Jerry built: the success of 'Seinfeld' was an implicit rebuke to PC pieties - and a confirmation of America's unpredictable spirit

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by Rob Long

HOLLYWOOD

YEARS ago, at lunch with an NBC executive, I happened to mention a promising new series on his network. The Seinfeld Chronicles, it was called. It had aired three times in a terrible time slot in the middle of summer -- the boneyard, the death trap, the place, in other words, where networks dump their least promising shows.

"Oh, that," he said, with a dismissive swat of his hand. "That show is dead. We shoulda just flushed the money down the john. Woulda been faster."

Nine years and billions of dollars later, Seinfeld, as it was renamed, has not only made its eponymous star a centimillionaire, but it has noticeably buoyed the balance sheet of its network, NBC, and that network's owner, General Electric. The executive who dismissed it so haughtily in 1991 was promoted.

That, of course, is standard Hollywood procedure.

Hits aren't created; they're stumbled into. Seinfeld is, essentially, a show about four desperately selfish and ludicrously childish friends who behave in a way that can be described, in clinical terms, as sociopathic. They fall in and out of bed with a gaggle of partners, none of whom measure up, and spend a good portion of each episode in a local coffee shop, kvetching. Who could like these people? Who would want to have them as friends? They wear life like an itchy sweater -- grumbling, grouchy, and always trying to wiggle out of responsibility.

The show is also a pretty smutty little half-hour, which is one of the reasons conservatives are uneasy about it. Conservatives have a hard time with smut, sadly. They associate it with the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s -- young people grooving on sex and drugs and tinny music, bad haircuts, that sort of thing. But the true legacy of those years wasn't music or intoxicants, it was piety. Insufferable, caring, toasty-warm piety. The adjective "nurturing" to describe a relationship between adults; the phrase "handicapped"; the smoothing out of all the rough edges of life -- "challenged" for slow, "homeless" for alcoholic, "white wine" for bourbon-rocks, and "life partner" for . . . well, you know.

Seinfeld is gleefully free of cant. There are no messages, positive or otherwise, delivered in an episode except the only one that matters: Laugh. Enjoy. And tune in next week. We are the kings; they are the clowns. Implicit in the series is the understanding that our moral and spiritual life is our own affair. Jerry and friends are strictly for laughs.

The most revolutionary aspect of Seinfeld was how easily it confounded the prevailing wisdom. What you need to have a hit, the networks will tell anyone who listens, is a core group of likable characters. They can't be mean or caustic. They need to love one another. They need to be the kind of people the audience can rely on. They cannot be, in other words, the cast of Seinfeld. (Early on in the series, the rumor goes, an NBC executive suggested that Jerry get engaged to Elaine, his platonic friend played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. "What you need here," he is reported as saying, "is a reason to care about these characters. Otherwise, the show will die. No one will watch." He has also, presumably, been promoted and given a large raise.)

The year the show broke out and became a certified smash, Hollywood flew into a frenzy of copy-cat development. "Get me young people talking," went the morning line. And so the following autumn, a dozen or so young-people-talking series went on the air. Most were canceled in a few weeks. It escaped attention that the cast of Seinfeld wasn't particularly young -- Jerry's got fifty on the horizon, at least. Michael Richards, who plays Kramer, isn't much younger.

"It's a show about nothing," was also part of the prevailing wisdom.

Not so. Seinfeld is the most intricately plotted, self-conscious situation comedy ever broadcast on American television. In 21 minutes of storytelling time, Seinfeld could cram twenty or more scenes, some barely five seconds long, to keep the story moving.

They were wrong when they said it wouldn't work, and they're wrong when they try to explain why it does. This, too, should cheer conservatives. The market-tested, focus-grouped, top-down, bureaucratically administered conventional wisdom was spectacularly mistaken. Seinfeld is a plot-heavy show about unlikable adults in their forties. If you pitched it to a network today, they wouldn't even offer you coffee.

WHY, then, does it work? Why is Jerry Seinfeld, comedian, richer than Jack Welch, corporate titan? Perhaps because there is something in the American spirit that loves a misfit. Perhaps because Seinfeld once produced an episode in which the central characters disrupted the life of a handicapped -- and insufferable -- boy. Perhaps because after years of pious liberal nonsense, the American viewing public relished the naughty pleasure of apolitical laughter. Seinfeld isn't a show about nothing; it's a show about nothing pompous.

In one episode, a local reporter mistakes Jerry and George's bickering friendship for a longstanding homosexual marriage. Jerry and George are horrified. A dozen or so times during the episode, they proclaim their heterosexuality. "We're not gay!" they shout, followed quickly by a robotic, "not that there's anything wrong with it." That, in a nutshell, is the average American's typical response to homosexuality: "I'm not, but if you are, well, what the hell can I do about it, anyway?"