Some correspondents constructed plots two and three pages long. Some readers of The Morning Call thanked us for giving them an exercise they found so much fun to do. People devoted to it were far in the majority. Nationally, “Seinfeld” attained the Neilsen’s ratings Top 10 in 1993 and stayed and stayed and stayed. “Quickly.” “Soon.” “Just so it does” were a few bite-backs we got. “How would you like ‘Seinfeld’ to end?” read our query to readers. Could anyone else, another group of writers, have done 22 minutes about masturbation and manage not to offend? The series mastered the art of being vague and explicit at the same time.īut not everyone felt that way, even after it became mainstream. So commonplace on the surface but so intricately and unexpectedly webbed.Īdmiration turned to love. The audacity and the genius - until this season - of the writing that dazzled you with its fancy footwork. Then I would watch reruns of reruns, absorbed in the way its outrageous ideas came even more outrageously together. I found I was enjoying shows in rerun more than I ever did as first runs. * Kramer as the Marlboro Man while George and Elaine find sex, or the absence of it, affects their brain cells. * Elaine’s “big salad” with the White Bronco spoof. * George’s “opposite” routine as Kramer debuts with Regis and Kathie Lee. * Jon Voight’s car with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. It gets under your skin and grabs you by the throat and dares you to figure out how to beat the writers at their own game of tying outrageous plot filaments together: Despite its over-the-top slapstick, this is sophisticated stuff. “Seinfeld” never hit me over the head, which is what I’d been foolishly waiting for. Over and over.Įven the more puerile episodes I disliked (1991’s “The Dog” and “The Parking Garage” come to mind) got second and third look-ins, just to see where genius couldn’t find Olympus. * “Love the Drake!” (And don’t forget the Drakes’ Coffee Cakes). * Kramer turning his front hallway into a Main Street, USA, front porch. * Elaine’s (as Meryl Streep) saying, “Maybe the dingo ate your baby” as party chatter. * The politically way-incorrect cigar store Indian. * “The outing” of George and Jerry by the NYU reporter. * Kramer’s coffee table book coffee table. * Kramer’s cackling rave over the Junior Mints: “They’re delicious.” Watching reruns of reruns, I noticed myself laughing out loud at the same gags, even as some comedy bit unnoticed before always seemed to surface. but an addiction that spilled from prime time into fringe viewing hours at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. Not just Thursday night appointment television - “must see TV,” as NBC touts its lineup built around Jerry & Co. I couldn’t tell you when “Seinfeld,” his fellow nitpickers and I began the fairly complex, deeply felt relationship that exists today - which many of you “Seinfeld” fans can relate to. Didn’t recognize the sophistication cloaking the slapstick. Didn’t catch the brilliance of the writing and construction. I still didn’t get the series’ subtleties, didn’t care about these shallow people and their skewed values. And that I would be at the front of the cheering section, loving it and, come this spring, loathe to see it go. I, whose job it is to spot series’ excellence and alert my readers to it, had not a glimmer that “Seinfeld” would become the most popular comedy of the decade. That was borne out by our “Seinfeld Last Episode” entries.Īt our house, we started tuning in Thursday nights, at first more from a sense of duty than anything. I was wrong, of course: You can’t classify “Seinfeld” devotees into young vs. This bunch of self-absorbed losers missed me by at least a generation, I thought. The show had already taken on some kind of cult status, even as I continued to pass off my own resistance to it to as a Grand Canyon-sized age gap. “I think you’d better look back in,” said my husband about a year into the run.
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