Seinfeld was the show about nothing and it was my favorite 1990’s show. I would sit front of my tv with my dinner and watch the adventures of Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, George Costanza and Cosmo Kramer every week.
Seinfeld – The show about nothing
The show lasted for nine seasons from July 9, 1989 until May 14, 1998 and spanned 180 episodes. Jerry Seinfeld plays a fictionalized version of himself and the show mostly focusses on his personal life with Seinfeld’s stand up comedy usually used as an introduction about the theme of the episode. The familiar bassline that you will recognize immediately upon hearing turned out to be a classic and was a ringtone on my phone for a very long time. As a matter of fact I should download it again.
The show revolves mostly around Seinfeld’s appartment in Manhattan and the show about nothing dealt with the minutiae of daily life. The majority of the episodes just about the mundane experiences you have throughout the day.
Jerry Seinfeld was an upcoming comedian in the 1980s and NBC offered him a TV show deal and Seinfeld asked fellow comedian and friend Larry David to help create a premise for a sitcom. Bored and annoyed with the sitcoms at the time where at the end of each episode characters would go all mushy and talk about the morale of the story, Seinfeld decided to go the other way and created characters who don’t learn from their mistakes.
The cast and characters
Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) – Jerry is a stand-up comedian who is often depicted as conscious of the group amid the general insanity generated by the people in his world. The character is a germophobe a neat freak, as well as an ardent Superman, New York Mets and breakfast cereal fan. Just take a look at Jerry’s apartment to see the memorabilia. Jerry’s apartment is where most of the adventures take place. Jerry’s usually breaks up with his girlfriends on the show for the most superficial reasons. Reasons include: A talking belly button that he saw one night when he watched one of dates sleep. The girl with the manhands, to him it was just a nightmare that the woman had stronger hands than he did. But the ultimate classic break up was the first mutual break up in the history of mankind.
Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) – Elaine is Jerry’s ex-girlfriend and later friend. She is attractive and a genius, while also being humorous, arrogant and occasionally impulsive. She sometimes has a tendency to be too honest with people (usually by losing her temper), which often gets her into trouble.She usually gets caught up in her boyfriends’ quirks, eccentric employers’ unusual behaviors and idiosyncrasies, and the maladjustment of total strangers. She tends to make poor choices in men she chooses to date and is often overly reactive, especially with David Putty. The last boyfriend she had on the show. Elaine has a rich career and can do a little bit of everything. Although it is not clear what education she has. She works at Pendant Publishing with Mr. Lippman, is later hired as a personal assistant for Mr. Pitt, and later works for the J. Peterman catalog as a glorified assistant and later even takes over the Peterman catalog after J. Peterman goes on a long trip.
The best episodes that include Elaine’s mishaps are basically ALL the episodes with boyfriend David Putty. The episode where her boyfriend plays The Eagles’ Desperado song and tells her to keep quiet. After she tells him to keep quiet because her favorite song is on he just plain ignores her.
In real life Ms. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a cancer survivor and I was shocked when she made the announcement on her later show Veep. She is one of the few who broke the chains of the Seinfeld curse and had a succesful acting career after Seinfeld ended. That is not to say that the rest of the actors didn’t have succesful careers after the show BUT she is the one who transcended Seinfeld and won several more Emmy awards.
Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) – Kramer is Jerry’s weird and strange neighbor. His trademarks include his humorous hairstyle, vintage clothes, and energetic sliding bursts through Jerry’s apartment door. Kramer was heavily based on a neighbor of David’s during his amateur comedic years in Manhattan. Afraid that the real Kramer (Kenny Kramer) would exploit the show’s succes, David decided to name the character Cosmo Kramer. The real Kenny Kramer gave tours past the locations that were mentioned in the show. The website KennyKramer.com is still up and running and links to TripAdvisor and you can still book a “Kramer’s Reality Tour” tour. Although never being able to hold a steady job, perhaps because of a lack of marketable skills, he does have a few jobs during the show. He is also the founder of Kramerica Industries but that was a business doomed to fail. Kramerica backed Make your own pizza pie restaurant and an oil badder system.
More ideas from Kramerica Industries are:
- Ketchup & Mustard in the same bottle.
- A restaurant that only serves peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, PB&J’S.
- A periscope for your car, so you can see the traffic, although this is only in Jerry’s imagination of the future Kramer.
- Calvin Klein cologne: The Beach
- Coffee table book about coffee tables
George Costanza (Jason Alexander) – George is Jerry Seinfeld’s best friend, and has been since high school. He is miserly, dishonest, petty and envious of others’ achievements. He is a loser who is very insecure about his capabilities. He complains and lies easily about everything: his profession, relationships and almost everything else, and it all comes back to him sooner or later. It is the source of most of the plots that revolve around George. He often uses the alias Art Vandelay when lying or concocting a cover story. Despite these shortcomings, George has a sense of loyalty to his friends and success in dating women and eventually secures a successful career as Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the New York Yankees. As assistant all the character traits that were mentioned above come to full fruition. George would lie, cheat and be petty when advising the players or when he got a job offer but his direct competitor was his own boss. It was as if all the previous seasons prepared George for the job as assistant.
George the lack of empathy is shown when George’ fiancee Susan died after licking envelopes. Or the way her parents treated him like dirt because they held him responsible for her death. George is a pretty cruel person. During a fire at a kids party, George was the first to run out of the house, pushing over kids and the elderly to get to the door and locking it from the outside. But also him moving back in with his parents led to Jerry’s comment: if u move out and then move back in then something’s gone wrong in your life. But the best one was George quit his job on Friday and then returned on Monday like nothing happened.
George is by far my favorite character on the show. And the funny part is that George is in reality based on Larry David, co-creator of the show.
My favorites of Seinfeld
I have watched the show religiously in the 1990s. Sure there were other shows like Friends or Family Matters and they were fun, I won’t deny that but nothing came close to Seinfeld. The memorable main characters and supporting roles from various actors made the show THE best show of the 1990s.
The show’s quotes are gold…most of them anyway. Here are a few:
“Kramer goes to a fantasy camp. His whole life is a fantasy camp. People should plunk down two thousand dollars to live like him for a week. Do nothing, fall ass-backwards into money, mooch food off your neighbors, and have sex without dating; that’s a fantasy camp.” – George Costanza talks about Cosmo Kramer’s baseball camp.
“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” – Jerry Seinfeld.
I loved that quote so much that I used it in my mother’s eulogy. With her permission ofcourse. I told her weeks before that I was going to use that and she laughed really loud.
Now this is my favorite supporting character on the show: Jackie Chiles.
You can’t let the defendant have control of the key piece of evidence. Plus, she’s trying it on over a leotard, of course a bra’s not gonna fit over a leotard. A bra gotta fit right over a person’s skin. Like a glove! – Jackie Chiles
The quote above was clearly making fun of OJ Simpson’s lawyer Johnny Cochran. In fact, Jackie Chiles is based on Johnny Cochran. Cochran tried to get the Department of Justice to let OJ Simpson because their main evidence, a glove, didn’t fit. So Cochran said: If the glove don’t fit, you acquit.
The Seinfeld writers and creators came up with the idea to create Jackie Chiles and hired Phil Morris, who was friends with Cochran, and he played the role so well that Cochran even had to ask if he could stop it.
And here is a special remembrance clip of a blooper starring Jerry Stiller as Frank Costanza who picks up son George Costanza from the police department after he got busted selling bootlegged copies of movies.
“My George isn’t clever enough to hatch a scheme like this” – Frank Costanza.
Where to watch?
If you want to watch the show you can watch it on Amazon Prime. All nine seasons. Some of the jokes wouldn’t be appropriate in this day of age and some jokes didn’t stand the test of time. But the show’s got heart and quality writing and amazing comedy.
Seinfeld will also stream on Netflix worldwide but won’t be until 2021.
There are some other shows on Netflix and those are mostly stand up shows of Jerry Seinfeld. I have just started to watch the “I am telling you for the last time” stand up show and so far I like it. Also his show “Comedians in the car getting coffee”, I have put it on my to watch list. And I may do a piece about that but that’s further down the road.
Jason Alexander, he is still active on the TV acting scene. He appeared in a few episodes of Young Sheldon. He stars in Harley Quinn – The animated series and more shows but he never matched the success he had with Seinfeld. It is always nice to see him on any TV show however.
Michael Richards, who played Cosmo Kramer, doesn’t star in TV shows regularly anymore. According to IMDB there is a huge gap between 2013 and 2019 in his acting resume. Too bad because he was great at the physical comedy that was needed to play the character of Kramer. Physical comedy is always fun.
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss went on to become a multi Emmy-award winning actress with the TV show Veep! A satire about American politics. But she also had her own TV show called “The New Adventures of Old Christine” where she played alongside Clark Gregg who would later become Agent Phil Coulson in The Avengers and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
