Acquired
02:01:10 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:01:10] S1: If you're NBC itself and you wanna advertise that week's NFL matchup, yes, it is the most important night. And the Thursday night lineup on NBC was more profitable than all of the other nights combined. [02:01:30] S0: What? Yes. It's that outsized? [02:01:33] S1: Yes. It was that outsized. Now part of that too was just because NBC was such a powerhouse on Thursday night. That's where their marquee shows lived. But... Wow. Because you have [02:01:44] S0: the the same amount of ad inventory you are selling each weekday [02:01:48] S1: Yep. [02:01:49] S0: Night. And Thursday's rates were high enough that it dwarfed the sales for all those other nights. Wow. Yes. Combined. [02:02:00] S1: Yes. So Seinfeld moving into this hallowed time slot is huge. Huge. And, boy, does it work. So the first week that Seinfeld moves to Thursdays in February 1993. NBC, by the way, had had the Super Bowl in January 1993. They used promos during the Super Bowl to announce the Seinfeld move to Thursday night. So they went big. [02:02:32] S0: And had they coined it must see TV yet? [02:02:35] S1: No. So they rolled out that must see TV slogan for Seinfeld as the anchor moving into Thursday nights. [02:02:42] S0: And it was what? Seinfeld, Cheers had ended. So I guess Frasier was... The spin off was just starting. I think Wings [02:02:49] S1: Right. Mad About You. There's a whole sub drama of Wings was the golden child from the comedy department at NBC. So the the actual sitcom department, were they always trying to push wings over Seinfeld.
02:02:49 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:02:49] S1: Right. Mad About You. There's a whole sub drama of Wings was the golden child from the comedy department at NBC. So the the actual sitcom department, were they always trying to push wings over Seinfeld. [02:03:01] S0: But NBC did something really smart here branding the night as must see TV and creating, like, a network identity around NBC rather than just marketing the shows themselves. So you actually ended up with this affinity for the network. [02:03:15] S1: I mean, for me growing up, NBC meant something because of this. Like, none of the other networks meant anything. They just had stuff that I watched on them. [02:03:25] S0: And that continued. I mean, if I think about what came after Seinfeld, Friends, The Office Yep. In between the two, you had Will and Grace around the time of The Office, and later, you had 30 Rock, Parks and Rec. [02:03:36] S1: Yep. Yep. There was, like, this whole NBC comedy powerhouse. [02:03:41] S0: Yes. Yep. And a lot of it using SNL talent Yes. Which is also NBC. [02:03:45] S1: Which is also technically true of Seinfeld. Yes. So back to the the actual move here in February 1993, when Seinfeld moves from Wednesday to Thursday, the show's ratings rise 57%, and it goes from the forty fifth most popular TV show on air to the fifth in one week. Now, obviously, a huge part of that is the power of the time slot, but it's also, like, after the contest, it changes everything. You you can't go back.
02:03:45 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:03:45] S1: Which is also technically true of Seinfeld. Yes. So back to the the actual move here in February 1993, when Seinfeld moves from Wednesday to Thursday, the show's ratings rise 57%, and it goes from the forty fifth most popular TV show on air to the fifth in one week. Now, obviously, a huge part of that is the power of the time slot, but it's also, like, after the contest, it changes everything. You you can't go back. [02:04:12] S0: And the thing that was shocking even to everyone at the network was if you put something after Cheers, it's gonna get good ratings. But it's gonna be a drop off from Cheers to that show. It's just a matter of how much drop off. Seinfeld actually gained audience over Cheers, that they retained the Cheers audience and then new people tuned in just to see the next Seinfeld episode. [02:04:34] S1: This this is the punch line. Mean, now here at the big leagues, first run, Thursday nights, it retains all the audience. And then by the end of the season, it's bigger. It's crazy. [02:04:46] S0: It's the new anchor show. [02:04:48] S1: It's the new king. [02:04:48] S0: Larry is, asked about this in 1993. The LA Times does an interview, because I think viewership hit an average of 30,000,000 viewers per episode by this point. And, Larry's quote is, this probably means that a catastrophe is imminent. Something terrible will emerge from this. I don't really know how to account for it.
02:04:48 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:04:48] S0: Larry is, asked about this in 1993. The LA Times does an interview, because I think viewership hit an average of 30,000,000 viewers per episode by this point. And, Larry's quote is, this probably means that a catastrophe is imminent. Something terrible will emerge from this. I don't really know how to account for it. [02:05:06] S1: Oh, man. Oh, man. Well, a catastrophe was not imminent because, you know, the season continues. They just keep crushing it. The outing. Yep. Episode 17, not that there's anything wrong with that. Episode 20 is the junior mint. Oh, of course. Which really starts to foreshadow the absurdity that would come into Seinfeld in in later years. [02:05:26] S0: This is a great example of the concept of the episode is a joke in itself. Like, absurdity of Jerry and [02:05:34] S1: Kramer. Jerry and Kramer. [02:05:35] S0: Get invited to observe a surgery from, like, a balcony above the OR. And they're eating junior mints. And one of the junior mints gets fumbled and actually ends up falling into the patient. [02:05:50] S1: Oh, man. [02:05:51] S0: Which fun fact, using the cameras at the time, the cameras would not have picked up a junior mint, so they actually used a York peppermint patty [02:05:58] S1: That's right. [02:05:58] S0: For the slow motion tumble. [02:06:00] S1: Great trivia. Great trivia. [02:06:01] S0: Yes.
02:06:01 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[02:06:01] S0: Yes. [02:06:02] S1: And, the cultural relevance, the catchphrases beginning with master of my domain, master of your domain. After that, we get yada yada yada, double dipping, shrinkage, festivism. Mean, on and on. These are all words and phrases that Seinfeld invented. And all this is hitting here as we head into 1994, 1995, right as the Internet is coming online. [02:06:31] S0: That's right. According to the book Seinfeldia, which is a great read Yep. There were a bunch of early online communities about Seinfeld. [02:06:39] S1: Analyzing each episode, the week it comes out. It was crazy. Steve Case would talk about, head of AOL, that AOL's main competition was Seinfeld. They would never see AOL connection numbers dip except when Seinfeld was airing. And then they would go right back up as everybody came on AOL to talk about Seinfeld. [02:07:00] S0: And you know who's talking about stuff on the Internet? Urban, well educated, affluent, young males. [02:07:07] S1: Yeah. I mean, was the the the most perfect timing ever that you could imagine for this type of show to have that moment of cultural relevance with the contest, move to the marquee slot on Thursday nights on NBC, and then have the Internet hit all in quick succession. It's amazing.
02:07:27 · Ben Gilbert
[02:07:27] S0: So this is all going really well, but what's going on inside is basically killing the people who are making it. I mean, the the obsession that is going into this. The, like, every word and the writing and the rewriting and this obsession with the the joke, nothing else matters. It is these, like, real auteurs that attracted other people as psychotic as them to obsess with them. And they needed to because at this point, Jerry and Larry, after five years of existing in writing a television show, they're not experiencing the real world anymore. So they need to keep bringing in young writers because they need to mine those people's brains for stories that happened to them. They need to find, like, mini Larry and Jerry's who still live in New York, hopefully, so they get some element of that. But what ends up being an amazing bed to recruit from is the Harvard Lampoon, where it's these young comics, super smart, except that they actually are experiencing the world. So every year for a while, they were bringing in a completely fresh crop of writers because they would basically steal all the best material from everyone's life and then move on to the next one. I mean, Festivus was a thing from someone's life. George's whole thing about is he gonna put a tip in the jar when they're not looking because he doesn't get credit for the tip. That's a thing from someone's life. You kinda need all this fresh blood to come in and get material. Okay. So how did it work to actually produce the weekly Seinfeld episode? Thank you to Alec Berg and David Mandel for talking us through this. They were writers on the show, and then there's some great interviews with Jason Alexander that share a lot of the detail too. So the typical sitcom schedule would start its life on a Monday with rehearsals leading up to a Friday shoot. And on Seinfeld, they realized, well, actually, we could start the week on Wednesday and shoot the following Tuesday. And when the actors go home for the weekend, that means we can get some extra time coming in and rewriting the episode to make it better, which is fine since then they weren't married. They didn't have kids. Like, they had no personal life to speak of. They were obsessed with this. So that's just what they did. So day one, it starts with a table read. Everyone is there.