Acquired
01:37:02 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:37:02] S1: Yep. It's like theater. [01:37:03] S0: Single cam is, probably more expensive because you have to run the action multiple times. You probably have to relight it every time you're shooting it from a different angle. So if you're shooting character a and then the next run through, you're gonna shoot character b, there's a pause and relight step. It has kind of a more cinematic feel. NBC was able to push back enough to say we're not doing single cam for this show, but they brought in a lot of single camera elements to it. So it it did have more filmic lighting. It often used a pretty high number of location shoots for a sitcom where they would actually not shoot it on the stage that had the sets that were prebuilt for Jerry's apartment, for the coffee shop. [01:37:45] S1: Think about the number of Seinfeld scenes that are out on the street or in Central Park or in an airport or in some other location. [01:37:51] S0: Right. And that adds all this expense of packing up the whole cast and crew and getting them out there, especially when you're you're shooting every week. They borrowed a lot from cinema that was uncommon on TV at the time. It's not overacted. I think in a lot of sitcoms when I watch them today, anything pre Seinfeld, I'm like, oh my god. It's so overdone. Like, stop selling me on your fake emotion. Seinfeld is not that. In fact, Jerry can barely act, and he's laughing through the entire thing. But since it's the situation that's funny, it totally plays. And I think Jerry's chuckle kinda, like, is a cue for you to laugh along with him.
01:37:51 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:37:51] S0: Right. And that adds all this expense of packing up the whole cast and crew and getting them out there, especially when you're you're shooting every week. They borrowed a lot from cinema that was uncommon on TV at the time. It's not overacted. I think in a lot of sitcoms when I watch them today, anything pre Seinfeld, I'm like, oh my god. It's so overdone. Like, stop selling me on your fake emotion. Seinfeld is not that. In fact, Jerry can barely act, and he's laughing through the entire thing. But since it's the situation that's funny, it totally plays. And I think Jerry's chuckle kinda, like, is a cue for you to laugh along with him. [01:38:23] S1: Oh, man. The scenes with, Jerry Stiller who plays Frank Costanza, George's dad, are just... They're so good. All the other actors are just... They're cracking up, and you can tell. [01:38:33] S0: God, he's so good, Jerry Stiller. There's no artificial laugh track. So this is like a purity thing for Larry and Jerry as stand ups. If they didn't earn the laugh, they're not putting a fake laugh in. [01:38:46] S1: Right. From from the live audience that was there at [01:38:49] S0: the point. Single laugh you hear on Seinfeld is the live audience laughing at that joke. [01:38:54] S1: Yes. Even for the scenes that were recorded offset, they would play them on video screens to the live audience when they were there for the taping and then record the laughter from the screens.
01:38:54 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:38:54] S1: Yes. Even for the scenes that were recorded offset, they would play them on video screens to the live audience when they were there for the taping and then record the laughter from the screens. [01:39:06] S0: Yes. Which has two jobs. One is record the laugh, but two is they need to know if those jokes are funny, and they need to change the episode if it's not. It's like a real time feedback mechanism because these guys come from stand up. [01:39:20] S1: Yep. Exactly. [01:39:21] S0: And then the last one that I didn't really realize until last night, I was watching a bunch of episodes, and my wife and I were talking about this. It was kind of this light bulb moment for me. Seinfeld episodes are not live camera switched. They are edited in post. So, normally, what would happen is at a sitcom, you'd be sitting in a proscenium. There'd be a live audience. The actors are on the stage. There's someone at a control board saying camera a, camera b, camera c. Okay. Now back to camera a. Camera b, go in for the two shot. Great. Cut to camera b. Like, they're they're directing it. [01:39:56] S1: Right.
01:39:56 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:39:56] S1: Right. [01:39:57] S0: In Seinfeld, they they do some live switching, but that's kinda to get a feel. All of the real work is done in post, which gives them the flexibility to do two things. One, to make all the cuts much tighter. The scenes can be shorter, and you can get more scenes in and more situational jokes. And two is it lets you tell jokes you couldn't otherwise do. So if you think about the episode, the contest, where, David, you you mentioned, being master of your own domain, there's a joke where the way the joke is told is they're cutting to each of those characters, and you're seeing them lay in bed, and they're either restless and they can't sleep, or they're sleeping like a baby. And that's the joke as it cuts around. That's impossible to do in a live Switch show because there's no way to make those cuts in front of a live audience. You have to just go record all the material and then have a whole step after that of sitting there in a editing bay making the cuts be the jokes. [01:41:00] S1: And, of course, that adds production complexity and expense. It's kind of a way to get closer to the single cam Yes. Film like ethos. That's exactly right. It's hard,
01:41:00 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:41:00] S1: And, of course, that adds production complexity and expense. It's kind of a way to get closer to the single cam Yes. Film like ethos. That's exactly right. It's hard, [01:41:11] S0: but these guys are nut jobs. They're obsessives. They're purists. And so they want all the flexibility and pacing of editing a movie while also getting the benefit of what you would get with a live audience at a play that laugh to let you know if the joke is landing or not. And so they kinda threaded this needle and invented a novel production process to get the best of both worlds. [01:41:31] S1: Yep. Yep. So at the end of that half season midseason replacement, Seinfeld does get picked up for a real first full season, season three of the show. [01:41:43] S0: Still with kind of a cult following. Exactly. It's starting to catch.
01:41:43 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:41:43] S0: Still with kind of a cult following. Exactly. It's starting to catch. [01:41:46] S1: Still on Wednesday nights. They're not on Thursday nights yet. But even at the end of season three, that first full season, Seinfeld was the forty second ranked show on television. Seinfeld's got this cult following, all this creative juice, but certainly not the centerpiece for the network. But season three would be the last time that, that would be true and really that any of the actors in the show, be they leads or guest stars, could live a normal life ever again. But before we tell the story of how Seinfeld finally caught on and became the Seinfeld that you know it today, now is a great time to thank our good friends at Sentry. Yes. That is s e n t r y, like someone standing guard. Which is exactly what Sentry does for developers. Sentry helps teams debug everything from errors to latency issues, basically any software problem, and fix them before users get mad. So, David, I wanna talk about the whale. My favorite episode. We're gonna spoil it. [01:42:59] S0: The show gave us the single best root cause analysis story ever put on television. Absolutely. Perfect illustration of why you need Sentry decades before Sentry was invented. [01:43:10] S1: I love it. In the [01:43:12] S0: episode where George pretends to be a marine biologist, he wades out to the beached whale that is in front of a crowd and comes back holding a golf ball that he pulled out of its blowhole. And he says, the sea was angry that day, my friends.