VISITORS to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., spend hours strolling through rooms filled with historical somethings–costumes, famous documents, “interactive exhibits,” notable works of art. But, if you happen to pass by the museum’s exhibit “Icons of Popular Culture” these days, you will also find, hanging next to a moth-balled Kermit the Frog, a piece of nothing.
It is a white, long-sleeved shirt, with a flamboyant collar and flared ruffles of fabric that burst upward every few inches. It is a puffy shirt. It was made for a man of medium build, and, befitting a museum artifact, it seems tailored for a more antiquated, genteel age, when men were men, and bad men were, well, pirates.
The puffy shirt, of course, was made famous many years ago, in episode 66 of Seinfeld, the blockbuster sitcom co-created by comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Seinfeld, famously billed as the show about “nothing,” ran nine seasons on NBC. It earned its creators over $200 million dollars each. It was nominated for 58 Emmy awards, and won 10. Not long ago, TV Guide ranked Seinfeld the number one television show of all time.
Since the show ended in 1998, it has shown little sign of fading away, becoming, more or less, a syndication zombie. Episodes, mutilated to find space for more commercials, are repeated over and over again, sometimes two or three times a night. On the forty-third viewing, these old episodes feel stale: They are no longer living, breathing shows . . . but they are not quite dead, either. Six years after the show ended, syndicated Seinfeld episodes still do well, rating-wise–so well, in fact, that DVDs of the show were postponed in order to make as much money as possible from syndication.
No longer. On November 23, Seinfeld‘s first three seasons were released on DVD. It was worth the wait. The 41 episodes released so far have never looked better: the picture and sound have been remastered, the shows restored to their original lengths, the whole package supplemented by hour after hour of special features. There are outtakes and deleted scenes and a one hour documentary. There are commentaries and mini-documentaries introducing individual episodes, and there is an optional feature called “Notes About Nothing,” in which trivia pops up on the screen during an episode. All this retails for about $50.
But that’s not all. There’s also a “deluxe” version of the DVDs, a bulky package that includes all three seasons, a set of “salt and pepper shakers” from “Monk’s Diner” (Jerry’s fictional Upper West Side hangout), and a limited-edition script autographed by series co-creator and chief writer Larry David. The deluxe set provides an introduction into the marketing economics of Seinfeld. In all, you see, 400,000 deluxe units were made. Each set cost $120. They were to go on sale, along with the regular DVDs, on November 23. By November 16, a week before the official release, every deluxe set had been sold–$48,000,000 worth.
Here are some more numbers. According to USA Today, “insiders” say total sales of the Seinfeld DVDs may total over 3 million units (worth about $150 million). However, more than 4 million units have been shipped to stores (worth about $200 million). But this is just the first three seasons. There are still five seasons left. Which means, using the roughest possible estimate, that the Seinfeld DVDs could generate over half a billion dollars in revenue. Adds Fortune magazine, in a classic understatement: “net revenues to the studios from Seinfeld should easily top the $178 million generated by The Sopranos, the previous bestseller.”
A commercial event of such magnitude is usually accompanied by a major marketing campaign, and the Seinfeld DVDs are no exception. There was a Seinfeld reunion on Oprah, a Seinfeld cover on TV Guide, an NBC primetime special, an A-list publicity party at Rockefeller Center. Jerry, now 50 years old, appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman. There was a Seinfeld category on the quiz show Jeopardy! On November 18, Jerry personally delivered the “puffy shirt” to the Smithsonian, along with a copy of the script, written by Larry David, of “The Puffy Shirt” episode. Seinfeld, smiling, addressed the assembled crowd. “I can’t even tell you the pride that I feel,” he said, “being the focal point of what has to be the most embarrassing moment in the history of the Smithsonian Institution.”
Call it the Seinfeld Paradox: How did a show so subversive, so antisocial, become so celebrated, so integral to American cultural history? One thing is for sure: It did not happen overnight. The show’s pilot, The Seinfeld Chronicles, aired in 1989. Audiences were sour. Yet NBC executives went ahead and ordered a season’s worth of episodes–four of them, to be exact. It was, we’re told in the DVD documentary, the smallest order in sitcom history.
The new show, Seinfeld, premiered on May 31, 1990, and ended four weeks later. The second season lasted 14 episodes, and, by the end of it, the network ordered a third season of 23 more. Seinfeld had found its footing. Soon it replaced the blockbuster sitcom Cheers on Thursday nights at 9:00 p.m., television’s most treasured time slot. The show took off, and soon spawned clones, like the sappy, uppity Friends. Seinfeld became the keystone to NBC’s “Must-See TV” line-up. David left after the seventh season; when Jerry called it quits in 1997, it came as a shock to many, not least the show’s ensemble. There was no reason, it was said, why Seinfeld couldn’t have gone on forever.
Why didn’t it? After all, The Simpsons is now in its sixteenth season. Yet Seinfeld is a different story altogether. In press interviews, Jerry has said he was afraid the quality of the show would diminish if it lasted too long. Larry David, who returned to write the show’s hour-long finale, had always been concerned that he would run out of ideas. Such fears were not entirely unfounded, because Seinfeld‘s comedy rested on two pillars–either of which, if pushed far enough, could have toppled over.
THE FIRST PILLAR was ambiguity. Both Seinfeld and David had always been drawn to social practices in which the rules had not been straightened out. Their standup, and later their show, revolved around questions like: How does an adult male make friends with another adult male? What happens when you are stranded at a party and can’t get home? How do you ask a woman if she’s visiting you out of friendship, or because she’s looking to get into a relationship? In their own way, Seinfeld and David were the Emily Posts of the late twentieth century. “Larry was a guy open to discussing virtually any human dilemma, as long as it was something that not a lot of people were interested in,” Seinfeld told James Kaplan in the New Yorker in January. “I was exactly the same way. We weren’t interested in what was on the front page of the newspaper.”
The potential problem here was that the mining of social ambiguities would become a joke in itself. The Seinfeld style–a group of hyper articulate New Yorkers bickering over social etiquette–was subject to parody. Worse, it could grow old and tired. This was something Larry David realized: Recall, for a moment, the series’ final scene, in which the group’s principals find themselves locked together in a jail cell, and Jerry asks his pal George a silly question about how to button a shirt . . . the same exact question Jerry had asked George in the first scene of the first episode nine years earlier. The show had come full circle.
The second pillar supporting Seinfeld‘s comedy was subversion–specifically the subversion of taboo. The show treated such topics as, in no particular order: lesbianism, virginity, masturbation, orgies, AIDS walks, genitalia, porn, senility, suicide, interracial dating, theft (from children and the elderly), and so on. Somehow, the show’s writers were able to transform each topic into cause for bellyaching laughter.
In one famous episode, Jerry makes out with his girlfriend, the daughter of a rabbi, during Schindler’s List. In another, Jerry and George are “outed” as homosexuals, leading to the classic line: “I was outed–and I wasn’t even in!” And in still another, when George’s fiancée dies after licking the toxic envelopes holding the invitations to her wedding, he and his friends, shrugging, decide to go have a cup of coffee, as if nothing had happened. There was a rule on Seinfeld: “No hugging, no learning.” It was one of the few rules the show’s writers obeyed religiously.
But this presented problems as well. Seinfeld began in the 1980s, and by the time it finished in 1998, taboos of all sorts had collapsed. By the show’s final episode, orgies and lesbianism and self-abuse were fodder for “safe” shows like Friends. Oprah was discussing deviancy on a daily basis. The president–well, you know what happened to the president. There was still a place for antisocial comedy (witness Larry David’s current series, Curb Your Enthusiasm), but that place wasn’t network television. Seinfeld had been mainstreamed.
These new DVDs are bittersweet pleasures. The show has held up over time, no doubt, but it is also a relic of its time. Ultimately, one thinks, Seinfeld will be remembered as the victim of its own success–as a show that contained within it the seeds of its own obsolescence. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
