Meanwhile, the state of the characters is reflected and reinforced through the stories, and while character usage remains most culpable for the comparative inferior quality that runs throughout much of the season, its stories exist as the most visible sign of decay. In fact, while last season downplayed the darkness, this year sees an acceleration in such motifs – not, as you might guess, in anticipation of the finale, but more so in the continued broadening of the series’ comedic-idea-driven scope. Now our characters, even if most episodic stories don’t explicitly make use of such ill-adjusted behavior, are existing in a time and place where they’re allowed to be exaggeratedly despicable – giving little thought to that aforementioned relatability that we should have already forsaken (in order to enjoy these final years), despite the series’ constant tacit denial of any changes. (If we don’t believe in Kramer, how are we to care if his ridiculous rickshaw scheme goes awry?) One specific element of these broadening characterizations is the aggrandized moral decay among the foursome, which hit its zenith when Susan died in Larry David’s final episode on staff at the end of Season Seven, but served as a thematic gauntlet that could never be un-run. Here, in these last few seasons, with the regulars (even the most consistent, George) heightened to the point of frequent surreality, and sans a premise-justifying change, we find it harder to accept and then willingly choose to invest time in their narrative shenanigans. But broadening characters – to the point where they lose, not only premise-required relatability, but simply, believability – is of enormous consequence, for although the show has generally been more idea-based than character-based, it’s always been vital for the show’s storytelling that the characters be able to “sell” these comedic ideas to the audience. That is, I’m used to them getting annually more absurd. Now, broadening stories are hardly more of a concern to me this year than in those prior, because we’ve been seeing this progression for a while, and I don’t want to decry the ridiculous plots below without noting that it was the years before these last two that truly gave credence and contributed to this growing trend. This, of course, is all exacerbated by the show’s own aesthetic drift into broadness (a figurative cousin to camp), here used to define the series’ tenuous relationship with truth – as less realistic stories, more extreme characterizations, and a heightened tone all help corrupt the show’s integrity. To this point, the aforementioned camp, which I believe the show uses to bypass its premise to connect with the audience and assert its legitimacy as a smart non-traditional comedy, destroys our faith in the reality of the players and their world.
#BEST SEINFELD EPISODES PER SEASON SERIES#
Thus, for our sanity, we instead settled on viewing the series within its simple, recognizable “group of friends” construct (with or without dovetailing stories), but noted that the design still resided on top of the requirement that we identify with relatable characters in a mostly realistic universe. Remember, Seinfeld told us in Season Four that it was “a show about nothing,” and in its seemingly corroborating avoidance of lofty, emotional themes, along with the much-discussed “fetishizing of the trivial,” this suggestion has never been rejected outright by the scripts – never mind the plot-heavy stories and gratuitously complex (but since undermined) storytelling, which I have posited as evidence to this “nothing” thesis’ contrary. But there’s nevertheless sustained uncertainty regarding what it is about… and whether or not the show itself even has an answer. So, by the time we get to Seinfeld’s final season, we know it’s no longer about a stand-up comic gathering material.
Unfortunately, as we saw, such winking camp undermined the relatable realism that the series still relied upon at the core of its idea-based comedy, and further alienated the show from the audience’s current perception of its premise. In last week’s entry on the eighth season, we discussed how the show’s diminished capacity to define itself based on its storytelling led to the institutionalized introduction of self-awareness, which crept into both the stories and the characterizations as a means of projecting relatability, thereby shifting Seinfeld’s identity. Seinfeld stars JERRY SEINFELD as Jerry Seinfeld, JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS as Elaine Benes, MICHAEL RICHARDS as Cosmo Kramer, and JASON ALEXANDER as George Costanza. I’m happy to report that the entire series has been released on DVD. Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday and the conclusion of our series on the best episodes of Seinfeld (1989-1998, NBC), one of the most popular and critically lauded American sitcoms ever produced.
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