In a previous entry in this series, I talked about my interest in 90s sitcoms, especially the NBC "Big Three" of FRASIER, FRIENDS and SEINFELD. The latter show is the subject of today's blog entry. Of the three aforementioned shows, I believe it was SEINFELD that we first latched onto, sometime around mid-season 5: the first episode we ever saw was "The Stall," so this would be sometime in 1994 (shortly after that we began watching FRASIER, then late into its first season, while FRIENDS we would not start to watch until sometime in season 4: by "we" I mean me and my brothers). By this point in time SEINFLED had become syndicated, so we were able to catch up with the past episodes we had missed very easily. One thing I remember about this time in my life was it was that pre-to-early high school period where we were still getting sent to bed at 9 p.m., which meant that our parents would tape new episodes of the show on VCR and we'd watch it the following day: sometimes when I was falling asleep I could hear the show playing downstairs, and I can distinctly remember hearing (before watching) that season 6 episode where Kramer loudly passes a kidney stone while at the circus. I also remember that SEINFELD was very popular with my fellow students during my high school days, and how it would often be discussed in class the day after each new show aired. And certainly I remember the hysteria and media frenzy when the show announced it was going off the air in 1998. At that time in my life, I couldn't really appreciate the impact it had on the sitcom as a medium: certainly on some level I was aware that it was a very different type of show than the 80s sitcoms I was more familiar with (PERFECT STRANGERS, FAMILY MATTERS) in that it seemed to have zero interest in putting across a moral message, and also the complexity and intertwined nature of each episode's plotlines. I would come to appreciate all that years later, but back in the day, all I really cared about was that I found it funny and it made me laugh.
I'm not quite sure when it was that I got Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's book SEINFELDIA: HOW A SHOW ABOUT NOTHING CHANGED EVERYTHING. It might have been shortly before the pandemic, or maybe shortly after it started: anyway, I got the book at work one night a couple of years ago. At around 300 pages with fairly large print it's a brisk and breezy read, covering how the show was conceived by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the early seasons where it struggled to find its footing, its inconceivable rise to become one of the most popular TV shows of all-time, and the effect it had on pop culture as a whole. In my opinion it only has one big flaw: while Armstrong interviews many people associated with the show (chiefly the writers, along with assorted network executives, or people with some link to the show, like the guy who played the Soup Nazi, or Kenny Kramer, who inspired the show Kramer), she didn't interview any of the show's four main stars or Larry David himself, so as a result the book, while affable in tone and very readable, can come off as a bit lightweight. But certainly it does a good job examining the impact the show had on 90s pop culture (and beyond).
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