Via RSS 
Via Facebook 
Via Pinterest 
Via Twitter 
On this day in 1991 the first episode of Seinfeld was aired. It was scheduled to debut a few days before but got bumped due to the start of the Persian Gulf War (remember that?). It almost didn’t make it at all actually, focus groups thought it was weak and one NBC executive said it was ‘too New York, too Jewish’.
End Of The Episode
The show made it though and eventually earned a strange reputation as ‘the show about nothing’. It got this nickname because it repeatedly broke the major rule of sitcom story lines: that the characters in a sitcom have to learn some sort of important lesson and experience personal growth by the end of the show.
Instead the characters on Seinfeld stubbornly stayed as ignorant and neurotic as they always were. In fact a lot of times they fed off of each other and seemed to end up with even worse moral character by the end of the episode.
Sticky
For me though it never seemed like a show about nothing, there was always an easy and funny answer to what the show I’d just seen was about. Each episode had that one crazy thing that just stuck out in your mind, like when Kramer decided to live his entire life in the shower, going so far as to waterproof his phone and even ending up making salads in there.
Or the Soup Nazi who cooked up broths of deliciousness that people waited in long lines for, head down so as not to anger the Soup Nazi and hear the ominous words ‘No soup for you!’
It was these sticky things that made the show so awesome because the next day at school or work you’d be talking about that one crazy aspect of the episode. All you had to do was say the words ‘Soup Nazi’ and everyone would burst into laughter and conversation, and that’s definitely not nothing.
Via Email
RSS feed for comments on this post, TrackBack URI