"Nothing" is a nice way of describing star Seinfeld's innocuous brand of comedy. And "nothing," too, is that vast wasteland of most broadcast TV, which was assertively supposed to be about something but most often amounted to nothing.
But even joking about how "Seinfeld" is about nothing, few actually spent time examining what the show was really about. What that something was was obvious but nonetheless disturbing. Could the show have been made -- or could two characters in an actual sitcom have gotten away with designing a new show -- about what "Seinfeld" is really about? Something that bleak, that uncompromising? And, once proposed, could its creators have been allowed to drive home that thesis with the densest underpinning in the history of the medium, something almost play-like in its attention to details, thematic denseness and near poetic devotion to the theme?
Could they have said, that is, We'd like to do a situation comedy about man's inhumanity to man? The petty desires, the arrant cruelties? The lack of perspective, the meaningless hostility? The lack of commitment, of sympathy; the confusion, the isolation; the impossibility of love; the futility of even attempting to break out of the molds we'd stuffed ourselves into?
The creators quit at the top of their game and departed with one of the most widely misunderstood works of art of our time, the final episode of "Seinfeld."
SOME SPOILERS HEREIN:
In that now infamous episode, you will remember, the group scores a free trip to Paris on an NBC jet. A bumbling Kramer nearly causes a plane crash -- a nice feint at those rumors that the show would kill off the characters. The foursome is forced down at a New England town (the cradle of spiritual individualism) and watched amusedly, as they would in New York, as a fat guy is robbed.
But they're caught in a local Good Samaritan law, and put on trial, at which local prosecutors call in a good chunk of the supporting players of the show's eight-year run to act as character assassins; Teri Hatcher testifies that Seinfeld just wanted to know whether her breasts were real; a virgin testifies about the group's masturbation contest; a woman in a wheelchair tells how George gave her a cut-rate wheelchair; a woman relates how Seinfeld stole a loaf of bread out of her hand; a Pakistani immigrant tells how he was deported after Jerry carelessly didn't give him his mail with his immigration papers in it.
And on and on. The four are convicted with dispatch and sent off to a cell together.
Jerry looks at George: "That button, it's in the worst possible spot..."
The group had come full circle, adding a new level of existential desperation to their predicament. They'd been in the same vicious circle already but didn't recognize it; in an insular, uncaring world, they'd acted alone in it, as if they didn't need or want to relate to others, and then in the end found themselves in a spot where they got their wish -- and then continued on as if nothing had happened.
A downer! cried the critics. Well, duh. Scriptwriter David's semiotic coup in this episode was to try, in a last parting burst, to get the audience to consider the implications of a show about nothing that dominated the most powerful medium of its time. Finally, almost in desperation, he criminalized the act. Sometimes, he was insisting, nothing is something.
But even joking about how "Seinfeld" is about nothing, few actually spent time examining what the show was really about. What that something was was obvious but nonetheless disturbing. Could the show have been made -- or could two characters in an actual sitcom have gotten away with designing a new show -- about what "Seinfeld" is really about? Something that bleak, that uncompromising? And, once proposed, could its creators have been allowed to drive home that thesis with the densest underpinning in the history of the medium, something almost play-like in its attention to details, thematic denseness and near poetic devotion to the theme?
Could they have said, that is, We'd like to do a situation comedy about man's inhumanity to man? The petty desires, the arrant cruelties? The lack of perspective, the meaningless hostility? The lack of commitment, of sympathy; the confusion, the isolation; the impossibility of love; the futility of even attempting to break out of the molds we'd stuffed ourselves into?
The creators quit at the top of their game and departed with one of the most widely misunderstood works of art of our time, the final episode of "Seinfeld."
SOME SPOILERS HEREIN:
In that now infamous episode, you will remember, the group scores a free trip to Paris on an NBC jet. A bumbling Kramer nearly causes a plane crash -- a nice feint at those rumors that the show would kill off the characters. The foursome is forced down at a New England town (the cradle of spiritual individualism) and watched amusedly, as they would in New York, as a fat guy is robbed.
But they're caught in a local Good Samaritan law, and put on trial, at which local prosecutors call in a good chunk of the supporting players of the show's eight-year run to act as character assassins; Teri Hatcher testifies that Seinfeld just wanted to know whether her breasts were real; a virgin testifies about the group's masturbation contest; a woman in a wheelchair tells how George gave her a cut-rate wheelchair; a woman relates how Seinfeld stole a loaf of bread out of her hand; a Pakistani immigrant tells how he was deported after Jerry carelessly didn't give him his mail with his immigration papers in it.
And on and on. The four are convicted with dispatch and sent off to a cell together.
Jerry looks at George: "That button, it's in the worst possible spot..."
The group had come full circle, adding a new level of existential desperation to their predicament. They'd been in the same vicious circle already but didn't recognize it; in an insular, uncaring world, they'd acted alone in it, as if they didn't need or want to relate to others, and then in the end found themselves in a spot where they got their wish -- and then continued on as if nothing had happened.
A downer! cried the critics. Well, duh. Scriptwriter David's semiotic coup in this episode was to try, in a last parting burst, to get the audience to consider the implications of a show about nothing that dominated the most powerful medium of its time. Finally, almost in desperation, he criminalized the act. Sometimes, he was insisting, nothing is something.
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