Acquired
01:01:11 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:01:11] S1: We'll recruit a test audience to watch this thing. [01:01:13] S0: Right. The practice at the time... And I know this is super interesting. They would cold call. They did... A research department would cold call a bunch of houses to recruit 400 households to watch a unused channel on their cable system at a certain time. And if you knew to tune in and you had the right hardware, you would tune in, and then you would see the pilot pop on. And then I think there's, like, nothing else afterwards. You're, like, just watching this one channel at this one time. The researchers then convene these people or call them and ask them a standard set of questions. It tested horribly. Horribly. Like Yes. The network executives were just a foreshadow of how people in the world saw it. Some of the most infamous comments that came out of this is, one, you can't get too excited about going to the laundromat. [01:02:04] S1: Which is where most of the pilot takes place with Jerry and George at the laundromat.
01:02:04 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:02:04] S1: Which is where most of the pilot takes place with Jerry and George at the laundromat. [01:02:08] S0: And Jerry and George have this whole discussion about what it means that this girl who's coming into town wants to see Jerry when she's there, and is she gonna stay with them, and, like, how much should they read into it. And, like, when he greets her at the airport, are they supposed to hug? Is she gonna hug him? Like, just overanalyzing the crap out of this situation, but they're having the conversation while in a laundromat, which is where a lot of the the feedback sort of focused. The other quotes include Jerry's loser friend George isn't a forceful character. Jerry needs a stronger supporting cast, and why are they interrupting the stand up for these stupid stories? Yep. If the viewers liked anything about it, it was actually just Jerry's stand up, but even that didn't test that strong. The recommendation from the research department to NBC was, if you're gonna air this, and then if you're gonna greenlight this, and you're gonna do something with Jerry, it should be stand up, and it should be better than this. [01:03:04] S1: Yeah. My favorite, quote from the pilot research report was, no segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again, and the overall pilot performance was rated as weak. [01:03:16] S0: And Jerry and Larry did not see this memo for several years, but once it was brought to their attention, they hung it on the wall of the bathroom on set. [01:03:25] S1: That's right in the bathroom of their production office on the set.
01:03:25 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:03:25] S1: That's right in the bathroom of their production office on the set. [01:03:28] S0: So they do air it. [01:03:29] S1: They do air it in a, time and day slot where the network notoriously burns off not very promising pilots. They air it on 07/05/1989. Not a lot of people tuning into television on, July 5 in America. And with that, 99 times out of a 100 in history, that would have been the end of the Seinfeld Chronicles, would have gotten put out to pasture with many, many, many other failed pilots. NBC does not pick up the show for a season run that fall in 1989. Instead, NBC picks up two other sitcoms over Seinfeld and all the other pilots that they ran, the nuthouse and sister Kate. [01:04:19] S0: You probably don't remember them. [01:04:20] S1: Yes. Exactly. Just to just to prove your point, Ben, that nobody knows anything. That would have been the end, except that back in the late night and specials department at NBC, they keep thinking about this Seinfeld thing. I mean, they love Jerry. They wanna do something with Jerry, and they're like, yeah. I mean, everybody was worried it was too Jewish. It was too New York, but but I'll be damned if it's not funny. Like, it was just funny.
01:04:20 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:04:20] S1: Yes. Exactly. Just to just to prove your point, Ben, that nobody knows anything. That would have been the end, except that back in the late night and specials department at NBC, they keep thinking about this Seinfeld thing. I mean, they love Jerry. They wanna do something with Jerry, and they're like, yeah. I mean, everybody was worried it was too Jewish. It was too New York, but but I'll be damned if it's not funny. Like, it was just funny. [01:04:47] S0: And even though most people didn't like it, there was a small group of people who completely got it. Yep. It's like any successful startup. You're not trying to be a seven for everyone. You're trying to be a 9.9 for a very small group of people that you can then figure out how to get those super fans to tell their friends. There were people at NBC that were like, this is the future. This is what we need to do. We need to be in business with Jerry Seinfeld and this brand of comedy.
01:04:47 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:04:47] S0: And even though most people didn't like it, there was a small group of people who completely got it. Yep. It's like any successful startup. You're not trying to be a seven for everyone. You're trying to be a 9.9 for a very small group of people that you can then figure out how to get those super fans to tell their friends. There were people at NBC that were like, this is the future. This is what we need to do. We need to be in business with Jerry Seinfeld and this brand of comedy. [01:05:16] S1: And it was Warren Littlefield in primetime and Rick Ludwin in specials. And so the two of them come together, and they hatch a last ditch plan to give their little baby another chance. They decide, well, since we've been doing this out of specials, what if we just cancel one of the other one off specials that we were gonna do and use that budget to place an order, a season, quote, unquote, order for this show that we love. So they cancel one two hour Bob Hope special that they were planning to do on NBC that fall. And instead, they use that budget. They call up Jerry and Larry and say, great news. We are ordering a season of the Seinfeld Chronicles. Jerry says, great. What... What's the order? Four episodes, making it, I believe, the smallest first season order in television history. [01:06:19] S0: And didn't you talk to Warren Littlefield about this?
01:06:19 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:06:19] S0: And didn't you talk to Warren Littlefield about this? [01:06:22] S1: Yes. Yes. So the quote from Warren about how this conversation went down, he says, I called Jerry to tell him the good news. There was a long silence over the line. Jerry finally asked me, has any show in the history of television ever succeeded with just four episodes? And Warren says, I didn't know, and that's exactly what I told him. [01:06:43] S0: Probably not. If anybody knows, it's probably the head of primetime at NBC. [01:06:49] S1: Yep. Jerry's telling Larry in the background as they're having this conversation, and Larry famously reacts to this with, that's fine. I think four episodes is all I got in me anyway. It's the ultimate Larry David line. [01:07:02] S0: Larry David would go on to be the head writer of 135 Seinfeld episodes. [01:07:08] S1: Yep. Yep. So they've got the order. [01:07:12] S0: And Jerry has later said in other interviews that he and Castle Rock were looking around for other buyers because they assumed that NBC was out, which is a fair assumption. Fox actually made an offer and guaranteed 24 episodes, but Jerry wanted that NBC imprimatur of a real network. [01:07:31] S1: Was also a startup network at this point in time. It was not Fox that you know it today as a... One of the major broadcast networks in The US. [01:07:39] S0: Jerry has phrased it as it wasn't the major leagues Yeah. And I wanted to be in the majors. And so they went with NBC's four episode deal instead.