weekly TV show ‘Seinfeld’ ended its nine-year run on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and attracted an audience of 73 million to witness the sight of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his three friends locked in jail, chatting about how to button a shirt.

It was an appropriate send-off to four characters who had built a huge following among TV viewers throughout the 1990s despite their obnoxious behaviour: Seinfeld’s musing, finicky Jerry; Jason Alexander’s selfish, crabby George; Julia Louis- Dreyfus’s frantic, sarcastic Elaine; and Michael Richards’s cosmically loony Kramer.

Seinfeld, who intends to leave Tv to return to stand-up comedy rotines, announced in December that he was ending the show which he created with Larry David – and on which he served as executive producer as well as leading actor.

In the five months since then, NBC orchestrated a mountain of hype around a show so obsessed with the minutiae of life – dating etiquette, eating quirks and the petty annoyances of New York City – that The Washington Post took pains to identify articles as ‘Seinfeld-free’.

From the cover of magazines like Time and Rolling Stone to the 35-foot-high video screen in New York’s Times Square – where some 200 people watched the ‘Seinfeld’ finale on May 14 – the publicity surrounding the demise of the show was unavoidable. The hype led to one of the most-watched television events in the annals of U.S. broadcasting – beisdes the 73 million – or nearly a third of all Americans – who watched the last episode, millions tuned in again when it was aired six nights later.

What they saw showed much of what made the show funny, and quite a bit of what made its demise appropriate, and even a little tardy.

‘Seinfeld’ shared with other comedies – such as Britain’s madcap ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ – a tendency to generate catch phrases and odd characters which quickly latched into the popular imagination. From phrases like “yadda-yadda-yadda” (which could hide a number of thoughts) to “sponge-worthy” (i.e., a mate worthy of the use of a particular contraceptive), the show alternately spoofed and bolstered the slang-heavy world of educated, upper-class New Yorkers.

As the last episode showed, ‘Seinfeld’ complemented its four lead characters with a universe of equally self-absorbed, hostile or simply confused eccentrics, from the porcine postal worker “Newman” (played by Wayne Knight) to bit players like a domineering chef referred to as ‘the Soup Nazi’ (based on real New York soup merchant Al Yeganeh, who gloated about the show’s demise).

Perhaps the most famous recurring concept – and certainly the one most annoyingly repeated in the press – was that it was a show “about nothing”. That line comes from one particularly self- referential plot, in which Jerry and George tried to sell NBC executives a proposal for a TV comedy uncannily similar to the actual ‘Seinfeld’ show: one which, George assured the unconvinced executives, would be about “nothing.”

In fact, ‘Seinfeld’ was a show which offered increasingly complex plots, with each of the four characters involved in separate complications which would become entangled intricately over the course of a half-hour episode. It was about nothing in the same way that Marx Brothers movies were: Unlike most U.S. television, no moral points or need to restore order ever got in the way of the pleasant insanity of the plot.

By the end of the show’s run, with co-creator and lead writer David having left after the seventh season, some of the steam had begin to run out, and the stories were becoming more convoluted: recent story lines about gossipping rabbis and a Puerto Rican Day parade attracted some mild protests, but not that much laughter.

Even the finale seemed off-key, with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer on trial in Massachusetts for precisely those character traits which had made them almost endearing: their self-regard, and alternating contempt for and disinterest in other people. Arrested under a “Good Samaritan” law for not helping a man who is being robbed, the four confront a Kenneth Starr-style prosecutor who – in a Clintonian moment – puts their character on trial. Naturally, it ends badly for them.

As a send-off, the finale at least shared the sour mood of many of the funniest ‘Seinfeld’ episode – no previous U.S. television show has ever resolved its plot by summarily condemning its cast to prison. Also, it offered a witty image of the sort of prison that Jerry Seinfeld must have felt the weekly schedule of his successful comedy had become.

But it leaves open a scary question: If the cast members ever decide to tire of their post-‘Seinfeld’ career track, will the four inmates simply end their sentence and come back?