What followed was eight seasons of this stuff. Jerry and George pitch a sitcom about nothing to NBC. Elaine plots to rid herself of her reputation as the office skank. Jerry and George plot to help Jerry break up with a girlfriend and date her roommate. Some episodes are now legendary for the existential punch -- the four spend an entire episode waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, or looking for a car in a parking garage. In perhaps the slyest of these, George tells the merciless parents of his late fiancie that he has a house in the Hamptons and then finds himself driving the implacable pair out there to see it, even though both he and they know that it doesn't exist.

As in the set piece with George and his date, over and over again we saw modern man agonistes, swept up by banal urges about the most minor of comforts as they solidly trump once-stronger and more atavistic ones. Jerry, relentlessly chary of germs, tosses clothing items that touch bathroom fixtures and could never again kiss a woman whose toothbrush he saw fall into the toilet.

Nothing was too small-minded for Seinfeld and David to tackle, from discussions of the most minute of human behaviors to ... well, to other minute behaviors. Constipation and masturbation, evasion and prevarication; the pettiest envies and the most banal euphemisms. George tries to give Elaine a sweater he got cheap because it had a spot on it; Jerry forgets the name of the woman he's dating; another he drugs, not to rape her but to play with her toys -- her real toys, not metaphorical ones.

The emotional relations between friends and lovers are a bottomless abyss of ontological inquiry. What defines a male friend (going to the airport? helping them move? being a "come with" guy who goes to the laundromat?) and what doesn't (calling him to say thank-you for hockey tickets and washing your underwear together, among other things).

In a remarkable scene early on, Jerry and Elaine, determined to sleep together again, rationalize it in a hysterical discussion about "this" (i.e., their friendship) and "that" (i.e., sex). Foreplay is reduced to a ballet of sophistry.

In the late 20th century, Seinfeld and David argue, man is unmanned and woman unwomanned by these new urges. Once rampant and fecund, we are now epicene and unwanted, not only solitary but increasingly genetically forced into solitariness.

We don't make war, we shove for position; we don't mate, we bump around in the dark. And in place of the big pictures and magnificent vistas seen by those who built our society, we are obsessed with the small and the trivial, even the microscopic. We are at once appalled by procreation and strangely drawn to the act that produces it.

You don't have to agree or disagree with this thesis to enjoy the show; but you must marvel at the Herculean ingenuity that created the set pieces that follow the characters' moral prestidigitation.

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After a while it's hard not to see virtually everything the show did leveraged against this worldview: The characters seem to operate almost as characters in a hellish, upside-down version of a miracle play, the saints replaced by sinners, their deeds endlessly examined.

We see them doing everything they can to do anything but break out of their characters. But in "Seinfeld" we knew that the group never would succeed. For one, it was obvious that the sensibilities behind the show were much too rigorous to allow any "Friends"-like shenanigans: Elaine would not get back together with Jerry; George would never marry; Kramer would never see a brilliant idea come to fruition; and Jerry, well, Jerry would continue to hang out with his friends, eat cereal, and identify an infinite number of character flaws that would rule out one vivacious, shapely, attractive woman after another.

And time and time again, their own behavior came back to bite them on the ass. In perhaps the show's most slicing scene, Seinfeld meets the perfect mate -- Janeane Garofalo, the perfect girl, who's exactly like him -- only to discover how quickly observational humor wears thin. A woman, breaking up with George, says, "It's not you, it's me." This is a line George has heard before, coming out of his own mouth. He bursts into a rage -- an unattractive rage, not a mock sitcom rage -- and tells her: "That's my line. Don't tell me it's not me; it is me. It's me!" She concedes the point; it's another small Pyrrhic victory for Costanza, in a life full of them.

You can look at Seinfeld, of course, as the Ur-sitcom -- a bunch of people sitting around and doing, famously, nothing. This setup was a joke from the start, and course parodied in a later story line that saw Jerry and George attempt to get a sitcom on NBC, one that would be about nothing. And the idea of "nothing" would be a sly recurring motif as the show went on.

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