by Seinfeld is often recognized as the definitive TV show of the 1990s, so it’s worth remembering that it first landed in the 1980s. During that inaugural season, in September 1989, the top comedy properties in America were: The Cosby Show, Cheers, Who’s the Boss?, Roseanne, The Golden Girls and a Cosby Show spin-off called A Different World a it was long forgotten.
In that company, he stood out as homo erectus among the neanderthals. By the time it ended, nine years and 169 episodes later, no one could look at the sitcom in the same light.
Seinfeld struck a chord with diversity – in that it allowed truly awful people to star in mainstream comedy. From David Brent to George Bluth, Mark Corrigan to Dennis Reynolds, Seinfeld walked so others could run.
It seemed to reveal something about human nature that made everything that came before disappear – like McCartney and Lennon listening to Heartbreak Hotel for the first time, or Stravinsky’s audience after the first performance of The Rite of Spring. There was no view of the world he gave us, and since then comedy has come to view his role as the mirror of the narcissist.
“No Hugging, no Learning” was the famous Seinfeld writing room dictum. Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine would often end the episode being punished by the universe for their lies, but at the same time not happily resolved to become better people.
George Costanza (Jason Alexander) was active as Shakespeach in his ability to actively narrate the dark forces clashing within him. The arch misanthrope (“I don’t think there’s ever been an appointment in my life when I wanted the other guy to show up”), when George, in season seven, is relentlessly determined to marry Susan’s fiancée, he begins to pray she dies in a plane crash.
Jerry then reminds him that plane crashes are rare. “It’s a thing,” replies George. “There is hope.” When Susan later dies, it’s because George was too tight-fisted to pay for self-sealing wedding invitation envelopes, forcing her to lick 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 single coolest moment in television history,” said Jason Alexander, who played George.)
For his part, Jerry, for all his milquetoast poise, is as volatile as American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman: lying on cereal and serial dating, his emotional palette ranging between slightly drowned and neutral, his head full of nice sneakers and dental hygiene tips, her future turns to the other whim. Meanwhile, for true connoisseurs, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is often the most duplicitous person in the lot – a woman who thinks nothing of being deaf to avoid small talk with cab drivers. .
Even as the show was winding down, a new generation of comic writers were reshaping their art in its image. Graham Linehan credits the complex plotting of Father Ted and later The IT Crowd for Seinfeld’s obsession with reverse engineering.
When Mitchell Hurwitz came up with Arrested Development in 2005, he tapped into some of that complex collision of storylines. But more importantly, he shed any last common decency, to construct an unrivaled ensemble of narcissistic pathologies in skin suits.
In fact, if you watch Arrested Development, it often feels as if you’re watching characters talking to themselves, rather than to each other. Not only is there no learning and no hug, the message is that dialogue itself is impossible: it’s all monologues, whirring algorithms, spinning tops bouncing off each other.
For Ricky Gervais, David Brent was a Costanza-like collision of ego and identity, but raised to the level of English awkwardness. “George is the perfect character,” said 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 is pushing children and old women out of the way when there’s a fire… it was really inspiring to see someone so bitter. It really suits the British sensibility.”
Bain and his writing partner Jesse Armstrong (Succession) have consistently drilled characters that survive the first issue. In The Thick of It, the romantic relationship between Ollie (Chris Addison) and his Tory SpAd equivalent girlfriend stands as a grim piece of verité for the ages, the apex of London Dating: two distracted people exchanging fluids between periods of career anxiety. , no longer even sure how this started.
A few years later, Louis-Dreyfus assisted Veep, The Thick of It’s American cousin, in this regard, which couldn’t help but bring Elaine a little to her VP Selina Meyer – such a woman. terrible she stops an assistant 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 featured and undermined was over. Fey’s team had a more wonderful sense of the venal, the ugly and the strange, but a commitment similar to the hard narcissism.
The most obvious Seinfeld homage screams, however, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It started in 2005. Incredibly, it is still going on. Like Seinfeld, It’s Always Sunny is the story of four friends who seem to have little to do, and treat human relationships like arachnids. Recently the team even recreated the famous Seinfeld Contest. And, like Seinfeld, some of his own clichés have entered the dictionary: who will forever forget “because of the implication”.
But as critic Chuck Klosterman points out in his collection of essays I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined), the difference is that Always Sunny requires you to be on the hook. To laugh at Charlie, Mac, Dennis and Deandra, you must first understand them as amoral sociopaths: it is their inability to understand the rest of us that is most difficult.
Oddly enough, this was never Larry David’s intention. When writing Seinfeld, David emphasized situations drawn from his own life and that of his co-writers. But few realized that the reactions were also meant to be true. As he records in the Seinfeld documentary, Seinfeld: How It Began, whenever he heard criticism that no one in real life behaved the way the Seinfeld characters do, he replied: “I did. That exact thing happened to me, and that’s exactly how I responded”.
Of course, there is also a brand of US comedy that has taken more noble lessons. The likes of Schitt’s Creek and Parks and Recreation, while essentially heartfelt, still trade in the same sense of hopelessly self-involved characters: the laughs come from watching their internal ego wars spill out out.
In fact, that world of spoiled, unhappy people has morphed into its own genre: the sadcom, first recognized around 2016, includes real comics like the animated Horseman Bojack (an alcoholic, emotionally withdrawn, horse with a knowing that his best days are behind him), and shows like Fleabag that continued into the batting quality of today’s world.
The spectrum continues into the likes of Louie, Louis CK’s loose reworking of his own problems as a middle-aged schlub, a show that barely touched the dots, but left viewers with a strong sense that the comedy was unfunny. own life. Fifteen years after The Office, Ricky Gervais’ After Life followed him down that path, discarding the jokes in favor of emotion. In fact, perhaps the most Seinfeldian of the entire lineage is a show that never existed as a comedy in the first place: Succession. Seven or so vectors of self-interest bouncing around high life Manhattan, dealing with an imploding corporate merger while stuck at their child’s birthday party.
Not that Jerry Seinfeld seems to be in the mood to take credit. Lately, he could be found decrying modern comedy, political correctness and the death of the traditional sitcom. “It used to be that you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’” he told The New Yorker’s Radio Hour podcast. “You had hope [there will] be some funny things that we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what? Where is he? This is a result of the big left and PC crack and people being very concerned about offending others.”
If Jerry is singing straight – maybe like the 70-year-old – well, he could hit the generation gap even harder, because, from 2021, Seinfeld is on Netflix. When Friends landed there in 2018, it became a sensation among Zoomers, who were too young to watch it the first time, overwhelmed by the zippy New York glamor of their group of friends, but still repulsed by that enough of their friends.
In many ways, Friends was a transitional show. It was originally built as a warm-fuzzy 1980s-style sitcom, but when it premiered in 1994, Seinfeld shifted the tectonic plates so much that its characters took on some wise, sane element.
Seinfeld is the exact inverse: a show created by the clean guy who made the “So what’s the deal with airline peanuts?” a school of observational comedy, which breaks down as badly as Samuel Beckett. It will be interesting to see if Gen-Z ever takes the show to heart in the same way.
