16 Great TV Shows, Part 4: Seinfeld

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

C'mon, as soon as I praised story density and pace in The Simpsons, you probably saw this one coming.

I came to Seinfeld at the top of its 4th season, which you might know as the one which kicks off with a trip to LA and eventually leads to a storyline about Jerry and George collaborating on a pilot. This was the year the show moved to the post-Cheers slot at midseason and EVERYONE discovered it. It had been a cult hit prior to that, but this was its breakout moment and it felt instantaneous. I'm not sure if that could even happen today with a network show.

Created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Seinfeld had been a timeslot competitor with Home Improvement, and that seems like the perfect metaphor for the instant switch in my sitcom tastes at the age of 13. I'd grown bored with family sitcoms that followed the same predictable formula each week, set largely in the same living room/kitchen stages, with the same stale conflicts. Seinfeld was like none of that. Instead of plots like "Tim forgets date night with Jill and goes to a monster truck rally" there were stories like "George jeopardizes the future of their pilot by staring too long at an executive's daughter's cleavage." If you look at those loglines, you can at least see how Home Improvement's story can easily breakdown in an A to B to C story. If someone tells you the Seinfeld conflict, you go, "Is there a show there? Is it funny?"

They found humor in all the little moments that everyone else overlooked, and so much of the comedy was specifically tied to character. During that year, NBC reran an early episode called "The Pen" that was about Jerry and Elaine visiting Jerry's parents in Florida. My hand to God, the first five minutes of the show - before we really hit anything resembling the A-story of the episode - was my grandparents to a tee. It wasn't even the dialogue so much as the tone and the nuances of their attitudes. And in true Seinfeld fashion, the main story gets instigated by a minor conflict. (Jerry admires an astronaut pen that belongs to his father's friend. The friend offers it to Jerry. Jerry declines saying he couldn't possibly take it. The friend insists, Jerry accepts. Problem: the friend didn't want Jerry to accept and word spreads that Jerry took his pen, setting off tension in the retirement community.)

So my first lesson from Seinfeld: you can find a story anywhere.

Second lesson: When you're mining humor from characters, the more specific and unique the characters, the funnier they are. This maybe holds even truer with one-off guest characters. Think of how many one-episode Seinfeld characters are instantly memorable.

Let's talk about story density. If you watch the series in order, you see the structure get gradually more complex and ambitious. Early episodes sometimes have two major plots that don't interact much, but gradually, the stories would start to converge in unexpected ways. Eventually, it got to the point where each of the four regulars had their own story and those stories would cross and interconnect in Rube Goldbergian ways. It's hard to find that much ambition on TV today, let alone 25 years ago.

Again, this was the period where the pace of television really sped up. Scenes were shorter, dialogue came faster, the entire rhythm of the scenes was faster paced. You could blame short attention spans, but what you're really gaining is the ability to tell more complex stories. With a lot of television, the rule is "Get in, get out," keep things moving. (There are exceptions, of course. Better Call Saul really luxuriates in its measured pace. You don't find a lot of leasurely-paced comedies, though.)

This was also the first time I can remember a sitcom that was more or less telling a serialized story across the entire season. Though there are a number of episodes that don't deal with the pilot, it's a recurring thread through much of the season. (And that's not even counting branching threads like George's relationship with Susan.) It was a nice novelty to be watching a sitcom that didn't mostly pretend that last week's episode didn't happen. I know my reaction to the NBC pilot subplot was, "Wait, you can do that?"

Seinfeld blew up the sitcom formula in so many ways, many of which have been the topic of many books and thinkpieces, but these are the elements that mattered the most to me in learning about story. It's one of the few shows that I don't think I'll ever burn out from watching reruns. I'm sure there are some episodes that I've sat through 20 or 25 times and they never get old. It also is a clear forerunner of another favorite of mine, Curb Your Enthusiasm (which does not appear on this list.)

Other Seinfeld Posts:

"The Golf Ball" - building to a Seinfeld-like payoff
The Seinfeld finale and why putting your lead character on trial can backfire

Part 5: The John Larroquette Show

Part 6: ER

Part 7: Newsradio

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

"It gets really good 7 episodes in"

TV shows evolve over time. Certainly if you were to watch the first couple episodes of Seinfeld, you'd find them to be strange, slightly stilted and slow affairs, lacking the complex structure and quotable dialogue that made the show one of the last true mega-hits of the TV boom. And yet, you can still see the germs of genius, the voice that was unlike anything else on TV at the time. It's not honed or polished yet, but it is distinct.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another show that took a season and a half to evolve into its ideal form. The moment "shit got real" is when Buffy lost her virginity to Angel, triggering his reversion to his evil personality and completely upending any sense of safety within the show. For that matter, the spinoff show starring Angel himself took at least 11 episodes to truly find its footing. It needed that time before its voice emerged and it found where it was going to fit into the Buffy-verse. Still, I'd argue that if you watch the first season of Buffy, it might be a little campier, cheaper and less ambitious than what followed, it still is distinct and unique in a way that draws you in. Joss Whedon's voice is there - he's just still finding his best keys.

One of my problems with the way network TV is run today is that programmers seem to have itchy trigger fingers. A new series could find itself canceled after two or three airings, which hardly seems like a fair amount of data on which to judge a series. Of course, it's important to realize that by the time most network shows have had their premiere, the series has probably shot six or seven episodes and may be working on the script for the 9th or 10th episode. At that point, the studio and the network have a pretty good sense of what they've got creatively, and if that's not working for them, a limp debut isn't going to convince them to throw good money after bad. (Though streaming figures and the Live+3 and Live+7 viewing numbers can end up extending a show's life just by virtue of the fact they take longer to compile.)

I bring all this up as a way of saying "yes, I get it. A show won't always be a home run right out of the gate."

That said, it's really exhausting hear a particular phrase with increasing frequency - "It gets really good six episodes in."

Look, back in the 90s the vast balance of our original programming was limited to 4 broadcast networks, sometimes 6 when The WB and UPN were in play. The idea that FX, TNT, TBS, and AMC would be major content providers really wasn't there. Today there are so many outlets for original narratives and there's already an abundance of good stuff on TV and all the various streaming channels. I feel like I watch a TON of excellent original programming and there's still probably an almost equal amount of excellent series that I don't watch.

So when I'm presented with a new show to fit into my already crowded life, I don't have time to give it a quarter of a season to figure itself out. This is especially true if the early episodes of the show seem devoid of anything compelling. I don't want to keep beating up on AGENTS OF SHIELD, but its first season was the epitome of a series that didn't know at all what its identity was supposed to be. The fallout of THE WINTER SOLDIER gave it a stronger mission statement and forced to show to redefine itself some 17 or 18 episodes in, but even then, I can't say I found it to be all that great. I gave it another half-season due to the addition of Reed Diamond as a bad guy, but to me it never felt like it got any better than the kinds of shows that would have been canceled by The WB and UPN back when Buffy was breaking new ground.

I'll give the show this - they had loyal fans. Their fans were so loyal that after the first half-dozen episodes I saw a LOT of angry responses to reviews pointing out the emperor seemed to be bereft of garb. When they weren't arguing the judgment was wrong, they seemed to be willing it to be a better show, convinced it was building to something. The makeover that followed THE WINTER SOLDIER allowed them to feel vindicated, leading to a rallying cry that translated to: "It got really good 17 episodes in."

When you say it like that, it almost sounds silly, right?

And if I'm being honest, this "give it 7 episodes" plea feels even more ridiculous in an era where streaming services are dropping an entire season's worth of content on us at once. I'm supposed to hand over seven hours - fully half of the season's running time - just to wait for something that feels like it's being delivered in its final form?

Apply the same patience the Marvel geeks gave SHIELD to the Warner Bros DC Comics film universe. Can you even imagine it being acceptable to tell someone, "Just keep watching until AQUAMAN. Then it gets really good." Can you imagine if the first Marvel film to be REALLY good was CAPTAIN AMERIC--

Okay, I kinda walked into that one.

(Before you send me angry comments, allow me to disclaim that the first hour of IRON MAN is one of the strongest things Marvel's ever done. Robert Downey Jr. is brilliant in the role, and most of my issues with the film come from the rather weak second hour, and Obadiah Stain is a pretty uncompelling villain.)

Daredevil just released its second season on Netflix. I rather enjoyed the first season, so I was interested in checking it out, even though I'm generally more of a DC guy. So far, I've watched the first three episodes and... it's not really my thing. Maybe I can attribute some of that to the fact that I find The Punisher profoundly uncompelling as a character, but I can weather the punishment of a disconnected story arc.

The larger problem - and this is one that I'm really noticing with streaming series - is many shows are now doing the TV equivalent of "writing for the trade." That's a comic book phrase, based on the premise that it's far more common for publishers to collect storyarcs that spanned several issues into trade paperbacks. What results is often a decompression of the story, padding out what might have once been a two or three issue arc into six or seven stories. A result is often that each issue feels less like it tells a complete story and more like something completely dependent on the other parts.

I felt it in Jessica Jones, where we got maybe two too many episodes early on where Jessica seemed to do little but follow Kilgrave. I've felt it in several seasons of House of Cards, particularly season two. It's a curious side effect of television drama becoming more strict in its serialization - we get fewer stories that standalone, even though in a long-running series, those are often the plot threads that allow creators to build out the world. In practice, it means that one, or perhaps two stories are told across the 13 episodes.

I understand how the standalone episode is anathema to the streaming model of cliffhanger-after-cliffhanger. A self-contained chapter completely halts that momentum, but there must be an alternative to a structure that demands several episodes of buildup while holding the compelling moments for much later in the run. There might be different causes for this malady - possibly plot constipation, or alternately, it's the natural result of a show finding itself.

So many of these streaming services are championed for how they give much more creative control to the writers. I bring this up because I don't think we can blame "executive interference" for things that displease us on Netflix and Amazon Prime. I do think that what might be more valuable is time. Give the creators more time to develop before they shoot. I can't remember the figure but there's some interview out there with Vince Gilligan where he reveals the final seasons of Breaking Bad spent much more time than is typical breaking story. It gave them the freedom to find ideas that they never would have hit on with tighter constraints. "More time" won't be a popular option, as it means the writers are entitled to additional weeks on the payroll, but maybe it can keep a third of the season or more from feeling like a throwaway.

The second change is one I'll address to the showrunners. Don't assume you have a patient audience. I know when you're launching a network show, you're under extreme pressure to spew plot twists. Every pilot season, that's more than clear than ever as pilot scripts spend only 50ish pages burning through twists that would have been stretched across as many as 6 episodes in the old days. The last couple of years it's been easy to perceive the flop sweat within the scripts, and that serves neither you, nor the audience very well.

And you, dear reader, should you pass this rant forward for others to read and they complain about how long it is, just assure them -

"It gets really good eight paragraphs in."

Friday Free-For-All: Happy Festivus!

It's December 23rd, which means it's Festivus, created by Frank Costanza.







Seinfeld writer Dan O'Keefe based the Costanza version of Festivus on a holiday his father invented.  As depicted in Seinfeld, the holiday begins with the display of an aluminum pole.  Then come the Feats of Strength, and most importantly, the Airing of Grievances.  During this ceremony, you are to gather your family around and tell them the ways in which they have disappointed you in the last year.

For more about Festivus, go here.

And please feel welcome to participate in the Airing of Grievances in the comment section.

"The Golf Ball" - building to a Seinfeld-like payoff

While getting notes on a pilot script last week, my friends coined a new term I'm going to do my best to get into the screenwriting lexicon: "The Golf Ball."

Basically, this came about because one of the members of my writing group expressed disappointment that my story lacked the complexity of, say, a strong Larry David-developed episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.  He said I had several plot lines set up over the course of the script and he was expecting them all to collide in the end for maximum comic effect.  Most of all, he pointed out one element in particular that had been established in an earlier scene, then neglected when it came time to fashion the climax.

"Give us 'the golf ball,'" said another member of the group.  It's a measure of how in sync we are that I knew EXACTLY what he was referring to.  In a classic episode of Seinfeld called "The Marine Biologist," an early scene reveals Kramer's plans for the day.  He's bought a bunch of new Titleist golf balls and he invites Jerry and George to drive out to the beach with him "and hit 'em into the ocean!"  The others decline, but Kramer follows through on his plan.

Later in the same episode, George gets embroiled in a lie where he's trying to pass himself off as a marine biologist to a woman he's attempting to date.  It's his bad luck that he takes her for a walk on the beach just as whale in distress is discovered.  As George and the woman happen upon the scene, one bystander cries out, "Is anyone here a marine biologist?"

Wonderful, now George has to either save the whale (which he has no idea how to do) or blow the lid on his lie (which he REALLY doesn't want to do.)  He marches towards the water, and then we fade into George sitting at the diner, telling his friends what he did.  It's one of the classic Seinfeld monologues.

George reveals that he was in a position to see that the whale's breathing was being impeded, and so he reached in the blowhole and pulled out the obstruction - a golf ball!  A Titleist, to be precise.  The detail that the audience has all but forgotten about is revived as the punchline and the cause of the climax.  Thus, "The Golf Ball" is my term for the comedic plot device that unites two or more unrelated story threads.

I grant this is similar to an existing screenwriting term: Chekhov's Gun.  If one insists on a distinction between the two, I see The Golf Ball being more of a comedic device.  That, and I'd bet that more aspiring writers these days are likely quite familiar with Seinfeld, while to them, Chekhov is that Russian guy from Star Trek.

The Seinfeld finale and why putting your lead character on trial can backfire

Last week I pontificated a bit about the Best and Worst Series Finales, and there were a few who definately felt that the Seinfeld finale really should have been on the Worst List, if not leading it. I gave a brief explanation of my reasons in the earlier post, but I figured that it was worth discussing the Seinfeld finale on its own, as there are some lessons to be learned from it.

For those who don't know, the basic plot is that Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer are charged with violating a "Good Samaritan" law and are put on trial. Their defense attorney, predictably, is Jackie Chiles, the Johnnie Cochran-style attorney who reacts with bemusement to the gang's nicknames for all the witnesses against them. In an effort to make an example of the foursome, the prosecutor calls as many witnesses who have been wronged by the gang as he can find. These included Jerry's virgin girlfriend who was repulsed to learn about "the contest," The Soup Nazi," whose business was ruined by Elaine, and the large-breasted woman Jerry dated who was inadvertently groped by Elaine.

Basically, it was an excuse for Larry David to bring back every memorable character the show created, and give them a few seconds of airtime. Occasionally there were a few clips of their first appearance tossed in, but not nearly enough for me to tar this with the "clip show" brush.

Why this fails as an episode of Seinfeld - with only a few notable exceptions like "The Chinese Restaurant," most of the classic episodes of Seinfeld featured multiple plotlines that would then somehow intertwine and collide by the end. This Rube Goldberg style of domino-plotting took a while to evolve, but it's pretty much the standard from the third or fourth season onward. The problem with "The Finale" is that it's all A-plot. There's no B, C, or D story. Thus the most recognizable traits of a Seinfeld episode are completely absent from this story.

It might have worked if just one of the characters - let's say George - was on trial for his life and that was where subplots for Jerry, Elaine and Kramer ended up intersecting in the end. It would give the main characters something to do instead of spend at least half the show sitting next to each other at the trial. Which brings me to...

Why this episode fails as a piece of writing - So you've got a script where your main character is accused of some dastardly crime and faces stiff penalty for it. Most of the story is a trial, and you probably figure you'll have the audience captivated. After all, the stakes are pretty high if they're found guilty. The wrong verdict could completely change that character's life so this can't miss as compelling drama, right?

Guess again.

The defendant spends most of the trial sitting there, listening passively as everyone else gets their say against him. He doesn't question his accusers, he usually doesn't take the lead in his strategy, and he generally doesn't have much to do.

Who gets to "kill the bull" in these stories? The attorneys, either the prosecution or the defense, whichever one wins. They confront the witnesses, they get to pull all the courtroom theatrics and they're the ones doing the heavy lifting of figuring out how they're going to either lock up this evil bastard, or turn him loose on the streets.

See the problem with the Seinfeld finale? Jackie Chiles is pretty much the main character.

Look at all of the great courtroom films and note the protagonist:

A Few Good Men - Lt. Caffy, the defense lawyer.

To Kill a Mockingbird - Atticus Finch, the defense lawyer.

Philadelphia - Duel protagonists in Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington's characters, but notably Hanks' character is the one bringing suit in this story. He's not charged with anything, he's the one trying to sink his former employers.

A Time To Kill - Jake Brigance, the defense attorney.

There are probably a couple instances where a crafty screenwriter found a way to clear this hurdle and make the trial story work with the defendant as the protagonist, but most of the time those are the exceptions that prove the rule. If you're ever working on a legal drama, don't make the mistake of trying to center it on the guy who has to just sit there and remain silent the whole time until he finally takes the stand. Passive lead characters can drag a whole script down with them.

And that's why the Seinfeld finale doesn't work as a piece of writing. It's not really about the main characters - it's about everybody but them!

Friday Free-For-All: Seinfeld & Dawson's Creek

Today, May 14th, is the 12th anniversary of the last episode of Seinfeld. In honor of that, here are two of my favorite clips from the series:

Vandelay Industries - "And you want to be my latex salesman?"



The Marine Biologist - "The sea was angry that day, my friends... like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli."



This is also the 7th anniversary of the final Dawson's Creek. I debated for a while which clip to embed and eventually settled on this - the final scene and montage that closed the finale.

Friday Free-for-All: Seinfeld

This Friday's Free-For-All theme is in honor of the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, premiering this Sunday on HBO. As you may have heard, the entire cast of Seinfeld is reuniting this season as part of a plotline that has Larry David producing a Seinfeld-reunion show. In honor of that, I decided to post some of my favorite Seinfeld moments:

The infamous JFK-parody:




One of my favorite speeches on the series - George recounting his effort to help a beached whale while pretending to be a marine biologist:



The Soup Nazi:



And as a bonus, one of my favorite moments from Curb where Larry and Ben Stiller get into a fight about Larry sitting in the back seat of Ben's car.