Acquired
01:15:59 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:15:59] S1: ends consequences. It's just funny. [01:16:01] S0: Right. So the characters find themselves in a tough situation, but there's sort of no funny arc remaining after that. That's okay. The show just ends. Freeze frame. You don't get to know how they get out of the jam. There's no continuity into the next episode. They start fresh next episode. It's literally a stand up act, but the people are in the situations instead of the jokes being purely verbal. [01:16:24] S1: Yep. You led me right into the perfect Jerry quote about this. He says, I personally believe that what Larry and I brought to the sitcom format, a twenty two minute format, was a stand up comedian structural sensibility. We didn't really have time to tell what the characters were all about because we had jokes to do. We weren't really storytellers. We became that, but only through that lens, the jokes. It's so true. Yep. [01:16:51] S0: And the thing that makes it so universally appealing is that the characters they developed, we see ourselves in these characters. They they represent a side of ourselves. We've all wanted to grab the eclair from the top of the trash can, but we have restraint. We're real people who move around the world. We're complex. We have multidimensions. But Seinfeld represents wish fulfillment. George has no restraint. George is an avatar of our worst qualities. You know, Elaine has a lot of them. Kramer has our most insane qualities. And the recognition of this very basic human element in these characters is surprisingly timeless and durable.
01:16:51 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:16:51] S0: And the thing that makes it so universally appealing is that the characters they developed, we see ourselves in these characters. They they represent a side of ourselves. We've all wanted to grab the eclair from the top of the trash can, but we have restraint. We're real people who move around the world. We're complex. We have multidimensions. But Seinfeld represents wish fulfillment. George has no restraint. George is an avatar of our worst qualities. You know, Elaine has a lot of them. Kramer has our most insane qualities. And the recognition of this very basic human element in these characters is surprisingly timeless and durable. [01:17:34] S1: So all of this comes together and crystallizes during this kinda first season timeline in Larry's famous rule for the show. There's only one rule. [01:17:46] S0: Which I've heard this is not a stated rule. This was more sort of like something that bubbled up later that they realized they all had a shared understanding around. But Jerry, Larry, the writers, everyone had this ethos for sure. [01:17:57] S1: Yep. No hugging, no learning. Which again is the the exact opposite of every other sitcom that had ever been made to this point.
01:17:57 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:17:57] S1: Yep. No hugging, no learning. Which again is the the exact opposite of every other sitcom that had ever been made to this point. [01:18:05] S0: Right. The characters never hug and make up. There's no, in Full House, you know, how the end of every episode would be Danny sitting down on the bed explaining some law of life to his daughters. And, you know, you did a bad thing, but you learned your lesson. Seinfeld is you did a bad thing. You got caught. You lied about it. You dug yourself into a deeper hole. You learn nothing. [01:18:28] S1: We end the episode. You do it again the next time. [01:18:31] S0: Yep. Right. No one ever learns from their mistakes, and it provides this, like, perfect substrate for the jokes to happen, these insane situations that they get themselves into. And I think... I was trying to reflect back on all this. I think Jerry and Larry viewed it as respect for the audience, that we don't need to spoon feed you what emotions you should be having, and you don't need to hug and make up and, like, put a bow on everything. You get it. You're in on the joke with us. The joke's over. You're a smart person who can figure it out. And at first, that leads to a very niche audience. That is not a recipe to have a breakthrough season one or two or three, but that will earn the respect of some small group of people who are obsessed with it.
01:18:31 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:18:31] S0: Yep. Right. No one ever learns from their mistakes, and it provides this, like, perfect substrate for the jokes to happen, these insane situations that they get themselves into. And I think... I was trying to reflect back on all this. I think Jerry and Larry viewed it as respect for the audience, that we don't need to spoon feed you what emotions you should be having, and you don't need to hug and make up and, like, put a bow on everything. You get it. You're in on the joke with us. The joke's over. You're a smart person who can figure it out. And at first, that leads to a very niche audience. That is not a recipe to have a breakthrough season one or two or three, but that will earn the respect of some small group of people who are obsessed with it. [01:19:18] S1: You're so right. I think that's exactly how they thought about it. And it's so ahead of its time, and it's why Seinfeld is still so watchable and relevant today. Because TV sitcoms, all that others, you know, the hugging, the learning, the emotional arcs, it was all fake. It was all just fake. And eventually, thanks to cable and then the Internet, audiences on mass eventually just kinda came to see that for what it is of... It's fake. And Seinfeld was really, great. We're not gonna give you the fake stuff. [01:19:52] S0: We're gonna give you something that you actually see in your life too, that that feels more like real life. [01:19:57] S1: Yeah. Your friends and your family, they don't grow. They don't change.
01:19:57 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:19:57] S1: Yeah. Your friends and your family, they don't grow. They don't change. [01:20:00] S0: Right. Right. The funny thing about all this is they got the green light for these four episodes, but Jerry and Larry did not think that NBC would actually put them on the air. [01:20:12] S1: Yes. The the story I heard on this was they literally thought about these four episodes as we are making this for the dinner party that we're gonna host with our friends. And then after the dinner party, we're all gonna gather around a TV, and we'll pop in the tape of these episodes. And we can say, look at what we made. It never made it on the air, but look at how good it is. [01:20:31] S0: And the fact that that's what they made and then that's what succeeded gave them this, like, terrifying amount of autonomy from the network because they did it a 100% their way, a 100% the thing that they wanted to make, and that's what people actually wanted. Which if you're trying to exercise any measure of control as the network, that train has left the station.
01:20:51 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:20:51] S1: Yeah. Yes. The inmates were running the asylum from the get go. Yes. Especially with, you know, Larry running the show. So NBC, amazingly, does put it on the air. And, the scheduling team comes to Castle Rock and to Larry and Jerry and says, if you're willing to wait and have this run over the summer, you know, and summer is usually the traditional downtime for for networks where they don't have first run shows going. Mostly reruns. Yep. We could run it after Cheers reruns in the summer. Now you might say, why why is NBC a broadcaster doing Cheers reruns? The networks would get the right to rerun each episode once over the summer. And they would get the right to box out syndication for a certain period of time. Yep. So Castle Rock and Jerry and Larry are like, no brainer. We're gonna roll this thing after Cheers. Now in the meantime, throughout the spring of nineteen ninety, ABC had launched another show called The Marshall Chronicles. Nothing like Seinfeld, but everybody started worrying, oh, no. If we now launch The Seinfeld Chronicles over the summer, we're gonna look like a me too about the Marshall Chronicles over on ABC. And so this is how the Seinfeld Chronicles gets shortened to just Seinfeld. [01:22:14] S0: Drop the the. It's cleaner. It's cleaner.