Seinfeld - (1989-1998)

Despite its famous reputation as the “show about nothing”, Seinfeld was the sitcom about everything. Since its initial airing on July 5^th 1989 Seinfeld went on to become one of the most successful - and influential comedies of all time. Twenty-five years later, it still feels as fresh as it ever did. 

Created by comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Seinfeld follows the lives of four thirty-something middle-class New Yorkers who have no clear roots or obvious ambition. While contemporary sitcoms were driven by plot lines embellished by gags, Seinfeld’s primary focus was the humour extracted from the minutiae of Manhattan life - finding the absurdity in the ordinary. Although the situations were conventional, the characters were far from it.

The show starred Seinfeld as a fastidious caricature of himself who hangs out with his quirky ex-girlfriend Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), wacky dependent neighbour Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) and George Costanza (Jason Alexander), a short, stocky, slow-witted bald man. 

The quartet spend most of their time mocking others (and each other) while trying to make sense of the unwritten etiquette and rules of polite society. In a departure from the sitcoms of the time, the characters were self-obsessed, neurotic misanthropes. Usually the show revolves around people with peculiar eccentricities who often end up traumatised from their interactions with the group. As David once revealed in an interview: "A lot of people don't understand that Seinfeld is a dark show. If you examine the premises, terrible things happen to people. They lose jobs; somebody breaks up with a stroke victim; somebody's told they need a nose job. That's my sensibility."

Although the show dealt with the everyday, this didn't restrict the writers from coming up with some rather controversial material. In one of the most iconic episodes ‘The Contest’, the group wager amongst themselves to see who can go the longest without masturbating. As the content was considered almost too risque for primetime TV, the writers were forbidden from using the m-word. What resulted was a succession of ubiquitous euphemisms, which became a hallmark of the show. 

One of Seinfeld and David’s greatest skills was their ability to construct authentic conversations between Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. Whether discussing relationships, work or people, the acute observations were often able to cut much deeper than Seinfeld’s own standup material. It also marked a break away the superficial "setup a punchline" dialogue so prevalent in contemporary comedy.

Similarly, the show is replete with observational catchphrases and euphemisms that are still much quoted today. Such was the impact of the Seinfeld lexicon, many of these terms made the transition into everyday vernacular. Dubbed "Seinlanguage", some of the most notable idioms devised or popularised throughout the series include Man-hands, man-crush, re-gifter, close-talker, high-talker, bad breaker-upper, yada yada yada, double-dipping and shrinkage.

The show's origins can be traced back to Seinfeld’s successful appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1981, after which he began building a reputation as one of America’s hottest stand-ups. After being approached by NBC to make a show, Seinfeld teamed up with David as “He was the only person I knew who had ever written anything. He had written a movie script and I had never met a comedian that had written anything but an airline peanut bit.”

The initial idea discussed by the pair was to create a fictional 90-minute special following Seinfeld with a single camera across a few days. It would be from his (fictional) experiences from those days that would form a comic routine performed at the end. Essentially the concept was an exploration of how a comic would get his material. Seinfeld however, felt this would be difficult to sustain: “It was going to be a special all the way, but I didn’t think we could last 90 minutes, so instead we ended up making 90 hours.”

It was only they made the decision to write a 30-minute pilot that George - the fictional alter-ego of David, and Kramer, based on David’s eccentric neighbour Kenny Kramer, came into development. Elaine - absent from the pilot, was created after NBC requested a female lead.

Originally airing as The Seinfeld Chronicles, the response to the pilot was so underwhelming that NBC tried to flog the show to Fox. Surprisingly however, Seinfeld and David were offered a contract to make four more episodes. Following the broadcast of these shows, the series was picked up. It was in the second season that Seinfeld really began to hit its stride. Episodes such as ‘The Chinese Restaurant’ became Seinfeld classics despite being a 22 minute "story" of Jerry, George and Elaine waiting for a vacant restaurant table. In 'The Parking Garage' they spend the entire episode looking for Kramer's car.

David pin-points season two’s ‘The Busboy’ as the major turning point in the series. The episode culminates in a fight between Elaine’s boyfriend and a waiter George inadvertently gets fired. As a result, David became so enamoured with the idea of interlaced scenarios that he wanted to explore the concept further. 'The Busboy' is also noted for the fact that for much of it, Jerry is a virtual spectator. From now on Seinfeld would be as much about George, Elaine and Kramer as it was Jerry.

Unlike the sitcoms that it proceeded, Seinfeld was virtually void of any heart-warming or impassioned moments. Employing a rigorous “no hugging, no learning” rule on-set, there is little empathy from the characters and rarely do they ever learn any lessons - despite plot endings nearly always ending in someone receiving their comeuppance. Indeed anyone expecting a maudlin conclusion in the series’ finale would have been seriously deluded.  In the climax of the final season - watched by over 78 million viewers, the quartet find themselves on trial for not coming to the aid of a man being car-jacked. With Kramer videotaping the whole ordeal, the gang mock the victim’s weight with several cutting jibes. Seinfeld concludes with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer being incarcerated for a year. While to some degree ‘The Finale’ disappoints, it at least provided a sense of poetic justice entirely in keeping with the show's typically unsentimental timbre.

Another of the show's trademarks was its employment of multiple storylines within each episode. Traditionally a sitcom would have one major story, occasionally embellished with a sub-plot. Seinfeld however, broke from these conventions with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer each having their own story threads. These threads would be woven – sometimes quite complexly over the course of the episode, this concatenation of events lead to the show's comic climax. As the show evolved, Seinfeld became meticulously self-referential with numerous references to earlier plots and mini catchphrases. Indeed during the court case for 'The Finale', the episode is so esoteric with its relentless references and reappearances of bit-part character witnesses from earlier seasons that it would surely be indecipherable to someone unfamiliar with the show.

Later seasons became increasingly experimental and surreal, much to the annoyance of some hardcore viewers, displacing its former casual nature with often farcical action. However, with the writers constantly tweaking the show’s format - particularly its pace and tone, Seinfeld redefined what could be achieved within the parameters of a half-hour sitcom. The most evident example of lateral structure perhaps, is season nine’s ‘The Betrayal’, an episode run entirely in reverse. This peculiar, yet very-Seinfeld concept gave an opportunity to create humour which would otherwise not exist had it been edited chronologically. Despite such antics Seinfeld maintained his stance that it was a show about how a comedian gets his material. This is indeed true of earlier episodes which would be bookended by a brief comedy routine although these are often redundant in later seasons.

What further separated Seinfeld from its peers was the constant blurring of the lines between reality and fiction. As well as having its core and supporting characters based explicitly on real people, the plots are often based on the writer's personal experiences. These self-autobiographical narratives are taken to never before ventured territories when in season four Jerry is approached by NBC to make a pilot. With George, they pitch a show about nothing to NBC. What results is the Seinfeld equivalent of ‘The Mousetrap’. This show within a show concept probably influenced the plot of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, in which Gervais's character pitches a replica of his own sitcom The Office to the BBC (similarly the idea is sabotaged in production).

These ambiguous reality/fiction boundaries are further developed in David’s own sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, that stars David as a fictionalised version of himself. Curb also features a host of guest celebrities who too exaggerate their personalities. However, where Seinfeld was meticulously scripted Curb is produced cinéma vérité style.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is so intrinsically linked with Seinfeld, that a reunion of sorts was able to occur within it. Despite David's previous refusal to put on a reunion show, he felt that doing it within the Curb universe "was a perfect way to do something like that but not to do it. Under the guise of doing the Curb show, it was very relaxed and loose and easy."

Such is Seinfeld’s the influence over the modern television landscape that network execs realised that characters in comedies no longer had to be “likeable”. Curb Your Enthusiasm continued this theme while the concept has almost been abused by It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, perhaps Seinfeld’s most obvious successor, albeit a cruder ugly-cousin.

What makes its success so impressive is that Seinfeld should have alienated much of its audience - given that it was specifically about white, middle-class, Jewish New Yorkers. Its universal appeal stemmed from the fact Seinfeld was about people and their idiosyncrasies. While a few of the references may be dated, most of the material is timeless and still relatable. A quarter of a century since it debuted there has been nothing on television quite like it since. Despite being probably the most influential comedy of all time, Seinfeld's distinct ingenuity and dynamic has made it curiously inimitable. So much so that there may never be another sitcom that will achieve quite the same impact over contemporary pop culture... Not that there's anything wrong with that.