Best Ever
Sitcom?

The pitch was famously unpromising: a show about how comedians get their material. No hugging, no learning, no redemption arcs. NBC executives didn’t understand it. Test audiences hated it. The show nearly died multiple times before it found an audience. And then it became the most influential sitcom ever made, a show so widely imitated that its innovations have become invisible — the water we all swim in now.

The structure was the revolution. Most sitcoms of the era had A-plots and B-plots, the main story and a runner. Seinfeld routinely juggled four storylines, one for each character, seemingly unrelated for twenty minutes, then braided them together in the final act with a precision that bordered on mathematical. George’s quest for a parking space intersects with Elaine’s trip to the hospital intersects with Kramer’s golf game intersects with Jerry’s jacket. The payoffs are engineering marvels disguised as jokes.

Larry David’s sensibility was the engine. His obsessions — social contracts, minor grievances, the etiquette of daily life — became the show’s subject matter. Is it okay to date someone whose speed dial ranking is lower than yours? Can you return a jacket that you’ve already worn? What’s the statute of limitations on congratulating someone? These are tiny questions, deliberately trivial, and the show treats them with the seriousness usually reserved for life and death. Because for these characters, social embarrassment is life and death.

The four leads form a perfect comedic ecosystem. Jerry is the observer, the stand-up, relatively normal by design so the others have someone to react against. George, based on David himself, is neurosis incarnate — lying, scheming, failing upward through sheer persistence. Elaine is sharp, ambitious, slightly cruel, a character who would have been the straight man on any other show but here gets to be just as petty as the guys. And Kramer is physical comedy as a lifestyle, bursting through doors with a chaos that disrupts whatever equilibrium the scene has established.

Jason Alexander’s George is one of television’s great performances. Watch the way he commits to humiliation — the shrinkage scene, the marine biologist lie, the whole George-is-dead arc — with total conviction. George has no shame because George has no self-awareness. He’s a black hole of need, and Alexander makes him somehow sympathetic, or at least human. You shouldn’t root for George. You do anyway.

The supporting cast became a repertory company of grotesques. Newman, the postal worker nemesis. The Soup Nazi. Mr. Pitt. David Puddy. Each one is a cartoon, a single exaggerated trait given human form, but the show deploys them with such skill that they feel like a complete social world. Everyone in the Seinfeld universe is a little bit insane. The main four just happen to be insane in ways we recognize.

The finale was divisive — putting the characters on trial for their selfishness, parading old guest stars, ending with them in jail — but it was also honest. Larry David, who returned to write it, understood that these characters had never grown. The show’s whole premise was that they wouldn’t. The finale just made it explicit: these are bad people, and we’ve been laughing at them for nine years. The discomfort was the point.

Every comedy that came after — Curb, Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny, Veep — owes something to what David and Seinfeld built here. The cringe comedy, the anti-heroes, the elaborate structures, the refusal of sentiment. They made it okay to laugh at awful people, and then they made it mandatory.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld: The Best Ever is the architecture of pettiness. Is Seinfeld the Best Ever Sitcom? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• For the obsessives, the Complete Series DVD set includes the ‘Notes About Nothing’ feature on every episode.
• Purists might still prefer the framing of the original syndication DVD releases.