Update and scripts (Patreon)

Hi, patrons! Earlier this year, after a lot of soul-searching and bad days, I decided that it was time to return to making comedy videos. It's what I did at the beginning of my career. I did lots of humorous projects while making Renegade Cut (BT Podcast, Word Funk, guest on Dice Funk, etc.) but a lot of my audience was unaware of this, and the transition was too jarring. Views and new subscribers are way down.

Nevertheless, I am happier with my work than I have ever been, and I do not intend on going back to making serious videos about politics. It is absolutely necessary for my mental health to continue this way. I want to thank everyone who has stuck with me during this time. There is so much more to come.

Here is the script that marked the transition between serious videos to comedy videos. It contains a handful of lines that I cut.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH SEINFELD?

What's the deal with Seinfeld? Have you seen this show? You got the comedian guy, the anxious guy, the wacky crazy, and the girl guy. That's too many guys! What are you trying to tell me, that these four personalities are both alike and different enough to bounce off each other for comedy? Get out of here, sister. Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying.

OK, that's quite enough of that. Seinfeld debuted in 1989, ended in 1998, and in between, produced 180 episodes. I watched Seinfeld in the 90's, and due to syndication, I watched Seinfeld well after the 90's. I recently re-watched the series from front to back – a first for me. Seinfeld was something I never felt the urge to “binge” before, having previously seen it in its original run. But I did, and watching the series transform and grow over its nine seasons, I have made several observations, enough to make Jerry Seinfeld himself proud.

But first:

[History]

NBC brought in Seinfeld for a meeting, but the 34 year old comedian had no ideas. He wanted to play himself, not some wacky sitcom character. Seinfeld contacted old friend Larry David. Seinfeld and David had been friends since Catch a Rising Star in the late 70's. Seinfeld was a comedian on the rise, David, now in his 40's and more caustic than ever, was on the decline, but Seinfeld saw in David a comedy writing partner.

The series had several iterations during conversations and negotiations with NBC. According to Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Seinfeldia, “Seinfeld was smart to consult David on this TV thing. David did have a vision, if not a particularly grand one. 'This,' David said as they bantered in Lee’s Market, 'is what the show should be.' Seinfeld was intrigued. …

At about midnight, they settled into a booth and riffed on the possibilities: What about a special that simply depicted where comics get their material?”

Seinfeld and David wrote what was supposed to be a 90 minute documentary special but ended up only filling 30 minutes and feeling more like a sitcom. The series, then called The Seinfeld Chronicles, was not pitched as a show about nothing. It was pitched as a series about the life of a comedian and how he gets his material – from his real life – and because the real world Jerry Seinfeld is an observational comic, the series ended up picking apart the minutiae of everyday life.

The cast was made up of people Larry David already knew. He met Julia Louise-Drewfus when he worked on Saturday Night Live. He met Michael Richards when he worked on Fridays. And obviously, he and Seinfeld had been friends since 1976.

Many episodes of Seinfeld were based on real experiences. For example, George quitting his real estate job and then returning the next day as if nothing happened was based on David's time on SNL. According to the book Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good by Josh Levine, “Fed up with never getting anything on the show, Larry stormed in one day and told Ebersol that he was quitting. But almost immediately afterward he regretted the move. For one thing, he actually had a decent salary. For another, he had no other options. He moaned to his friend Kenny Kramer who lived across the hall. Kramer told him to go in the next day and pretend it never happened, and that’s just what Larry did.”

Watching the series again as an adult in my early 40's, it has mostly, just mostly, aged well. It simply contains the sensibilities of a particular people living in a particular city at a particular time in American history – the 90's. Although pitched in 1988 and its pilot aired in 1989, Seinfeld feels culturally 90's in its social values, with all the complimentary and derogatory associations with that time period. I was born in 1982, and because of my elder millennial status, I never felt more an 80's kid than a 90's. The 80's were when I was a small child, but the decade after was I did my real growing up.

What were the 90's? When people picture the 90's, even people who were there and should know better, they remember certain styles and aesthetics – the Saved by the Bell look mixed with Nirvana and grunge. But 90's sitcoms were not only Saved by the Bell with hyper-stylized colors that have replaced an entire decade in our memories with a blinding, neon pallete. 90's sitcoms were also Martin, Frasier, and Will & Grace. Nirvana only covered the early 90's due to the tragic death of Kurt Cobain. 1999 gave us the Slim Shady LP.

We remember the 90's because of a favorable economy during the Bill Clinton administration – let the good times roll – but we also remember it as the time when Generation X came into maturity and their whole “Whatever, who cares? Nothing matters.” sensibilities in popular movies of the time. It was everything, and nothing. [“It's about nothing.” “Right.”]

Similar, Seinfeld is about everything and about nothing. It's about nothing because it focuses so much on inconsequential matters and socially unimportant conversations among friends, but it's about everything because, well, that's life, isn't it? We're not all out there saving the world. We're hanging out and talking about nothing, and if that's all we're doing, then the nothing is everything.

Seinfeld, because of its everyday what-have-you focus, is one of the better time capsules for the 90's, a way for someone who wasn't there to see what people cared about and what people believed in the 90's. What people believed about gender, sexuality, race, relationships, and less consequential matters like what people thought was funny. Seinfeld was such an enormous hit by its fourth season, and studying what was popular might tell us a lot more about a culture than what is critically acclaimed. Although, Seinfeld was that, too.

Bear in mind that when I talk about serious matters in this video and how Seinfeld handled these matters, it will be done as a bit of anthropology or archaeology. I'm not trying to “cancel” Seinfeld because it doesn't meet up modern standards of social values. I'm just, you know, watching a show and gathering my thoughts.

I re-watched the series recently, saw it through new eyes and a new perspective, and I have a lot to say. Whether or not what I say is meaningful is up to you, but it is definitely a lot. I mean, look at this run time.

[Sensitivity and Casual Bigotry]

In every generation, there exists an enormous amount of people who believe that the population has suddenly and unexpectedly become far too sensitive. To right this terrible wrong and guarantee that this does not continue into the future or get worse in the future, all this sensitivity simply must stop immediately. If it doesn't, then a more drastic step must be taken: turn back the clock altogether to a more insensitive time. This is also the position of social conservatism and reactionary right-wing politics. If you don't consider yourself a conservative or right-wing but you shout about everything being “too woke” these days, you are taking the right-wing position whether you designate yourself that or not.

“Woke” is the catch-all term of today, but in the time of Seinfeld, “politically correct” was much more common. That term is sometimes still said today but has lost a lot of its luster and usage. Seinfeld was inoffensive enough to be on primetime network television in the 90's, but in many instances, certainly politically incorrect.

Seinfeld's politics can be summed up in this scene. [“I don't get all bent out of shape if someone asks me directions to Israel.”] Really? You wouldn't? Because if I were a Jewish man in the 90's walking down the sidewalk in New York, and a stranger looked me up and down and said “Hey, which why to Israel?” I would assume he wouldn't be asking for which subway connection gets him to the Middle East. I would assume, correctly, that he was making an anti-semitic remark, one that does not contain an explicit insult but is clearly designed to be reductive. “Which way to [whatever stereotype I know about you]?” or “Go back to [place of ancestral origin].” is how people in the majority remind people in the minority about their place on the de facto social hierarchy.

Jerry said this in response to people being, in his opinion, too sensitive these days. In order to drive home this point during this episode and other episodes, Jerry and his friends commit a series of insensitive actions but only by accident. For two reasons. First, it reinforces the idea that everyone is too sensitive and that any offense is almost certainly caused by a misunderstanding, and that those who take offense have merely misunderstood the circumstances. Second, it protects the main characters from being unlikeable, overtly racist, ableist or antisemitic people.

In one episode, Jerry presents Elaine with a gift: a cigar store Native American statue. Jerry makes a few goofy comments about Native American stereotypes, and one of Elaine's friends, Winona, leaves the apartment. Winona, as it turns out, is Native American herself. Jerry eventually apologizes, but the implication is that it was only wrong for him to do this because she was in the room, not because it was wrong in and of itself. Winona just misunderstood Jerry, who was only trying to be funny.

Later, Jerry asks a mailman for directions to a Chinese restaurant. On closer inspection, the mailman himself is Chinese. Because he has been reduced to his ethnicity in this way and because he has probably been treated like an outsider many times before, he lashes out. But Jerry, oh, Jerry didn't mean any offense. It was all a misunderstanding. Jerry learns nothing by the end of the episode.

In a later episode, George wants to suck up to his boss and tells him that he looks like “Sugar” Ray Leonard. His boss, played by Tuvix himself, does not really all-that-closely resemble one of history's most famous boxers, prompting him to say [“I guess we all look alike to you, George.”] Now, if you are white, this might be seen as a little defensive, or maybe you think Not Sugar Ray is viewing George's comment through the least charitable lens possible. But put yourself in the shoes of people who have to deal with this on a regular basis, and you can see why he reacted that way. Nevertheless, no matter where you as the audience stand, this is portrayed only as a misunderstanding. George was trying to get closer to his boss, and that is why he made that comparison, not because of racism, because it needs to be that way in order for George to still be likable. George learns nothing.

In another episode, Elaine is dating someone whose ethnicity is difficult for her to pin down. Instead of just asking him, Elaine debates this with Jerry and George. Jerry, of course, takes the position that it is perfectly acceptable for three white people in a diner to be discussing this openly whereas George, always portrayed as more wrong than Jerry, takes the opposite position. Elaine discovers that her boyfriend is white, they go to the Gap, and Elaine learns nothing.

When Kramer dates a Black woman, he accidentally offends her family. Kramer mistakenly spent too much time in a tanning bed, and he when he meets her family, he looks like he's doing blackface. Again, a complete misunderstanding, and Kramer learns nothing.

[wheelchair] This goes beyond casual racism and sometimes veers into ableism. For example, in one episode, Jerry's leg keeps falling asleep. Because of this, he accidentally gives a disabled man the mistaken impression that Jerry was mocking him. [“He calls himself Leapin' Larry. You would think he would have a sense of humor about it.”] Again, this was only a misunderstanding, and Jerry learns nothing.

Allow me to counter-argue what I expect will be a common dissent about this viewpoint. Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer are sometimes portrayed as clueless about racial politics and the plights of people different from themselves. That might produce the argument that the main characters are portrayed as wrong, much like in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. OK, that's almost a good argument, until you re-watch the series front to back like I did.

The consistent way that the series deals with political correctness, showing insensitive remarks and actions to be misunderstandings 99% of the time, always from the perspective of white people, always portraying white people as harmless perpetrators, always portraying minorities as overly sensitive, often but not always portraying minorities as caricatures or engaging in stereotypes. Well, it's challenging to see the racial politics in this almost exclusively white television series as anything more than white television writers seeing what they can get away with. I was curious and looked up each writer of each episode, and it's whites all the way down.

You could argue that the writers are lampooning white people here and there, but it comes across less condemnation and more roast. A roast lovingly mocks its subject and only criticizes in such a way that the subject will be amused more than upset or made to be introspective.

There are very few recurring characters played by people of color. Bob, who appears in three episodes, is Hispanic. He is a criminal who steals furniture but also has a social conscience. A man named Sid shows up and there, but we know almost nothing about him except for his occupation. He parks cars.

The only Black character of any note in the series is Jackie Chiles, a direct parody of lawyer Johnny Cochrane, who was known for representing famous black men like Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Michael Jackson, Riddick Bowe, and most infamously, OJ Simpson. Cochrane became famous not only because of these high profile clients. He was a tireless advocate for civil rights and an outspoken critic of police brutality, and on Seinfeld, he's a clown.

To give Seinfeld credit, there are times in which deeply racist attitudes are condemned but only the racism that even casual racists think is too far. The most obvious example is when Jerry and George are mistaken for Nazis. The episode is pretty clearly anti-Nazi. [laughs] So, you know, there's that, but really, that's about it. The most egregious form of racial animus and white supremacy is condemned in a series created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David in an episode written by Larry Charles. It's not exactly a bold position.

It's important to recognize that the main characters learning nothing about sensitivity is not simply an extension of the philosophy of show, often described as “no hugging, no learning.” It is far more of an extension of politically incorrect politics of the 90's and the explicitly stated politics of the series. It's not only the characters who learn nothing, it's the audience.

Now, to reiterate, I'm not “canceling” Seinfeld. I don't have that authority, and I wouldn't want it to begin with. I'm not even saying that Seinfeld is an inherently racist television series because of any of this, but it's, you know, hard not to notice, right? How much it ruins your day, well, your mileage may vary, but it's in there, all over the place, and it's impossible to ignore. It would also be intellectually dishonest to ignore.

[“Let's change the subject.”]

[Are they good people?]

Are the main characters from Seinfeld good people? Are they kind, good-hearted individuals who speak out against injustice? Are they honest and forthright? Are they more passive and unassuming than anything, a kind of Dungeons & Dungeons True Neutral alignment? Are they, as Babu would claim, very bad and not even people at all? [“These are not people. They are very bad.”]

I aim to explore this, and spoilers here, I don't have a great answer because these are fictional characters, and this is a YouTube video. But it might be fun, so let's do it anyway!

George Costanza is a neurotic, insecure, obsessive man with a short fuse and little in the way of bravery. George thinks little of himself, often blaming his lack of success both financially and socially on being a short, stocky, bald, slow-witted man. I disagree with that assessment. In terms of his appearance, he's not classically handsome, but I suspect George with a full beard, leather jacket and black t-shirt would be aesthetically pleasing in a masculine, stout, welterweight sort of way. George is funny, owing to his offbeat charm, and seems to have no problem meeting women. I have not done the calculations myself, but others who have done the work report that George has more girlfriends than Jerry throughout the series.

In terms of his intelligence, George is more educated than most. George graduated Queens College, the real life alma matter of Jerry Seinfeld. Only about 37% of Americans have a Bachelor's Degree. He was bright enough to be, well, maybe not a big shot in the real estate business but a medium shot. Considering his family was almost certainly a detriment to his upward mobility and confidence, one could at least make the argument that George is a self-made man. The worst you can say about George's wisdom and intelligence is that he is mediocre. Average. He clearly has some talents.

Arguably, George's failures in life revolve around his insecurity, which he masks through uncanny, far-reaching duplicity. George is a liar. George does not dispute this, often referring to his ability to lie as an art. [“That's like asking Pavarotti how to sing.”] George's friends do not dispute this either. [“Come on, Liar Man.”] George feels justified in lying, because he's not lying to get ahead, he's lying to keep his head above water. George feels put-upon because of his upbringing. His parents treated him so poorly that his confidence was shattered. He was bullied in school, sometimes by the faculty. George does not see his dishonesty as some deep moral failing but rather self-defense against a world that turned on him at a young age and never stopped. [“I knew God would never let me be successful!”]

That does justify his various cowardly acts through the series. For example, in one episode, George panics and pushes people over during an emergency. His upbringing and bad luck are not excuses for his poor behavior, but they are explanations for behavior. George is not some “bad seed” as Elaine claims. He is simply struggling to make his way through life and not doing a particularly good job of it.

George does have his moments of kindness. He cares about the security guard and buys him a chair. He correctly tells a mother to stop abusing her son. He says “God bless you” when a woman sneezes. Unfortunately, every time George tries to do the right thing, it blows up in his face. The security guard ends up falling asleep in the chair during a robbery. The son is not grateful for George's interference and openly mocks him. Even a simple “God bless you” ends up in disaster for the woman and her husband, as they contemplate divorce immediately thereafter. No wonder George rarely does the right thing. It always backfires.

George, both by audiences and characters within the series, is blamed for Susan's death. George picks out wedding invitations, Susan licks the envelopes, and accidentally poisons herself.

In the next season, George starts to believe that people on the board of the Susan Ross Foundation suspect him of murdering Susan. He records them, cannot find evidence that they suspect him, and eventually leaves the topic alone. We, the audience, are then shown that much of the board does openly suspect George of purchasing toxic invitations in hopes of killing Susan. George never confirms this, but it is confirmed to the audience.

In a later episode, George discovers that Susan's parents do, in fact, blame him for the death of their daughter. They tell him to his face. This is also brought up in the series finale. [“Murderer!”]

We, as the audience, know George did not intentionally buy poisonous envelopes, but some viewers might still consider it negligent because he chose those envelopes specifically because they were inexpensive. That George's consistent cheapness indirectly resulted in Susan's demise.

Two points about that. First, “inexpensive” is not the same as lethal. If we buy inexpensive goods with no cause to believe that these goods are dangerous, and these goods end up poisoning us to death, then it is the creators of these goods who are negligent.

Second, although the clerk warned George and Susan that the glue was not particularly adhesive and would require a lot of moisture, they were not warned that the glue was dangerous. I watched this scene over and over again, and the clerk did not indicate that the glue was toxic, poisonous, or dangerous in any way. In fact, by saying “moisture” here, it was the clerk who – more or less – recommended that the envelopes should be licked. George, however, did not tell Susan to lick the envelopes. Instead, he recommended buying new glue. [“So, we'll pick up some Elmer's.”] Susan chose to lick the envelopes instead.

Someone needs to fix the Villains Wiki because it incorrectly states that George was warned that the invitations were toxic. That did not happen. Stop lying.

To be clear, I'm not blaming Susan for her own death. I'm also not really blaming the clerk, even though her recommendation was what Susan followed and what ultimately lead to Susan's demise. I'm blaming the manufacturers of the glue and envelopes. George cannot be responsible for Susan's death just because he picked out the invitations because A) he had a reasonable expectation that he would not be purchasing something lethal, and B) he explicitly gave Susan instructions that would have saved her life. I find George Lewis Costanza not guilty in the death of Susan Ross.

Let's talk about Elaine. Born in my old stomping grounds of Baltimore and Towson, Maryland, Elaine Benes works for Pendant Publishing in Manhattan. She's smart, successful, and in the early seasons, really too good to be hanging out with George, Kramer and Jerry all the time. This comes to a head in a later season episode in which she finds more reputable, reliable versions of her friends.

As the seasons went on, Elaine became a lot more like her friends, kidnapping a dog, destroying a business because she wasn't allowed to eat soup there, and other questionable actions. [“You know, I could have killed you, and nobody would have known.”] Oh, and those friend dopplegangers? They reject Elaine. Because by that point in the series, she's in a limbo between being too much of a big-shot for her friends but too much like her friends to hang out with decent, caring people.

Early Elaine had principles. She had a lot to say when she saw a woman wearing fur. Later Elaine doesn't have time for that. [“Eh, anti-fur. Who has the time?”]

As explained by Paul Arras in Seinfeld: A Cultural History, “Elaine is the embodiment of the crisis of the yuppie. Riding the rising New York City economy to a comfortable career in the publishing industry, Elaine has a sense of entitlement that comes from her self-confidence; she believes she deserves the success in life and love that is coming to her. Yet, when she stumbles in those

categories, she is reminded of a nagging sense that, somewhere, somehow, she took a wrong turn.”

Jerry Seinfeld, the character, not the actor, is a morally neutral bystander of life. He plays the comparatively reasonable straight man witnessing the antics of Kramer, the lies of George, and the failures of Elaine. He often chooses not to intervene and instead makes a smug, sarcastic remark about how their plans are foolish and that their attempts to better their lives are meaningless. [“The whole thing blew up in the face.” “That's a shame.”]

By Jerry's own admission, he is not a man of any depth. When one of his girlfriends wants him to open up more, he says that there is nothing inside. He briefly learns to express himself more but is “scared straight” by George opening up to him. Jerry enjoys the applause but not the people doing the clapping. There are moments, especially in the earlier seasons, in which Jerry shows himself to be vulnerable or caring, but these become fewer and fewer still as the series continues. [S06E05] [“What kind of a person are you?”]

Jerry has a childlike innocence but also can't grow up enough to take responsibility for himself. He intentionally gets his girlfriend drunk so that he can play with her vintage toys, he steals a marble rye like a child grabbing a candy bar, and reads more cereal boxes than books.

Jerry invents reasons to break up with women because he doesn't want anyone to get close. He dates women because he's a straight man who likes having sex, and that is about as far as it goes. George and Elaine both have a number of long-term relationships, and even Kramer does once or twice, but the only time Jerry has anything serious is with Jeannie. Jerry spontaneously asks Jeannie to marry him after knowing her for about the length of a cup of coffee, and then they both break up simultaneously a few weeks later. [“I can't be with someone like me. I hate myself!”]

Jerry is an empty husk of a man who cares about the social graces only because of his fastidiousness and his desire for his own comfort. [“He's a very bad man.”]

Cosmo Kramer is a fun-loving hipster doofus. At a glance, his primary concerns appear to be his base pleasures and aesthetics. He loves women, fashion and spectacle. He tom-cats around Manhattan, enjoying the company of women but rarely committing to anything resembling a relationship. [“You've been with a lot of women.” “A lot of women!”] But does that make him a bad person? Isn't Kramer just sex-positive? If he mistreated these women or lead them on that the relationship might be heading towards marriage, that might be dishonest, but throughout the series run, Kramer's dalliances and cavorting are entirely healthy and consensual.

There are moments of perversion, such as when he leers at a naked woman who may be unaware that she can be seen by her neighbors. That is not cool. However, if we are judging Kramer, we must similarly judge Jerry and George, who also engage is some tom-peepery. Kramer is no worse than Jerry and George with regards to women. He just has a grander sexual appetite. [“I'm out.”]

In one episode, Kramer tells the man who will play him on television that he prefers to let women “do all the work” in bed, which does indicate that he may be a selfish lover, but I get the feeling that this was simply, as men sometimes say, locker room talk and that Kramer knows what he's doing sexually enough to please women. Frankly, it seems to be his main thing, owing his boundless attraction and sexual prowess to everything from his jacket to a supernatural allure called the Kavorka.

Kramer can fall in love, though. He is blissfully in love with Pam, Jerry's girlfriend, and he is serious enough about Anna to meet her entire family, with admittedly disastrous results.

Kramer's endless stream of women is a red flag for a woman who wants something serious, but there are no red flags about Kramer's actual mishandling of women. Kramer is a harmless weirdo, an enormous goofball who doesn't mean any real harm.

In fact, outside of accidental mishaps due to his hair-brained, money-making schemes, Kramer seems like a decent, affable man. He greatly cares about his friends and is only dishonest with them in the baseline sitcom sense. A sitcom requires misunderstandings and conflicts between the characters, but Kramer is never depicted as being more dishonest than the others. He is one of the only characters seen racked with guilt over his pangs of conscience and often makes moralistic statements. [“Without rules, there is chaos.”]

Kramer's adherence to the law is inconsistent. In some episodes, he is shown to be a stickler for the rules, and in other episodes, he is shown floating the law. When he does try to get around the law, it's never in a way that would hurt the common man – only major corporations and institutions – such as when he convinces Jerry to pirate cable or commit mail fraud against the United States Postal Service. Kramer is a friend to the worker, going on strike, correctly calling people scabs for their scabbery, and becoming a communist, at least for one episode.

Kramer changes the least out of the main characters in Seinfeld. Jerry, George and Elaine become colder and less likable whereas Kramer is just always Kramer. My perspective on this, judging by the changes in the other characters, is that this is a good thing.

Here's an alternative perspective by William Irwin, author of Seinfeld and Philosophy -- “What would it take for Kramer to move from the aesthetic to the ethical? He would have to become tired of his ceaseless 'rotation' of harebrained schemes and diversions. Once these diversions could no longer keep his underlying despair at bay, he might then be ready for the ethical stage. …

He, along with the other three primary characters, has been sentenced to a year in jail, for violating a Good Samaritan law by failing to come to the aid of a car-jacking victim. He and the others make no choice to help or not help but simply enjoy the spectacle – very aesthetic of them. The sentence of one year in jail does nothing to awaken Kramer (or the others it seems). He sees it as not such a bad thing, three meals a day, yada yada yada.”

I don't know if I'm capable of determining the weight of fictional characters' souls, but I will say that if these people were real, I would only hang out with Kramer. He seems like a mostly good guy who cares about his neighbors. He makes a lot of same mistakes that George, Jerry and Elaine make, but he's more of a “rogue with a heart of gold” than a straight-up bad person. There is that one scene that suggests he might snitch on me if I committed a crime, but we never really see him cooperate with the authorities. So, he gets a pass on that.

I'm calling it. Cosmo Kramer: the only good Seinfeld character in the main quartet.

[Nothing] [“It's about nothing.” “Right.”]

Observational humor is a form of comedy in which the comedian comments on everyday concerns and affairs. An observational comedian broaches a common topic [“Women put on their perfume in an interesting way”] and then interrogates our everyday practices related to the topic [“Ever notice, they have their key strateg-o areas. Places they think we're going.”]

Observational humor relies on the comedian having made a solid observation about something ordinary that, when interrogated, appears strange or foolish. Well, I have an observation of my own. Most observational humor bits told by Jerry Seinfeld actually rely on the audience not thinking about his humorous observations for too long and generally fall apart with greater context.

In the case of Jerry assuming that women are spraying perfume exclusively to attract men and placing their perfume in the “wrong” places, women are actually applying their perfume to pulse points on their bodies. I'm not a scientist, but according to L'oreal, these points emit more heat than normal, and heat activates the perfume and the scent reaches its full potential. Women are just reading the instructions, Jerry.

[“I never understood the importance of the conductor. … Do you really need a guy waving a stick in your face...”] Jerry, the conductor is communicating with the musicians through a series of motions and gestures. I'm not a musician, but it's partly about timing and volume and stuff like that. I thought that was pretty obvious. [“The only reason you're getting in shape is to get through the workout.”] What are you talking about, dude? People get in shape to lose weight, to feel better about themselves, to stay healthy, to compete in athletics, to correct something that their doctors recommend correcting, et cetera. I'm sorry if any of this makes me appear humorless, but some of these “observations” suck. [“What's the deal with cancer?”]

Here are some of my observations related to topics brought up on Seinfeld.

You ever notice how police officers are dangerous and out-of-control in the real world, but in Seinfeld, they are just laughably incompetent? And, you know, that is often true in the real world as well. It's not one of the other. But on Seinfeld, the cops are just bad at their jobs in a less egregious way. Seinfeld is not 90's sitcom Roc, and we're not going to see police brutality on Must-See TV Night before the 10 o'clock dramas begin.

I do applaud Seinfeld for consistently portraying the police are total clowns, though. In the first season episode The Robbery, Jerry's apartment is robbed because Kramer forgot to close the door. When Jerry informs the humorless, uninterested police officer of what happened, he asks if the police ever solve these cases. [“Do you ever find anything?” “No.”]

In the season four episode The Ticket, Jerry and George are hiding from Joe Divola, a violent stalker. They want to leave, so they ask the police officer to escort them outside, which would take all ten seconds. The police officer spends a half an hour ordering food and ignoring two people in need. [“You know a muffin can be very filling.”] In the end, the police officer does not help them at all.

In the season eight episode The Summer of George, Elaine finds herself in a dangerous conflict with a woman named Sam. When she asks the police for help, they fetishize the conflict as a catfight. The police are similarly useless in The Puerto Rican Day Parade, suspicious and unsympathetic in The Beard, and aggressive and self-righteous in The Library.

In the season three episode The Parking Space, George attempts to parallel park near Jerry's building, and someone else, Mike Moffitt, rushes in head-first to take the spot for himself. They can't agree on who should have the spot. When two police officers arrive, rather than simply making a decision, they argue between themselves, and nothing gets done.

For the record, it's George's spot! I'm sorry, but this is not that complicated. George was there first. Admittedly, because George took a few extra seconds to prepare, Mike might have thought that George was not parking, but once it became clear that George was parking during the near collision, Mike should have said “Sorry.” and went on his merry way.

Mike is trying to muddy the issue by introducing two arguments. Mike claims to have been confused about whether or not George was parking because he was taking a while. Mike also claims that parking head-first is acceptable under certain circumstances. But here's the thing. Even if Mike's intentions were completely honorable, did not mean any disrespect, and was not trying to steal George's spot, as he claims, that is not the issue. The code of ethics related to parking spots is almost exclusively “Who was there first?” George. George Lewis Costanza. That's who.

If I accidentally walk into the wrong apartment, the tenant might choose not to press charges for trespassing due to this being an honest mistake, but that doesn't mean that I get to stay there and claim that it's my apartment now. We don't have to condemn Mike for making what might have been an honest mistake, but we don't give him the parking spot.

I've lived in big cities most of my life – Baltimore, Las Vegas, Austin, Baltimore again, Philadelphia, and some other places in between – and Mike does not have a real argument. He has excuses about why he parked front first but not an argument about being there first. I don't know what New York City law says about it, but people generally understand this as part of the social contract. [“You know, we're living in a society!”] Also, Mike Moffitt is a big phony.

Here's another observation. You ever notice how Seinfeld co-creator Larry David does a number of cameos throughout the series? What's the deal with that? OK, so, playing “spot Larry David” is a fun meta-game to play while re-watching Seinfeld. In this scene from The Chinese Restaurant, David's voice can clearly be heard after Elaine makes a public spectacle of herself. [muffled Larry David sounds]

In the episode The Heart Attack, Jerry watches a science fiction film called The Flaming Globes of Sigmund, starring none other than Larry David as a German sci-fi weirdo.

In this episode, Larry David's voice can be heard as none other than Newman. Yes, the co-creator of Seinfeld was actually the original Newman before the writers decided to give the (until that point) unseen character an actual role on the series.

In the second part of The Trip, Larry David is right here in the corner of the screen, gawking at Kramer, who is about to be falsely arrested under suspicion of being a serial killer.

In the episode The Pilot, Larry David plays a member of Greenpeace. In The Chinese Woman, he plays my favorite cameo of them all: the man in the cape. In The Gum, he plays a cashier. It's a particularly funny cameo because Jason Alexander played George Costanza essentially doing a Larry David impersonation.

And finally, most famously, Larry David played the voice of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. [“Get better, George! Get better!”]

What's the deal with the episode The Jimmy? Umm, content warning, SA. So, in The Jimmy, Jerry goes to the dentist, and when he wakes up, he sees Tim Whatley and a woman seemingly dressing themselves, as if they were undressed moments before. Jerry is deeply concerned that he was sexually abused while he was unconscious. This is played for laughs, and I do not want to talk about that right now.

What I do want to talk about is the question of whether Jerry's shirt was tucked or untucked before he was unconscious. Jerry's evidence that he was abused is that his shirt was untucked after he regained consciousness. Jerry and Elaine debate whether or not he commonly tucks those shirts. Well, let's look at the evidence ourselves. Here's Jerry wearing the shirt earlier that day – untucked. Here's Jerry wearing the shirt untucked again right before he goes under the gas.

Jerry's other piece of evidence is that a Penthouse magazine has a story about something sexual happening while a patient was under anesthesia, but as Jerry himself is oft to point out, these letters are fake. Even if they were real, there is no reason to believe that out of all the doctors in the world, his dentist is the one who wrote this letter. Also, the time between Jerry's experience and reading the Penthouse magazine is, what? A day or two? Do you know how long magazines take to get put together? The contents of this Penthouse were finalized long before Jerry went to the dentist. It definitely cannot be about him. It's impossible.

I hereby declare that Jerry Seinfeld was not abused while he was unconscious at the dentist.

You ever notice how in the episode where both Jerry and George look at Denise Richards' cleavage, the character is stated multiple times to be sixteen years old, and while the behavior is admonished, it's also swept under the rug? Because Jerry himself does not tell George that he did something wrong by doing this. Jerry only tells George that the problem was he got caught. It was Jerry himself who nudged George in hopes that he'd peek at her cleavage. [“That's why I poked.” “That's why I peeked.”] Jerry explains the ethics of peeking at a sixteen year old's cleavage as perfectly acceptable so long as you only look for a short enough amount of time not to be caught by the young woman in question, or in this case, her father.

Peeking at women's cleavage with their permission is not cool in general. It's one thing for your eyes to accidentally wander but to make it some kind of communal experience by informing other men to do it – on purpose – is, at best, icky, at worst, the reddest of the red flags. So, not cool in general, but to reiterate here, the character, not the actress, but the character, is a high school student who is barely old enough to drive. You are sexualizing a minor. [“You know, we're living in a society!”]

Elaine provides some light pushback about this but not really enough. Also, when George tries to apologize, he only apologizes to the father, not Denise Richards, and he doesn't actually apologize. He makes an excuse, and then, the leering, the peeking is portrayed as unavoidable due to a sting operation in which Elaine participates. This is gross and made me feel gross watching it, and the whole thing is made even more gross by Jerry Seinfeld's personal life during the filming of the series. I hate this, so much, and I wish it had been handled a thousand times better or just, you know, not at all.

This is pretty heavy stuff, so let's change tones completely! Here are my favorite line reads from Seinfeld. [“He's a man.” “I'm a man.”] [“Can I have have a sip?” “No.”] [“I can't carry a pen. I'm afraid it'll puncture my scrotum.”] [“But you were wrong, Jerry. You were wrong.”] [“Free candy!”] [“You're killing independent George!”]

And now, if you will indulge me, the most relatable part of Seinfeld for me. [“Hi, have you met Ned? He's a communist.” “Really?” “Oh yeah, big communist. Big, big communist.”]

Alright. Let's move on to a singular topic.

[Sex and Sexuality]

[“Not that there's anything wrong with that.” “No, of course not.” “I have many gay friends.” “My father's gay.”]

Before we can address how sexual orientation was portrayed in Seinfeld, we need to understand the time and place that Seinfeld inhabited. While Seinfeld is widely remembered as a seminal 90's show, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David pitched the series to NBC in a meeting in 1988, and the pilot episode debuted in 1989.

In 1988, Ronald Reagan was still President. He left office on January 20, 1989, making way for George H.W. Bush. Nobody except hobbyists and scientists had heard of the internet, phones were just phones, video games were exclusively the domain of children, the Cold War – which arguably began in 1945 – still had a couple years left, goods, services and homes were relatively affordable but wouldn't be for long because of the after-shocks of Reaganomics and neoliberalism, and nobody knew a gosh darn thing about anything unless it was in the local news.

I was born in 1982. That was only a few decades ago, but it feels prehistoric. The world today looks similar to how it did in my childhood – the same schools, convenience stores, and roads still exist, but the way everything functions and the things we believe are unrecognizable to someone in 1982.

In the 80's and 90's, when you and your buddy were arguing about some seemingly important-at-the-time fact, it would become this contentious issue that was never fully resolved, and you would go on thinking this wrong-headed psuedo-fact, potentially for the rest of your life. We were socialized to believe whatever the people in our immediate circle of friends and family believed. Now, we just search for the answer on the internet and hopefully come away a little less ignorant. Misinformation populates the internet as well, but those of us who can use the internet responsibly know where to get accurate data and believe accurate data.

Now, put yourself in the mind of someone living before our modern, everyday circumstances – a grown adult in the United States in 1989 with a basic public school education and not intellectually curious enough to take a lot of sociology and humanities classes at university, having experienced the world through the carefully curated local news media and corporate advertising. If the mind of this person, this you, is a heterosexual, do you think that you probably have highly-informed, deeply sensitive, and perfectly welcoming attitudes about the gay community and have a host of gay friends? Maybe! But probably not.

Misinformation and generational ignorance were, and in many cases still are, enormous roadblocks to gay liberation, but there existed, and still exist, institutional roadblocks as well. In the United States, homosexuality was only removed as a “mental illness” in 1974.

According to Matthew Reimer and Leighton Brown, authors of We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, “... a 1974 vote by the entire American Psychiatric Association (APA) membership was unambiguous: homosexuality per se no longer constituted a mental illness. And a second resolution went even further: if homosexuality was no impairment, then all laws codifying public and private antigay discrimination had to end, as did those criminalizing private sexual activities between consenting adults.”

So-called sodomy laws began to be overturned state by state, but many states refused. In 1986, in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of laws that legally marginalized gay couples. The opinion was not reversed until 2003 in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, although by that point, the laws were only selectively enforced.

For context, Seinfeld debuted in 1989, three years after Bowers v. Hardwick, and ended in 1998, five years before Lawrence v. Texas. Seinfeld begins in 1989, in which President George H.W. Bush continued the work of Ronald Reagan by largely ignoring the AIDS crisis and showing little, if any, sympathy. In the 80's and much of the 90's, the subject of being gay was often connected in the media with the subject of AIDS, stigmatizing millions upon millions of people whether they were HIV positive or not.

In short, there exists organic, sociological, and even technological causes for the far-too-slow erosion of homophobia in the United States, but all of this exists within a larger framework of institutions that uphold homophobia, study homophobia, or challenge homophobia.

I say all of this not to make things too heavy but to explain the context for the world in which Seinfeld inhabited. As we sort through the homophobia in Seinfeld, bear in mind that this is not meant to condemn a television series or score points as someone more virtuous than a sitcom from the previous century. This is, for lack of a better term, anthropological. Not strictly moralistic or high-horsed.

Homophobia takes its most literal form in George Costanza. [“Paranoid, neurotic, it's a pleasure.”] George is terrified of either being secretly gay or being perceived as gay. From what we actually see, this does not come from any particular incident or trauma. George is simply perceived as a paranoid neurotic and that his homophobia is simply inexplicable and somehow a non-judgmental byproduct of his paranoia more generally. [“I think you're afraid to sit next to a man. You're a little homophobic, aren't you?” “Is it that obvious?”]

George is enormously and comically homophobic. His casual admission that he is homophobic does suggest that he is not ashamed of being homophobic the way one might be ashamed in the 21st century. If, in 2024, I noticed that I displayed homophobic characteristics or treated gay people less than the way I treated straight people, I would be ashamed. But during the time that Seinfeld aired, George's open and outward homophobia, explicitly telling Elaine that he would not want to sit next to a man out of fear of being perceived as gay, hit home for many viewers.

[“Come on, George. Relax. Just because they look alike doesn't mean you're secretly in love with Jerry.”]

[“I can't get a massage from a man.” “Why not?” “What are you, crazy? I can't have a man touching me.”]

[“Do you like him?” “Well, he's a good fighter and a nice guy, but I don't like him.”]

George's paranoia about his sexual orientation or the perception of his sexual orientation is carefully curated to the audience as not being hateful. [“Not that there's anything wrong with that.”] This protects the beloved George character. He is not perceived by a 90's audience as contemptible because of his homophobia. Instead, George is the object of mockery. Although, in a more unintentionally insidious way, George is also the object of sympathy for his homophobia. George personified the generalized, unexamined homophobia of the early 90's but in a way that sympathized with the homophobic, not the victims of homophobia.

Jerry is also homophobic, but he displays his homophobia in a more subdued manner, as if his homophobia is the “correct” way to be homophobic. [“I don't know. Just standing there with a box, holding it by a little string.” “You think it's effeminate?” “It's a tad dainty.”] [“Do you think it's effeminate for a man to put clothes in a gentle cycle?”] [“I'm not gay.” “Well, neither am I.”]

Fans of the series might object to the Jerry character being characterized as homophobic, partly because that's George's whole thing and partly because they might not want to acknowledge that Jerry's attitude “counts” as homophobic, designating homophobia only in its most literal sense or only as an overtly pointed and hateful attitude. Homophobia is not only literal fear of being perceived as gay or overt, violent hatred. Homophobia is also a system of institutionalized discrimination and misinformation that characterizes LGBTQ+ people as inherently more dangerous and sexualized than heterosexual people.

It is actually Jerry who repeats the most common 80's and 90's homophobic misinformation about gay people, such as recruitment. [“Oh, come on, that's a huge feature. When they approach a new recruit, I'm sure that's one of the big selling points.”] Recruitment is a fabricated, fictional practice in which gay people increase their numbers by essentially hard-selling straight people into “becoming” gay. In this homophobic nightmare fantasy, straight people are the targets of a kind of gay hypnosis or confidence game. In addition to this fictional practice labeling homosexuality as a choice instead of an orientation, it also casts gay people as predatory, and casts straight men as the victims of an encroaching homosexual threat.

Jerry, both the character and the actor, probably did not perceive this line as homophobic, because it begins with a patronizing line about homosexuality having the benefit of matching wardrobes. This joke, in and of itself, is mostly harmless, but what came after, the “recruitment” lie, was not. This particular lie was antiquated in May of 1994 when the episode aired. It sounds like a bit Jerry Seinfeld the actor/comedian wrote in the 80's.

In the episode The Note, Jerry consoles George's homophobia with his own brand of misinformation, telling George that if a man touches him under any circumstances, and his body reacts favorably, this is “the test” that would conclude that a man is gay. [“That's not the test. Contact is the test, if it moves, as a result of contact.”]

Now, one might argue that the audience is not meant to take Jerry and George seriously here, but there is no counter to this, nobody who steps in and gives an alternative to this misinformation. At the risk of being vulgar, a penis can become erect under almost any circumstances. Warm water can make a penis erect. George's experience with the massage is unremarkable.

Much later in the series, in the episode The Engagement, George tells Jerry about how much he misses Susan Ross, his ex-girlfriend. Jerry reminds George that she is a lesbian, but George says it “didn't take.” This reinforces a number of nasty pieces of misinformation about the LGBTQ+ community.

For one, it reinforces the outdated notion that homosexuality is often just a phase. Bear in mind that this episode aired in September 1995, not ten years prior, but this misunderstanding was still widely prevalent in the 90's. Seinfeld was still living in a pre-Will & Grace world.

For another, it erases bisexuality completely. Isn't Susan just, you know, bisexual? Or pansexual? Or literally anything besides gay or straight? She dates men, she dates women. You might be thinking “This is ridiculous! Why is this so complicated for the writers of Seinfeld? Did people just not acknowledge bisexuality in 1995?” [laughs] Well, yeah. Kind of! This is a magazine cover, introducing the concept of bisexuality to the American population as the emerging sexual orientation, like it's a new model car that had just been invented. It's from 1995, the same year as this episode of Seinfeld. I remember this being a topic on my Twitter feed recently because of Chasing Amy. There are a lot of examples of this.

Refusal to acknowledge bisexuality is called bisexual erasure, which itself is part of broader biphobia or skepticism/mistreatment of bisexuality and bisexuals. This must be galling for bisexual people because there is a growing body of research suggesting that attraction to more than one gender may be more common than previously hypothesized.

According to Pew Research, “Among adults who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, 62% identify as bisexual, while 38% are gay or lesbian, according to the same 2022 survey.”

Susan, from the perspective of any objective observer, is some shade of bisexual, pansexual, or a sexual orientation in which attraction to more than one gender exists, but the series itself never acknowledges this. Instead, her relationships with women are treated as aberrations, as flings, as phases, until she reaches her true sexuality, which must be heterosexuality in order to reunite with George. Susan is not written as a bisexual woman currently in a relationship with a man. Instead, Susan is written as a kind of “failed lesbian” who was actually heterosexual all along. [“No, it didn't take.”]

The conversation between Jerry and George about Susan's sexuality could have had Jerry ask about Susan's relationships with women, to which George could have replied “She's bi.” It might not have gotten the laugh that “It didn't take” got, but I'm pretty sure a team of comedy writers could have made it funny while not engaging in bisexual erasure.

In the episode The Cheever Letters, Susan discovers that her father, Henry, had an affair with a man. In the later episode The Virgin, Elaine remarks [“Yeah, since she met him, she's been vomited on, her family cabin's been burned down, she learned her father's a homosexual, and she got fired from a high paying network job.”] Even ignoring the fact that the existence of a gay person is on a list of unfortunate incidents, there is no reference here or throughout the series about Henry being bisexual.

The man that the fictional Henry Ross loved was real life short story writer and novelist John Cheever, author of The Wapshot Chronicle and Bullet Park. Cheever had relationships with both men and women, and is widely understood as bisexual. Henry also had relationships with both men and women, but he is only called homosexual by Elaine. And then, he is shown to be in a committed marriage with his wife throughout the series with no further references to his sexuality or his feelings for John Cheever. Bisexual people have always existed, but a 90's audience was still grappling with this completely uncomplicated fact.

In most episodes, Kramer is portrayed as being comfortable with his sexuality and comfortable talking about men being attractive without fear of being mistaken for gay, but it is always done for comedic effect, not for social commentary. [“I think he looks fantastic.” “Oh, come on.” “No, I never noticed what an attractive man he is.”] [“I'll tell you who is an attractive man. George Will.”] Kramer is comfortable enough with his sexuality that he kisses Jerry, but again, it's just played up as Kramer being goofy. Kramer is briefly bothered by the insinuation that he might be gay in, I think, one scene, but that's it.

In the episode The Subway, Elaine is uncomfortable telling a socially conservative woman that she is attending a wedding between two women. In the 90's, gay weddings in the United States were not legally binding, but they existed nevertheless. When the woman is repulsed by this admission and makes a hasty exit, Elaine's primary concern is being mistaken for a lesbian. [“I hate men, but I'm not a lesbian.”]

Elaine reinforces homophobic misinformation by engaging with the make-believe notion that women become lesbians because they simply hate men, or that hating men is in some way connected to homosexuality in women. It's not difficult to see the misogyny inherent in this mistaken belief. Even within a sexual arrangement that exclusively involves women, men still wish to center themselves in this conversation. People who are left-handed don't hate right hands, they're just left-handed.

In the episode The Beard, Elaine romantically pursues a gay man and attempts to “convert” him to heterosexuality. She is temporarily successful, until the end of the episode where everything must return to status quo. It's a sitcom. The fact that this conversion does not work long-term might be viewed as a positive because it implicitly reinforces that being gay is an orientation, not a lifestyle choice, but it is also so dated in its sexual politics with talk of “going back” and “switching teams” that it's a hard watch at times. The possibility of Elaine's romantic partner potentially being bisexual is also never broached. Its absence should be conspicuous to the modern viewer.

It might be unfair to accuse this episode of endorsing so-called conversion therapy – legally and morally considered a form of torture – because the unlawful exercise does not exist in this episode. Nevertheless, the mistaken idea that being gay is a choice and not an orientation is the same belief that social conservatives invoke to justify conversion therapy. It both is and is not part of this episode.

Jerry Seinfeld, the actor, not the character, had a persistent rumor follow him around since the 1970's – that he was a closeted gay man. According to Jerry Oppenheimer, author of Seinfeld: The Making of an American Icon, Seinfeld was suspected to be gay in high school because he was part of a theater club with gay members. “Already viewed by classmates as a 'nerd,' he now feared he might be labeled a 'queer' like some other club members. In the early 1970s, conservative, provincial

Massapequa High had not yet come to terms with gay liberation …

Years later, when Jerry became a big name himself, he became the subject of gossip among friends, and within the entertainment industry, that he was either gay or bisexual. Privately, Jerry was concerned about the talk, and efforts were made by his people to make him appear more macho.”

A writer for Seinfeld used this rumor as the basis for the famous episode The Outing, in which both Jerry and George are incorrectly identified as gay. The episode goes out of its way, comically so, to let the audience know that there is nothing wrong with being gay. [“Not that there's anything wrong with that.”] Once again, as explained in Seinfeldia, “David and Seinfeld almost abandoned an

earlier version of Larry Charles’s script for the episode due to fears of offending the gay community, but during the discussion, Charles uttered what would become one of the show’s stickiest catchphrases – “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Once David and Seinfeld asked him to

put that in as a recurring joke, it became a satire of homophobia, skewering straight, liberal men’s desire to emphasize their heterosexuality while maintaining their image as enlightened beings. It

was a perfect depiction of ’90s political correctness.”

According to Jerry Seinfeld himself, the only way to, as he put it, “get away with” such panicked, homophobic reactions on television in the mid-90's would be to pepper in this phrase throughout the episode.

Whether you consider this a landmark moment for LGBTQ+ representation on television or a bunch of straight people trying to get away with an episode about homophobia and finally quash a rumor depends on how charitably you watch The Outing. But just to be clear, in an episode about gay people, we are seeing this almost exclusively from the perspective of straight people. I don't want to go too hard on it, though. Gay representation had such slim pickings at the time that The Outing actually won a GLAAD Award. And, in fairness, dedicating an entire episode to the subject in 1993 was worthy of attention.

Matt Baume made a YouTube video about The Outing and has his own take on the episode. If you want to go more in-depth on it and from the perspective of a gay man, you might want to check that out.

It's important to recognize that while I am focusing on common 90's-era homophobia and homophobic propaganda, it obviously never fully dissipated from American culture. We are all in the midst of a planned reactionary movement that has resurrected outmoded fears about gay people as inherently dangerous to children, combined with transphobia to put the fear of God into the hearts of social conservatives. It's easy to mock 90's homophobia, but it's critical to learn from these backwards attitudes so that we don't continue to repeat them. If the excuse for the blatant homophobia in 90's sitcoms is “Those were just the times.” then why are we re-living those times right now?

[Early Seinfeld vs. New Seinfeld]

When you ask Seinfeld fans about the best seasons of the series, they generally rank seasons one and two as the worst, season three somewhere in the middle, and the later seasons – four through nine – scattered among the rest. Seasons four and seven are usually ranked either at the top or near the top. Here's a hot take: I prefer seasons one, two, and to a lesser extent, three over what came after. Before anyone rushes to the comments to accuse me of having a contrarian opinion to drive engagement, I am putting this at the end of the video, not the beginning, and I am prepared to defend my tastes. So, here we go.

The first two seasons of Seinfeld have a more down-to-Earth, lived-in quality. Look at the lighting in Jerry's apartment in season one. Jerry's apartment looks like … an apartment. It's an adult man's apartment – baseball memorabilia, clean without being too tidy. The sofa looks fluffy, almost too fluffy, like it's not stable or new.

The apartment in the pilot is different from the apartment in the rest of season one – a stereo and a little computer are added – but it doesn't feel too staged. Clear cabinets in the kitchen to give the scene some more color, but it still looks real enough. In later seasons? I can't stop looking at the Superman statue and the rows of cereal. Like a lot of millennials, I never entirely grew out of my childhood interests either, but this is a thirty-something year old man in 1990. It makes him quirky, full of quirk, steeped in quirkness. It is the home of a sitcom character, not a man.

Of course, he is a sitcom character, but that's the whole point. In the first two seasons, Jerry seems developed enough to draw in viewers but real enough to be relatable. In the first two seasons, we get the sense that Jerry has everyday struggles and that he's still trying to make it as a comedian. At some point in the series, Jerry basically becomes bullet-proof. He breaks up with a new woman every week, it never bothers him, and he is successful enough that nothing could possibly interfere with his livelihood. The series outright tells us this. [“You know who you are? Even Steven.”]

[S01E04 7:15] The coffee shop in the first season has warm colors, a warm glow. The coffee shop in later seasons is too brightly lit. In seasons one and two, the camera moves around from time to time. [S02E09 1:25] [S01E04 7:15] This may seem like a small thing, but it adds to the 70's New York movie cinematic quality. By season three, everything is uniform, cookie-cutter, leveled. I prefer the Seinfeld logo in seasons one and two as well. It's just Seinfeld – but by season three it's Seinfeld.

Where I'm going with this is, well, the more Seinfeld goes on, the more it looks and feels like an ordinary sitcom. What set it apart in seasons one and two is largely gone by season three.

It retains some of the conversational tone of seasons one and two, but even that is given a heightened reality to it. The first set of conversations in Seinfeld are obviously in the pilot, and they are between Jerry and George. They debate Jerry's chances with a woman and have a back and forth about this throughout the episode. By the second half of the series, everyone and everything has a wacky nickname. The closer-talker, the two-face, the Soup Nazi. [Finale, 42:44] “Soup Nazi? You people have a little pet name for everybody.”]

Worse than that, the characters change in uncomfortable ways and become less relatable. The writers had a mandate: no hugging, no learning. This was one way that Seinfeld could differentiate itself from other sitcoms. I'm all for it, in theory, but at some point, the writers took that mean that the characters could only change for the worse.

Jerry in seasons one and two was generous, friendly, mostly kind to women. Elaine was a warm, caring person who stood up for her principles. George was still George, but he had more moments of empathy in the first half of the series than in the second. Season One George would never experience “restrained jubilation” over the tragic death of his fiance. He would probably cry and feel guilty about any sense of relief he felt. In the early seasons, Newman is an unseen character on the verge of ending his own life. And then, he is introduced as a nemesis for Jerry, comically villainous, complete with an evil laugh like a Saturday morning cartoon antagonist.

Let's be clear. Sitcoms don't have to be realistic to be good. In fact, they traditionally are not realistic, but that's what set Seinfeld apart at first. Seinfeld was, in seasons one and two, a sitcom that defied sitcom standards. It was novel, unique. And then it just wasn't. In season seven, George's boss has him committed to a mental institution because apparently that's just something that the owner of the New York Yankees is allowed to do. This is played for laughs. In season eight, Elaine travels to Myanmar and plays out an Apocalypse Now homage. In season nine, Kramer somehow stumbles upon the original set of The Merv Griffin Show and begins hosting a mock talk show in his apartment. This is what Seinfeld was, and this is what Seinfeld became. [“Holy Cow!”]

It's possible that the changes were simply necessary to keep the series on the air. After all, Seinfeld didn't pick up in the ratings until the late season four episode The Outing, which is often cited as the turning point in viewership. Although, I'm pretty sure that episode could have been done with the lived-in look to it.

I sometimes wonder what Seinfeld would have been like if it retained the seasons one and two aesthetic and characterizations. Would it have been a better show? A worse show? Simply a different show? It's impossible to see that alternate timeline and know for certain, but it's something I wonder about and something I wish I could have seen. I'm probably not the only one.

[Conclusion]

Seinfeld had a strange, divisive series finale. The finale was fitting – four people who usually don't mean any harm but seldom put their necks out for anyone – are tried and convicted for neutrality in the face of a crime. The Good Samaritan Law, as described in the series finale, states that bystanders must help if it is reasonable to do so. Who decides if it's reasonable? Is it reasonable for a stranger to help their neighbor? Yes. Is it reasonable for a stranger to approach an armed criminal? Maybe not! The criminal is clearly indicating that he has a gun. The victim shouts “Don't shoot!” Is it really a good thing to escalate this matter and potentially turn it into a shooting? What is the best thing to do here?

Also, what gives? As the carjacker is driving away, a police officer shows up and speaks to the victim, but the police officer, instead of getting in his patrol car and chasing after the carjacker, arrests Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine. Seriously, watch how close the police officer is to the action and does nothing: [“Officer, he's stealing my car!”]

The car is right there! Just go after him! Oh, I get it. You're gonna arrest four witnesses who had nothing to do with it because it's easier than chasing the actual criminal. Fuck the police.