Watches Seinfeld

...90 DISSENT / Summer 1998 In the early shows the self-consciousness of what Seinfeld was about was reflected in the stand-up monologues viewers saw Jerry doing in clubs...

...At every chance it got, Seinfeld went out of its way to ridicule what was supposedly exempt from ridicule, then refused to undermine its assault with a wink or a qualification that would demonstrate the show had its heart in the right place...

...Seinfeld could jar us and expose the contradictions behind so many nineties beliefs...

...Although reruns of the nearly two hundred Seinfeld episodes are expected to generate as much as $1.6 billion in the coming years, Seinfeld was bringing NBC more than two hundred million dollars in profits annually and drawing in the most desirable demographic group in the country, eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds...

...The Cigar Store Indian" revolved around Jerry buying a wooden Indian as a gift while dating a Native American...

...The modesty of Jerry Seinfeld and his writers was no more to be taken at face value than the modesty of Mark Twain at the start of Huckleberry Finn, when he warns his readers, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted...

...It's predictable, a part of our television culture...

...The risks Seinfeld took with Schindler's List were more daring than those it usually chanced, but they were not out of character...

...Yes, it's truly special to be here in New York—for the end of Seinfeld...

...DISSENT / Summer 1998 91 As Seinfeld entered its final season, the question for the show was where it could take its humor without going so far over the top that it became pure put-on...

...We are prepared to talk about what is in our self-interest, but there is not a whole lot, especially when it comes to our private lives, on which we are prepared to act with the sanctimoniousness that provided the grist for Seinfeld's most original comedy...

...It doesn't occur to Jerry that there might be something wrong with such a relationship...

...Viewers were never given a chance to get sentimental about Seinfeld or to doubt that Jerry and his friends believed that nineties civility was pure contrivance...

...Days later, he and his girlfriend find themselves so frustrated that in the middle of watching Schindler's List they start making out in the theater...

...To get rid of George's fiancée, whom he didn't want to marry, the writers had her die of poisoning from the glue on the cheap wedding invitations George bought...

...you only have to find others who will share your arrested development...

...They offer to leave and go to a hotel, but Jerry, like a good son, insists that they stay...

...These days, being anti-PC isn't merely fashionable...

...With All in the Family the edge came from its consistent assault on racial bigotry...

...Closer to being fortysomethings than thirtysomethings, the characters of Seinfeld sent out the message that in order to be happy you don't have to outgrow adolescence...

...When Jerry and George visit a child who, because of health problems, lives in a bubble, they find a kid who is a perfect monster...

...The absence of a clear-cut moral edge to Seinfeld was, however, both deceptive and the show's great strength...

...And when Jerry dates a hearing-impaired woman (and tries to be sensitive), he finds that she and her friends have great fun mocking him in sign language...

...One got to be a fan of Seinfeld by coming to terms with the sensibility that prompted Jerry to express his admiration for Elaine by declaring, "She enjoys teasing animals, BanLon, and seeing people run for their lives...

...It doesn't matter that the people we are worrying over were invented by a team of writers and then market tested before we got to know them...

...He asks George's girlfriend to pull her top down so he can see her breasts, and he starts a fight with George over a game of Trivial Pursuit...

...All in the Family begat Maude, and Cheers begat the current hit Frasier...

...persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot...

...Most important, as the public's reaction to the Clinton scandals demonstrates, we have entered the era of postmoral politics...

...92 DISSENT / Summer 1998...

...It wasn't simply that few blacks or Hispanics appeared on the show...

...Elaine always fought with her bosses...

...David Letterman and Jay Leno wouldn't be caught dead being anything other than antiPC, and every night on ABC, following Ted Koppel's Nightline, it is possible to watch Politically Incorrect, a tongue-in-cheek talk show that specializes in getting entertainers and political pundits to make fun of the day's news...

...Time and again, Jerry and his friends found that no good deed goes unpunished...

...The end of the Seinfeld show this May, like the much-watched endings five and fifteen years ago of Cheers and M*A*S*H, turned out to be another television milestone, drawing an estimated seventy-six million viewers as well as a tribute from Vice President Al Gore, who, during his commencement speech at New York University, observed, "Today marks the end of a significant episode, a day when you say goodbye to a strange assortment of people who have somehow become close friends...

...One of the classic Seinfeld shows, "The Junior Mint," is based on his dating a woman whose name he can't remember, except that it rhymes with a female body part...

...NBC, which had already been paying record sums for Seinfeld—supporting cast members received six hundred thousand dollars per show—offered Seinfeld five million dollars an episode if he would stay another year, and when that didn't work, the network consoled itself by charging advertisers up to two million dollars per thirty-second commercial for the final episode...

...And Jerry treated his work as a stand-up comedian simply as an easy way to make a buck...

...The seventy-five-minute final episode of Seinfeld was as outwardly unsentimental as it could be...

...persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished...

...Elaine is worried that she will have to wear an unflattering orange uniform in prison, and in the show's final scene we see Jerry, dressed in an unflattering orange uniform, doing stand-up comedy, breaking up George and Kramer—but not his fellow inmates—with a routine in which he asks, "What's with lockdown...

...What undoes the New York Four, as they are quickly labeled by the media, is not, however, their inaction in Latham (a town they land in when their NBC corporate jet is forced into an emergency landing) but the parade of character witnesses, all figures from previous Seinfeld shows, who testify to being abused by them...

...Often they have been more revealing of themselves than friends or family...

...By its final season, Seinfeld even took on the homeless with a show in which Kramer imports a rickshaw from Hong Kong, then rationalizes his desire to get a homeless person to pull it around for a few dollars an hour with the observation, "They're always walking around the city...

...WHAT SEINFELD stood for and exactly why he will be missed is, however, another matter...

...It revolved around Jerry and his friends being sentenced to "a year removed from society" when they violate the Good Samaritan law of Latham, Massachusetts, by doing nothing to prevent a carjacking they witness...

...Instead, he spends the show trying to come up with a name (Mulva, Aretha, Gipple are the best he can do) that will allow him to go out with the anonymous woman (Delores) without revealing how inattentive to her he has been...

...In sliding between assaults on political correctness and a comedy of manners, Seinfeld was always in danger of spinning out of control...

...Seinfeld, by contrast, had no such clearcut moral edge...

...But as Seinfeld grew in popularity, Jerry's opening and closing monologues were cut, and viewers were left on their own to see how Jerry's observational comedy stemmed from his belief that in our daily lives political correctness can only kill joy and complexity...

...Kramer never seemed to work...

...There was no way to predict, as there has been with the political right over the last decade, the manners or values they would target...

...BUT THE LONGER Seinfeld went on, the harder it got to keep its humor both fresh and within bounds...

...In the age of safe sex Jerry never worried about getting to know someone in depth before trying to sleep with her...

...The world of its four principals —Jerry, his ex-girlfriend Elaine, his neighbor Kramer, and his high school pal George— has seemed too self-defining to imagine that any single Seinfeld character could hold an audience without the others...

...Parents were out-of-touch nuisances, and the usual obligations of career were rarely taken seriously...

...EQUALLY IMPORTANT, Seinfeld never attempted to escape the charge that it was guilty of misanthropy by periodically suggesting the value of doing the right thing...

...Why not strap something on them...

...Mary Tyler Moore begat Rhoda and Lou Grant...

...The political correctness that Jerry and his friends had such a delicious time satirizing at the start of the nineties has become everyone's favorite target at decade's end...

...Even the early Roseanne held off getting cheap laughs to drive home the point that American prosperity wasn't all it was cracked up to be if you came from a working-class family and had only a high school education...

...Since the end of the traditional family sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s, the most successful sitcoms have depended on having a moral edge, instead of sentimentality, to define them...

...Whether it was the Philip Roth—like jokes about sexual taboos in "The Contest," in which Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine make a bet to see who can go the longest without masturbating (Elaine, the predicted winner, is the second one out), or the satire on male bonding that occurs in "The Boyfriend," when Jerry becomes friends with baseball great Keith Hernandez, then turns jealous after he finds Hernandez is attracted to Elaine, there was no mistaking the thrust of Seinfeld's humor in its early years...

...No hugging, no learning," was the television motto of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, and often it was a motto that seemed brutally true...

...Jerry had no qualms about not playing by the sexual rules of the nineties: dropping women for the slightest "fault"—big hands, a habit of completing his sentences, and, in one case, breasts so perfect (those of actress Teri Hatcher), that he assumes, incorrectly, that they had to be surgically enhanced...

...In its dependence on dialogue Seinfeld was in many ways closer to the radio comedy of Jack Benny and Fred Allen than that of television...

...George lost job after job...

...Even more blatant were Seinfeld's attacks on PC sexual thinking...

...But Seinfeld, like Jerry himself, has turned out to be childless...

...Record numbers of us turn on our television sets to watch what is going to happen to people who have been part of our lives for a decade or more...

...Such stretches reflect the difficulty of writing nine years of sitcoms, but they also demonstrate how Seinfeld's insistence on not linking its trademark assault on political correctness to any larger social vision limited its comedic possibilities...

...For the Latham jury and judge, the evidence of "mocking and maligning" is overwhelming, and as they go off to prison, Jerry and his friends realize the impossibility of mounting a credible defense of themselves to strangers...

...At its best, however, it stayed on course, kept its irony clear...

...It begins with Jerry's parents, who are visiting him in New York, returning early to his apartment and surprising him and his girlfriend kissing...

...Aren't weight lifting and sodomy enough...

...How demanding the anti–political-correctness test could be on Seinfeld was epitomized by the famous Schindler's List episode...

...The material in the monologues involved the use of material in the show, and thus one got two versions, one usually more ironic than the other, of the same incident...

...rOR NBC and its parent company, General Electric, the loss of Seinfeld was particularly hard to take...

...At a time when the United States was doing nothing about the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Elie Wiesel, at the dedication of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, publicly reminded the president that one couldn't meaningfully say "Never again" and then ignore ongoing genocide, it would have been easy for Seinfeld to explain Jerry's action in a way that scored political points...

...The success of Seinfeld's war on political correctness depended heavily on scripts that ran as many as seventy pages per half hour, twenty pages longer than the usual show...

...Hardly anybody outside Jerry's New York orbit was ever more than a bit player...

...A gossipy friend sees Jerry and his girlfriend necking and reports on what they were doing, and Jerry spends the rest of the program apologizing, getting laughs by trying to explain how his sexual desire got the best of his social conscience...

...Jerry and his friends were seen as unsympathetic urbanites, and although the show soon improved in the ratings, it never really changed character...

...Like the characters in a serialized Victorian novel, they're people we've grown attached to...

...With Mary Tyler Moore the moral edge came from a feminism that said women can have it all...

...Since the 1970s the most popular sitcoms have tended to generDISSENT / Summer 1998 89 ate spin-offs, based on a supporting character starting a television life of his or her own...

...Originally called the Seinfeld Chronicles, the show at first struck viewers as cold...

...That, however, was the best it could do...

...To show the tyranny restaurants have in New York, they invented a despotic chef known as the "Soup Nazi," and to deal with men's fears of aging, they had Kramer invent a male bra, alternately known as the Bro or Manssier...

...Children were virtually nonexistent...

...After nine seasons Seinfeld had built up an audience of thirty million weekly viewers and helped make NBC the number-one television network...

...The last time we see them together, they are as caught up in their own world as ever...

...And "The Apology" got its laughs by focusing on a friend of George's who becomes a complete tyrant while on a twelvestep recovery program...

...But nothing like that happens...

...WHAT LAY at the center of Seinfeld and made it the leading sitcom of the nineties was the delight it took in attacking political correctness...

...The Jimmy" centered on Kramer's being honored as a mentally challenged person who was coping well when in fact he had been thrown for a loop after his dentist gave him too much anesthesia...

...When Kramer befriends a man who is a midget, he angers the midget, who initiates a fight in which Kramer has more than he can handle...

...Seinfeld's writers were fearless in a way that few in academic life have been...

...Although Seinfeld continually claimed it was about nothing, even doing a show, "The Pilot," in which Jerry and George submit a proposal to NBC about a sitcom built around four friends who do nothing, there was nothing vapid about the show's intentions...

...For Seinfeld fans, the end of the show was equally tough to take...

...NICOLAUS MILLS'S most recent book is The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self...