Acquired
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.
01:43:12 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[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. [01:43:26] S1: The actual root cause of the golf ball being in the blowhole of the whale is Kramer from way earlier in the episode when he was hitting golf balls into the ocean. Nobody in the audience connected those two storylines until George pulled out the Kramer golf ball. [01:43:48] S0: And that is exactly what a real software outage postmortem feels like. Yes. Yes. There is the hero of the story who gets paged in the middle of the night and that they try to fix the issue, but then there's the golf ball. Some small change that shipped a long time ago that nobody mentally connected to the thing that is currently on fire. The hard part is not noticing the whale on the beach. It's realizing that, ah, it is actually the golf ball causing the issue. [01:44:21] S1: Yep. Yep. And that is what Sentry does. It takes the thing your users are yelling about and traces it back to the exact change that started it, which release, who was impacted, and the very commit or very golf ball with the developer's name on it. Then all that context goes straight into whatever writes the fix, whether it's Claude Code or Cursor or Sentry's own agency, which finds the issue and opens the PR for a human to review.
01:44:21 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:44:21] S1: Yep. Yep. And that is what Sentry does. It takes the thing your users are yelling about and traces it back to the exact change that started it, which release, who was impacted, and the very commit or very golf ball with the developer's name on it. Then all that context goes straight into whatever writes the fix, whether it's Claude Code or Cursor or Sentry's own agency, which finds the issue and opens the PR for a human to review. [01:44:52] S0: This is why 200,000 organizations run on Sentry, whether it's a solo side project or the engineering teams at Anthropic, Vercel, Linear, or GitHub. You can learn more about where software gets fixed at sentry.io/acquired, or click the link in the show notes and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. [01:45:11] S1: Alright. So here we are now in the fall of nineteen ninety two heading into season four, the second full Seinfeld season. The show is this cult hit. [01:45:23] S0: It's maybe a little more than that. Season three averaged 18,000,000 viewers per episode. [01:45:27] S1: Yep. But it still hasn't cracked the Nielsen top 30.
01:45:27 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:45:27] S1: Yep. But it still hasn't cracked the Nielsen top 30. [01:45:30] S0: Which is crazy, though. I gotta interrupt you. The 18,000,000... That's not in the Nielsen top 30? Today, you would never ever ever see 18,000,000 people watching a single thing no matter how good a show is other than, like, NFL and NBA games. I mean, there were four networks. That's what you watched. No Internet, baby. Phones, podcasts, short form video. I mean, cable had just started coming up, but most of America's attention is still on one of those four broadcast networks in primetime. So 18,000,000 viewers an episode not cracking the top 30 is nuts.
01:46:04 · David Rosenthal
[01:46:04] S1: I mean, I think we're still a year away from the Mosaic web browser. Right? 1992? Yep. Yeah. There's no competition. Yep. It's a great time to be in television. Yep. Meanwhile, though, NBC, the network, has a problem because Cheers, the anchor of its whole comedy lineup, is on its final season. And Warren and the whole crew, the executives there, don't know what they're gonna do to replace it. So Time Magazine ran an article from this time. NBC, the one time kingpin of primetime, has seen its fortunes turn sour almost overnight. Its biggest hit of the eighties, The Cosby Show, took an early retirement last spring. The network's last remaining top 10 hit, Cheers, we'll call it quits at the end of the season. Highly regarded younger shows like Seinfeld have not lived up to ratings expectations. The network is desperately in need of a miracle. And then on top of that, so Seinfeld is running on Wednesday nights currently here going into season four. ABC, a competitor, moves their big new comedy hit sitcom, Home Improvement, to compete directly against Seinfeld in the Wednesday night slot. So for the first time, Seinfeld not only, you know, has to prove that it can get a bigger audience, but it has to do so against a big challenge, a direct competition in the same time slot from another network. Yep. And, home improvement kicks its butt. Yep. So by mid season, home improvement is pulling 28% share of audience in its time slot, and Seinfeld is down at 17.
01:48:01 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[01:48:01] S0: Not great and doesn't feel to me like the future of the network. I mean, the 17%, if you're thinking, oh, 17% versus 28%, they're like a close second or something like that. They got so much of it for free. Yeah. It's like, if you're gonna turn on your TV, there's four options, more or less, that people are actually watching in this time slot. So it should be very competitive. [01:48:22] S1: Yep. Larry and Jerry, though, and especially Larry, they don't care. Like, they're not making the show for the ratings. So this season, season four, they just go on like a... An all timer. So they start with... I I think the first season long meta arc ends up becoming a show long meta arc where they have NBC, a fictional NBC, ask Jerry in to pitch a TV show Called Jerry. Called Jerry. [01:48:55] S0: They went with his other name. Yeah. His other called Seinfeld. [01:48:58] S1: And he and George come up with the idea of a show about nothing to pitch it to NBC. That's the first episode of season four. That then continues off and on throughout the whole season. [01:49:08] S0: And the off and on is important because each of these episodes still can stand on its own. You don't have to be invested in the story, the multi episode season long arc in order to get it. [01:49:20] S1: Yep. Episode seven of season four is the Bubble Boy, another classic. [01:49:26] S0: I'm not sure you could make that now. Like, if that was actually a news story right now, making fun of the Bubble Boy that everyone is writing articles about is completely off limits.