Seinfeld is often hailed as the definitive TV show of the 1990s, so it’s always shocking to think that it first appeared in the 1980s. During that debut season, in September 1989, the biggest comedy properties in America were: The Cosby Show, Cheers, Who’s the Boss?, Roseanne, The Golden Girls and a long-forgotten Cosby Show spin-off called A Different World.
In that company it stood out among the Neanderthals like Homo erectus. By the time it ended, nine years and 169 episodes later, no one could ever look at the sitcom in the same light.
Seinfeld dealt a blow to diversity – by finally giving truly awful people the chance to star in mainstream comedy. From David Brent to George Bluth, from Mark Corrigan to Dennis Reynolds, Seinfeld walked so others could run.
It seemed to reveal something about human nature that made everything that had come before obsolete – like McCartney and Lennon hearing Heartbreak Hotel for the first time, or Stravinsky’s audience after the first performance of The Rite of Spring. There was no way to stop seeing the world it had brought us, and since then comedy has come to see its role as the narcissist’s mirror.
“No hugging, no learning” was the famous saying from the Seinfeld writing room. Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine often ended the episode being punished by the universe for their lies, but at the same time remaining blissfully unreconciled with the fact that they were better people.
George Costanza (Jason Alexander) was actively Shakespearean in his ability to actively narrate the dark clashing forces within him. The arch misanthrope (“I don’t think there’s ever been an appointment in my life where I wanted the other guy to show up”), when George is unwittingly about to marry fiancée Susan in season seven, he begins to pray that she will die in a plane crash.
Jerry then reminds him that plane crashes are rare. “It’s something,” George replies. “It’s hope.” When Susan later dies, it is because George was too cash-strapped to pay for self-sealing wedding invitation envelopes, causing her to eat her way through a toxic amount of paper glue. George responds to her death by calling actress Marisa Tomei and asking for a date. (“The coldest moment in the history of television,” said Jason Alexander, who played George.)
For his part, Jerry, for all his sense of milquetoast poise, is as dull a figure as American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman: he eats cereal and serially dates, his emotional palette fluctuates between mildly irritated and neutral, his head full only of nice sneakers and oral hygiene tips, his future changes at the next whim. Meanwhile, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is often portrayed by true connoisseurs as the most duplicitous of the bunch: a woman who will stop at nothing to feign deafness to avoid chatting up taxi drivers.
Even as the show went dark, a new generation of comedy writers was re-modeling their art in his image. Graham Linehan attributes the elaborate schemes of Father Ted and later The IT Crowd to his obsession with reverse-engineering Seinfeld.
When Mitchell Hurwitz came up with Arrested Development in 2005, he tapped into some of that complicated clash of storylines. But more importantly, he abandoned every last common decency, to build an unparalleled ensemble of narcissistic pathologies in skin suits.
To the extent that when you watch Arrested Development it often feels like you’re watching characters talking to themselves, instead of each other. Not only is there no learning and no cuddling, the message is that dialogue itself is impossible: we are all just monologues, whirring algorithms, spinning tops bouncing off each other.
For Ricky Gervais, David Brent was a Costanza-esque clash of ego and selfishness, but heightened to an English degree of clumsiness. “George is the outstanding character,” says Sam Bain, co-writer of Peep Show, Fresh Meat and The Thick of It. “We definitely had him in mind when we were writing Mark Corrigan in Peep Show. Super Hans is our Kramer, but Mark is our George. When George pushes children and old women out of the way when there’s a fire… it was so inspiring to see someone so bitter. It suits the British sensibility very well.”
Bain and his writing partner Jesse Armstrong (Succession) have consistently delved into characters who live for number one. In The Thick of It, the romantic relationship between Ollie (Chris Addison) and his Tory SpAd equivalent girlfriend is a slice of grim truth for the ages, the epitome of London dating: two distracted people trading fluids between bouts of career anxiety. , I don’t even remember how this started.
A few years later, Veep, the American cousin of The Thick of It, was helped in this regard by the leading role of Louis-Dreyfus, who couldn’t resist bringing a little Elaine to her cynically hapless Vice President Selina Meyer – a woman who is so terrible, she stops an aide from adopting children during a campaign because he will be too busy at work.
By the time Tina Fey’s 30 Rock landed in 2006, the three-camera format that Seinfeld both exemplified and subverted was well and truly over. Fey’s casting of the corrupt, the amoral, and the merely strange had a more fantastical feel, but a similar commitment to harsh narcissism.
However, the most obvious tribute to Seinfeld has long been It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It started in 2005. Incredibly, it’s still running. Like Seinfeld, It’s Always Sunny is the story of four friends who seem to have alarmingly little to do, and who treat human relationships the way reptiles do arachnids. Recently, the cast even remade Seinfeld’s infamous The Contest. And like Seinfeld, some of its own clichés have entered the lexicon: who will ever forget it “because of the implication.”
But as critic Chuck Klosterman notes in his essay collection I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined), the difference is that Always Sunny requires you to be in on the joke. To laugh at Charlie, Mac, Dennis, and Deandra, you must first understand them as amoral sociopaths: it’s their inability to understand the rest of us that hits hardest.
Strangely enough, this was never Larry David’s intention. When writing Seinfeld, David emphasized screenplays drawn from the real lives of him and his co-writers. But what few understood was that the responses were actually intended. As he records in the Seinfeld documentary, Seinfeld: How It Began, whenever he heard criticism that no one in real life would behave like Seinfeld’s characters, he responded, “I did.” That’s exactly what happened to me, and that’s exactly how I responded.”
Of course, there is also a kind of American comedy that has taken gentler lessons. The likes of Schitt’s Creek and Parks and Recreation, while essentially warm-hearted, still traffic in the same sense of characters hopelessly preoccupied with themselves: the laughs come from watching their internal ego wars unfold.
That world of damaged, desolate people has indeed turned into a genre of its own: the sadcom, first identified around 2016, includes real comedies such as the animated Bojack Horseman (alcoholic, emotionally avoidant, a horse that knows its best days are behind it are). him), and shows like Fleabag that leaned on the bathetic quality of modern life.
The spectrum continues in that of Louie, Louis CK’s loose reworking of his own problems as a middle-aged schlub, a show that barely suffered from punchlines but left viewers with the eerie feeling that life itself is an unfunny comedy is. Fifteen years after The Office, Ricky Gervais’s After Life followed that path, putting the jokes aside in favor of the feeling. In fact, perhaps the most Seinfeldian of all the progeny is a show that never billed itself as a comedy in the first place: Succession. Seven or so vectors of self-interest bounce around the high life of Manhattan, dealing with imploding corporate mergers while stuck at their child’s birthday party.
Not that Jerry Seinfeld seems in the mood to take credit. Recently he could be found decrying modern comedy, political correctness and the death of the traditional sitcom. “It used to be that you went home at the end of the day, most people would say, ‘Oh, cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is here. All in the Family is on.’” he told The New Yorker’s Radio Hour podcast. ‘You just expected it [there will] There will be some funny things we can see on TV tonight. Well, guess what? Where is it? This is the result of the far-left and PC nonsense and people who worry so much about offending other people.”
If Jerry sounds gruff – perhaps like the 70-year-old he is – then he could be closing the generation gap even harder, because Seinfeld has been on Netflix since 2021. When Friends landed there in 2018, it slowly became a sensation among Zoomers, who, too young to have seen it the first time, were seduced by the racy New York glamor of their gang of friends yet rejected by many of their mores.
In many ways, Friends was a transitional show. It was built as an ’80s-style warm-fuzzy sitcom, but by its debut in 1994, Seinfeld had shifted the tectonic plates so much that a certain jaded, smart-aleck aspect affected the characters.
Seinfeld is the exact opposite: a show created by the clean-cut guy who answers the question “So what’s the deal with airline peanuts?” perfected. school of observational comedy, which scores as poorly as Samuel Beckett. It will be interesting to see if Gen-Z will ever take the show to heart in the same way.
