That scene was my introduction to the show, and I quickly saw how a significant part of it was created along those lines: tableaux of human fecklessness imagined and presented with an adamantine clarity no less intoxicating than the smooth stone of "Apollo and Daphne," the riotous imagery on the dominant wall of the Sistine Chapel.

There are great movies released every year, great rock albums, great TV shows. "The Simpsons" is as dense as -- even denser than -- "Seinfeld," but its deliberate cartooniness and shotgun approach to humor, however devilish, limit its timelessness. "Will & Grace" and "Frasier" are both scintillatingly written and mischievously themed, but both have a too-small worldview. Only "Seinfeld" combined extraordinary writing with incredible acting and lucid direction.

"Seinfeld" was not really about how evil humanity is, though it's about that to some extent. The show is really about the joy of charting, in exquisite, unrelenting, almost celebratory detail, the infinitely variegated human interactions that, closely watched, will ultimately tell the story of the disintegration of our species.

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The show, for those who are unfamiliar with it, features a guy named Jerry, who makes a decent living as a stand-up comic. (I'm using the present tense because it's still viewable on a daily basis in many markets.) We never see him practice, and his interest in his work seems deliberately casual. He has some unspoken code of his art -- he looks down at certain other comedians -- but he's not too edgy himself.

He doesn't run with a fast showbiz crowd; rather, the great part of his existence is spent in the company of a loser friend of his from high school, an ex-girlfriend and an unconventional mooch across the hall.

The friend is George Costanza, who can't keep a job and is devoid of talents or ambition in an almost systematic way -- which is to say, he determinedly devotes more time and effort to avoiding work than he does actually working. He is so amoral as sometimes to seem almost a monster, ready to lie, cheat or steal to give himself a slight edge up in a world he firmly believes dealt him the worst of hands.

The ex is Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a not-unattractive woman whose laudable penchant for confrontation is taken to almost sociopath levels and who in this way functions as the closest thing the show has to a traditional male figure.

And the mooch is Kramer (Michael Richards), a gangling elf across the way who doesn't work but seems blessed with a cosmic guardian angel, though he, like the others, is most often taunted by fate than rewarded by it. (And in the "Seinfeld" worldview, fate is nothing more than the world the characters make for themselves.)

The show's lore has it that Costanza is a stand-in for the show's executive producer, Larry David, a stand-up comic like Seinfeld who is generally given credit for providing the show's mordant worldview. (David left before the last season but came back to write the final episode.) George may be the show's most precise realization -- born a white male in the most fabulously wealthy country in the history of the world, George uses nothing of what nature gave him in a resentful, infantilizing war against reality. To him, life is a very long line to get some necessity, and he views virtually everyone around him with the suspicion and hostility of a Soviet housewife waiting all day for a loaf of bread.

George is capable of eating an iclair he finds in a garbage can; pushing children and the elderly out of the way if he thinks he's in danger; smiling when he learns his dreaded fiancie has died, taking advantage of -- even physically combating -- the infirm or physically handicapped; and lying and then sticking to the lie even though everyone in his immediate vicinity knows he's prevaricating. He's selfish and self-pitying, cheap and reflexively untruthful, and lives in a world of such flattened ambition that even his fantasies are pathetic. "I always wanted," he says elegantly, in an early episode, "to pretend I was an architect."

(The gaunt, acerbic David has since gone on to star in his own odd sitcom, "Curb Your Enthusiasm." While invariably amusing, the show strikes me as problematic, from its forced title on down. Most particularly, what makes George tolerable -- even, in a slightly twisted way, noble -- is that we all know that in the brutal calculus of the modern urban environment, he is a loser; life isn't fair, and there are a lot of nice fat bald guys out there who aren't getting a break.

("Seinfeld's" uncompromising take on him, of course, is that George has a largely unattractive personality in addition to his genetic complaints; this gives his character its almost unwatchable pathos. David, by contrast, plays himself in his new show -- it's about the wacky situations the co-creator of "Seinfeld" gets into in the celebrity-driven world of Los Angeles. David jousts against many of the same dragons George did, but the difference is that, in "Curb Your Enthusiasm," David is an unthinkably wealthy guy, who spends his time hobnobbing with actors and studio execs. Too much of the humor is merely illustrative of the fact that rich and famous guys can get away with a lot.)

Anyway, "Seinfeld" watches the four cast members go about their lives, debating the tiniest of life's details: The first lines between Jerry and George in the show's very first episode are a fabulously reductionist sample of Jerry's stand-up humor, as he takes aim at a new dress shirt George is wearing: "To me, that button is in the worst possible spot. The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt. Look at it, it's too high, it's in no man's land. You look like you live with your mother."

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