Acquired
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.
01:22:17 · David Rosenthal
[01:22:17] S1: Yes. Yes. So Seinfeld goes on the air Thursday, 05/31/1990, premiering after the summer rerun of Cheers. And critically, that very same month, Brendan Tartakoff leaves NBC. He was the head of the entertainment portion of the network. So he didn't run, like, sports or news or anything like that. But everything within entertainment, dramas, comedy, sitcom, late night specials, reported up to Tartakoff. His successor is chosen, Warren Littlefield, one of the two primary champions of Seinfeld, just became president of entertainment at NBC, which means that when it comes to the next critical decision point in the young Seinfeld show's life cycle here of whether it's gonna get an actual season in the fall, gonna get picked up for real finally, it's now Warren Littlefield's decision to make. So the new episodes air throughout June and July. And Littlefield, of course, he loves the show. He wants to support it. And Rick Ludwin, the specials department head, is right there too. But they know they've got resistance in the network. And, yes, Littlefield can make the decision, but they gotta build consensus here. So Warren pulls over a guy from NBC Research named Preston Beckman and says, you know the folks at Nielsen, the ratings company. I want you to go talk to Nielsen and see if you can get custom reports made for each airing of these new Seinfeld episodes. And I want you to get reports by city, by metro area for each of these episodes so that we can have some data of whether this thing only plays in New York or whether it's universal. So Beckman does. He goes to Nielsen. He gets these custom reports, and he comes back. There is no difference in audience retention from the Cheers reruns to staying with Seinfeld in any major metro area. The same percent retained in New York as they do in Chicago or Houston or Seattle or San Francisco. And that percentage is pretty high. It's not a 100%. Nobody retains a 100% from Cheers, but it's, like, high. Most of the audience that is watching the Cheers reruns sticks around and watches Seinfeld. So they're like, alright. I mean, the audience is not big yet for this. It wouldn't be big for a while. But there's something happening here, and and there is something universal to this show. It's not just New York where this is playing. Yep.