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15 Years Post-Seinfeld: What's the Deal With Time Passing?

It's been fifteen years since everyone's favorite non-show ended. Is anything aging worse than Jerry's jeans?
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Fifteen years since the last new episode aired (and disappointed) a nation, the main characters of “Seinfeld” are back on the walls of the New York subways. At the Nostrand stop, the 90s live right alongside the “Real Housewives of New Jersey,” the faces of Jerry and Elaine covered with choice quotes from oft-quoted dialogue. But Pix 11 isn’t wasting its time letting us know when an old show is airing, if it’s “Seinfeld.”

Even if three-fourths of its cast hasn’t had a really successful project since the Clinton administration—and one of them wanders the Earth, a ghostly cautionary tale on hate speech—their dated hairstyles and countless contributions to the lexicon remain as known and adorned as the Drake himself. (Love the Drake!) “Seinfeld” was a hit in its own time, by every metric. It was a ratings monster and a critical darling, something that fans of “Community” or “Parks and Recreation” only dream of. It was openly New York and Jewish, and still its sixth and ninth seasons topped the Nielsen ratings. From 1994 and 1998, “Seinfeld” finished at least in the top two. And yet the form that "Seinfeld" used to dominate Thursday nights throughout the 90s, just like the network which dubbed it “Must See TV,” is but a shell of its former self, the embers of an afterglow. A lot has been written about the demise of the sitcom and how reality television has come to bury the old, what with its expensive scripts and actors. And if you look at the ratings, that seems to be the case. The Nielsen ratings for regularly-scheduled, primetime shows in 2012 are topped by Sunday Night football, followed by both nights of “American Idol,” and Sunday Night football’s pregame show. After both nights of “Dancing With the Stars” you finally get to the first scripted show, and even then it’s only “NCIS.” Contrast that with the world that “Seinfeld” left back in ‘98, where the only top-rated, non-scripted TV shows were Monday Night Football and “60 Minutes.” Even the sitcoms we have today are of a different ilk. Formally, “Seinfeld” is a boilerplate, multicam sitcom. While the nomenclature refers the way the show is filmed—using techniques pioneered by Desi Arnaz on “I Love Lucy"—the multicam sitcom is associated with other tired TV tropes like the laugh track. In the 21st Century, the multicam is pretty unfashionable.

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The 2000s saw the rise of the single-camera sitcom—“Arrested Development,” “30 Rock,” “Modern Family,” you name it. Single-camera sitcoms like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation,” which employ tropes like “the talking head” aside, borrow more heavily from reality television than from the “Lucy”-“Seinfeld” continuum--and none of them have the laugh track. It’s only fair to admit that “The Big Bang Theory” and “Two And A Half Men” are the two, top-rated contemporary sitcoms and they are both multicam and they both use laugh tracks. They are also both reviled. Call it the pernicious influence of the hipster if you must, but we live in an era in which being critically successful and acclaimed by the critics--professional or otherwise--seems impossible. ‘Twas not so, in the days of Sein.

And so “Seinfeld” is a bit of lens into another time—the hoary days of mass media truly being massive, television’s pre-golden age, golden age. While I was working on this article, I stopped to buy groceries. As we were checking out and I was musing about Seinfeld to my girlfriend, I asked the guy tallying up our groceries if he watched Seinfeld when it was on. “I mean,” he said nodding, “who didn’t?” Do we have a show like this anymore? “American Idol” circa 2006 or something? In a decade and a half, what will I talk about with my grocery store check-out guy? (Seinfeld, still, duh.) “Seinfeld” is the standard bearer of its medium, because not only is the best of its era, its era was the peak of its medium. The show is The Beatles of the sitcom. We won’t have a Beatles again—the mainstream of radio, Ed Sullivan and record sales that they dominated is long gone. Likewise a cable-diffused, DVRing, binge-streaming audience precludes the possibility of another Seinfeld. And there’s more to it than that. Our expectations for television, today, are much, much higher. There’s a certain amount of innocence that “Seinfeld” has when it comes to the issues that dominate pop-culture discourse these days, specifically when it comes to the big identity issues of race and sexuality. The idea of a Jerry Seinfeld as an “Every Man” has crumbled under the assumptions that the label “Every Man” carries—even an “Every Man” excludes every woman, and that’s half the population, to say nothing of having four leads who were all white, straight and middle class. But that was the mainstream, then, kids. While television is still very white, straight and upper middle class, our critical darlings, at least, no longer enjoy the luxury of guilelessly being so without catching flack for it. If you can believe it, HBO’s “Girls” had aired just one episode of its first season before it’s portrayal of an unrecognizably-white New York raised objections, which ballooned a backlash (which in turn caused a backlash, and so on). Shows ignore these issues at their own peril, and to join the pantheon of Important Television, diversity is a must. ABC’s perennial Emmy-winning duo of “Modern Family” and “Happy Endings” star a gay couple, an explicitly Colombian lead, an anti-stereotype of a gay man and interracial friendships, all fairly casually. Casts that are predominately minorities are still a rarity on television, but the conversation is happening and changes are appearing, however slowly and occasionally awkwardly. The effort is made to cast a wide net. Innocence isn’t exactly the right word for how “Seinfeld” approached questions of race or sexuality or even something as divisive as abortion, since it never approached the issues themselves. The show occasionally trafficked in mocking its own whiteness, or questions of sexuality, but only as flashpoints for the characters to react against, and always in service to a joke (“You wanna go to the Gap?”). If aliens are picking up the middle of Seinfeld’s run, 17 light years away, they won’t learn what these words signify, but they’ll be able to tell that they cause Earthlings to flip out. One guiding principle for the show’s writers was “No hugging and no learning,” which must be counted as yet another goal achieved. But even holding “Seinfeld” to this level of scrutiny is a little unseemly. As it aired in the last blaze of glory of big media, it wasn’t subject to the level of scrutiny that television’s new golden age, the DVD boxset and the rise of Internet media have allowed. Consider the plight of “Girls.” Are we collectively really so sophisticated that we all saw Hannah and the gang and uniformly wondered where all the non-white women were at? Or was it that, as The New York Times put it, “[o]ne idea begets Twitter messages, blog posts and aggregated outrage that burns (sic?) hot and fast”? Not only were there fewer outlets for fans to publicly discuss TV, existing media outlets weren’t devoting weekly space to professionally reviewing shows every week. Only the last few seasons of “Seinfeld” overlapped with people commonly using the Internet in their homes, and it ended well before the weekly TV review became normal. Thus even its most scrutinized moment, its finale, was covered by CNN under the headline, “’Seinfeld’ Finale Touches Some, Bothers Others.”

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To my knowledge, there is only one website that has covered “Seinfeld” episode by episode, albeit well after they had aired. Starting in June 2010 with the pilot and ending with the finale in April 2012, TV reviewer David Sims reviewed every episode of Seinfeld for the Onion’s AV Club. There’s something anachronistic about reviewing a show that every one has seen and made their conclusions about, now, and so Sims accepted the mantle with excitement and some trepidation. “It was a show I loved,” he told me. “It was a challenge, but it was an exciting challenge.” He wondered if the so-called “show about nothing” would give him enough to write about. “When it’s a comedy, you don’t want your review to just turn into a list of ‘this was funny and then this was funny and then this was less funny.’ You want to have a theme or something.” Sims started by writing about three episodes a week, then slowed down to just two. He’s not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line, the winds shifted in the heretofore-affable comment section below the reviews. If you didn’t print this article out, you can take a second to go check out the comments under an article at the AV Club. It doesn’t matter which article; the AV Club’s commentors are loyal and voracious—quick to quote classic-era Simpsons and just as quick to debate when that era ends. It sounds like a cliché but it’s really a commenting community. Even with everyone going by pun-based monikers and almost no real faces used for the avatar’s pictures, they have a world with their own inside jokes, celebrities, villains and awards. It’s bizarre, but it’s one of the few comments sections that offers something besides partisan bickering or other such inanities.   Sims doesn’t know when the "commentariat" turned on him exactly. “At a certain point, I remember, my friends—my actual friends who don’t really read my reviews, but I guess do once in a while—started pointing out to me, ‘You realize they’re getting pretty intense in the comments threads about you. Not just about the review but kind of about you—you’re becoming this avatar for them.’” What was driving this? “Well, I stand by my opinion, I do think Seinfeld kind of loses it a little bit in the later seasons, especially when Larry David isn’t writing for them anymore,” Sims prefaced. “My comments got a little nit-picky and that really drove them up the wall.” As a 21st Century television reviewer, Sims would talk about whether or not the characters acted to their type appropriately, whether the logic of the show was respected and note when jokes fell flat or a character was drawn too stereotypically.   And holy shit, did the commentariat revolt. Weekly they waited for Sims to post the review, and then tore into him. Their favorite thing was taking pull-quotes from his writing, calling it inane or just an unreasonable standard for a sitcom, and then crying out (silently, one presumes, but for the tapping of their keyboards): “SSSSSIIIIMMMSSSSS!” For his part, Sims took it in stride. “I take no offense, believe me, I understand. It wasn’t like they were only venting anger; there was some real craft to both their insults and insights.”

Writing about “Mad Men” or even “New Girl” makes sense, Sims pointed out, because they’re both serialized. You can speculate, long-term, about the characters, where they’re going, who they are. For Seinfeld, that’s a little more difficult. No one nit-picked its breaks in continuity on its first run, because we didn’t, as a society, have those people yet. We just had people to note that it was a show to watch, out of the twelve available sitcoms, and the numbers reflect that it’s the best.

“Imagine Larry David reading my reviews or dealing with me,” Sims said. “Imagine how flabbergasted he would be at my concern with X, Y or Z. I know he took ‘Seinfeld’ seriously, but I imagine he would be a little baffled.” This type of close watching just wasn’t on the radar then. That’s not to say that “Seinfeld” was universally beloved or that the 1990s didn’t have any cultural critics. One article that ran in The Baltimore Sun during the show’s penultimate week, accuses the show as being heartless, materialistic and cold, citing the episode where Kramer has the homeless pulling rickshaws, the Junior Mint that falls into a man’s open body cavity and even the reprehensible bubble boy (Moops!). The last episode of Seinfeld made explicit what had, until then, only been implied and picked up via subtext by savvy Sun writers: These people are terrible. They are funny and relatable, but under no circumstance are they admirable or worthy of emulation. Even before the show ended, David Lavery, professor at Middle Tennessee State University and editor of the book The Seinfeld Cosmos, recognized that, “Seinfeld's' lasting contribution, if it has one, is that it has opened up so many possibilities for crassness.” There’s no doubt that television has become more explicit, and the characters more horrible. But to their credit they’re also being more explicit about being horrible. On shows like “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” the characters constantly run up against a world that reminds you that, by the metric of any normal person, these people are sociopaths. Of course they could just be becoming more extreme in reaction to the sociopaths who abound in our media already. Perhaps here, fifteen years from “Seinfeld” the world of sitcoms has changed in proportion to world at large. David Sims pointed out perhaps the most-90s aspect of “Seinfeld” as we were finishing chatting. He told me that even though George is probably the best character, Jerry is his favorite, due to a peculiarity that makes him fairly unique among protagonists, of any story really.   “He’s never really in any trouble, he never really has anywhere to go, he’s fine. He’s doing fine from episode one and he’s never really in any doubt that he won’t be doing fine ever again. He does fine with the ladies, he does fine professionally. And so all he’s worried about is whether he’s going to be inconvenienced every day. And there’s something beautiful about that.” Sims was in England during the show’s original run, so I can’t be sure it echoes the same way to him, but I agree that there is something serene about how Jerry’s only concerns are “breakfast cereal and Superman.” When his voice rises to hilarious pitches, it’s over “wearing a silly shirt.” Something about that sureness of self and place in the world is enviable. The sitcom is not the perfect lens to view society, but the most popular TV show can probably give you some insight into the time and place that birthed it. If you can’t help finding Jerry to be a little smug, remember he was a product of the “World’s Only Superpower.” With all issues of class, money, race and sex all accounted for, and safely at the distance of a joke—all a little insensitive and indifferent—Jerry might be pre-9/11 America, sitting in a booth. Or maybe it doesn’t hold up to that scrutiny, or that symbol. Sitcoms didn't used to be forced to mean this much, at least not the ones about nothing.

@a_ben_richmond