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00:00Faux pas!
00:01Faux pas?
00:02Big, hefty, stinking faux pas.
00:06In the fourth season of Seinfeld,
00:07Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza pitch NBC a sitcom
00:11based on the stand-up comedy of Jerry Seinfeld.
00:14Nothing!
00:15What does that mean?
00:17The show is about nothing!
00:21George is describing a show that's a lot like, well, Seinfeld,
00:25a sitcom about the minutiae and minor struggles of everyday life.
00:29All right, we're done.
00:30You can have it now.
00:31Oh, very gracious.
00:37This idea that Seinfeld was a show about nothing stuck,
00:40even if Seinfeld himself resisted it.
00:43And doing nothing ended up making Seinfeld one of the most
00:46innovative and popular shows of all time.
00:49I was looking for something different,
00:51something that would have people talking at the water coolers.
00:53But this popularity created a contradiction
00:56when it came time to end Seinfeld.
00:58How does a show about everyday minutiae stage the kind of grand finale
01:02expected from such a massive TV phenomenon?
01:05A big sentimental farewell, like the kind for similarly sized hits
01:10M.A.S.H. and Cheers, would be at odds with co-creator Larry David's
01:14famous edict of no hugging, no learning.
01:16So when the finale debuted on May 14th, 1998,
01:20it confounded fans and critics who found it off-putting,
01:23too different from what the show usually did,
01:26while not at all what fans assumed a series finale should be.
01:29This is it?
01:30Was some of this disappointment inevitable?
01:32Or did the Seinfeld finale actually deliver on something
01:36the show promised all along?
01:37I don't need any ideas, it's a show about nothing.
01:41The whole thing sounds pretty stupid to me.
01:43Here's our take on what the show about nothing did when it found
01:47itself forced to say something.
01:49And what Seinfeld's finale reveals about what we expect from TV shows,
01:53even ones that break all the rules.
01:55This video is brought to you by Skillshare, an online learning community where millions of
02:13people come together to take classes that fuel their creative journey.
02:17If you're one of the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description below,
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02:24So become a member today and start exploring your creativity for less than $10 a month.
02:35Yeah, there's something in the air today.
02:37You feel it?
02:38There's something in the air.
02:40Seinfeld episodes are made to feel small.
02:43They're comic sketches drawn from petty, everyday grievances,
02:46staged in the familiar confines of Chinese restaurants and parking garages.
02:51But like rats and some experiment!
02:53Reveling in the mundane drama of close talkers, condiments,
02:56and whether it's okay to eat eclairs out of garbage cans.
02:59It was on a magazine and it still had the doily on.
03:02Was it eaten?
03:03One little bite.
03:05A normal Seinfeld plot finds Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer
03:09trying to further their own selfish aims while chafing against the unwritten rules that govern us.
03:15You know, we're living in a society!
03:17Their only real conflict is the ordinary, yet often insurmountable,
03:21fact that they're surrounded by other people.
03:24I will never understand people.
03:27They're the worst.
03:28The finale starts off in this typical Seinfeld fashion,
03:31albeit with a noticeable air of restlessness.
03:34I've been to the movies.
03:35Not this movie.
03:37They're all the same.
03:38You go, you sit, you eat popcorn, you watch.
03:41I'm sick of it.
03:42The characters are still talking about everyday things
03:45and debating minor social niceties.
03:47Jill's father is in the hospital and you call to ask about him on a cell phone?
03:51But things suddenly shift gears with an unexpected phone call
03:54about Jerry and George's long-shelved sitcom.
03:57He wants to sit down with us and talk about Jerry.
04:00A show?
04:01It's a momentous change, one that telegraphs that this episode will break
04:05from Seinfeld's usual low-stakes routine.
04:08The episode gets even bigger when NBC picks up the show
04:12and Jerry and George are summoned to Los Angeles.
04:15You're moving to California?
04:17Yeah, only for a while.
04:19Yeah, but Jerry, what happens if the show's a hit?
04:22You could be out there for years.
04:23This is a device we've seen time and again
04:26in more conventional sitcom finales,
04:28where we watch as characters say tearful goodbyes,
04:30pack up their TV homes, and embark on the next chapters of their lives.
04:34But before Seinfeld can stage its own heartfelt farewell,
04:38Jerry and George decide to take Elaine and Kramer
04:41on a last blowout trip to Paris aboard NBC's private jet.
04:45So we'll all go somewhere, the four of us,
04:47one big flame before George and I go to California.
04:50Again, this is another TV trope,
04:52the sort of splashy adventure we've seen in the countless sitcoms
04:56where families close out the season with a trip to Disney World.
04:59At this point, it's clear that Seinfeld is offering a parody
05:02of what we've come to expect from a finale.
05:05I'm sorry, I have to say I'm a little disappointed.
05:08I thought it would be a lot nicer.
05:09When Kramer causes a commotion that sends the gang's plane into a nosedive,
05:14the show openly winks at the sort of life-or-death stakes
05:17we might predict for a final episode.
05:19It can't! It can't, I like this!
05:22The episode uncovers a new fan-service-y revelation
05:26about a main character, but in typical Seinfeld fashion,
05:29this reveal is incredibly trivial.
05:31There's something I have to tell you.
05:32What? What is it?
05:35I cheated in the contest!
05:37And it mocks another popular sitcom final convention
05:40by teasing a romantic climax for Jerry and Elaine,
05:44Jerry! I'm always—
05:47only to laugh this off as another joke.
05:49We're straightin' out! We're straightin' out!
05:51We're straightin' out!
05:52The self-referential aspect of the finale becomes even more pronounced
05:56after the plane makes its emergency landing.
05:59The gang discovers they've entered an entirely new world—
06:02a kinder, gentler town somewhere in rural Massachusetts
06:05that marks a symbolic displacement from their TV home.
06:15Looking down on the world from their New York apartments,
06:18Seinfeld's characters often demonstrated a complete indifference
06:21to others' misfortunes.
06:22That's a shame.
06:24That's a shame.
06:24And they do it again here,
06:27witnessing a carjacking while openly cracking jokes about the victim.
06:31There goes the money for the lipo.
06:34See, the great thing about robbing a fat guy is it's an easy getaway,
06:38you know?
06:38They can't really chase ya.
06:41But in this world, they can no longer get away with it.
06:44They're arrested under a good Samaritan law,
06:47forced to stand trial for being who they are.
06:50Why would we want to help somebody?
06:51I know.
06:52That's what nuns and red cross workers are for.
06:55The trial premise sets up yet another TV finale staple—
06:58the replay of the show's greatest hits,
07:00with favorite clips and curtain calls for all its most beloved characters.
07:04You're not a big issue,
07:05and this trial is going to be character.
07:09But Seinfeld subverts this convention, too.
07:12Rather than offering us fond flashbacks,
07:14the Soup Nazi, Marla the Virgin, restaurant owner Babu,
07:18and all the others are here to cast judgment on the main characters,
07:22finally offering their perspectives on the group's selfish behavior.
07:26And then Mr. Kramer gave you a used wheelchair.
07:29That's right.
07:31And from their point of view,
07:32none of it seems particularly funny.
07:34All the time, mocking, mocking, mocking, mocking, mocking, all the time.
07:39Most of the show's episodes have a way of evening out.
07:42No matter what, things always seem to reset by the next episode.
07:46I'll meet somebody else.
07:48Sure, see, things always even out for me.
07:52This time, however, there will be no return to normal.
07:55This time, they are going to be held accountable.
07:59The finale positions the trial as a karmic payment that's long overdue.
08:04Your day of reckoning is coming when an evil wind will blow
08:07through your little play world and wipe that smug smile off your face.
08:12They get it when Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are sentenced
08:16to spend a year in prison.
08:18We find the defendants?
08:21Guilty.
08:22As its one-time rival, Roseanne Barr, once sniped,
08:25they think they're doing Samuel Beckett instead of a sitcom.
08:28And in the finale, the characters' no-hugging, no-learning ethos has
08:32finally led them to a dead end, to be stuck with each other in a purgatory
08:36that indeed resembles the existential absurdity of a Samuel Beckett play
08:40more than it does a sitcom.
08:42We could put on a show.
08:44Maybe, uh, Bye Bye Birdie, or My Fair Lady, Elaine.
08:48You could be Liza Doolittle.
08:49And rather than its characters moving on to the next chapters of their lives,
08:53the finale finds them locked into being themselves,
08:57doomed to repeat their meaningless lives forever.
09:00Our last glimpse even finds them rehashing dialogue
09:02from the very first episode.
09:04See, now to me, that button is in the worst possible spot.
09:08Haven't we had this conversation before?
09:11You think?
09:12Ultimately, this final fate is Seinfeld's meta-commentary
09:15on the hype surrounding its own finale.
09:18The characters are imprisoned for literally doing nothing,
09:21right when the world most expected them to do something.
09:24Your callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent
09:32has rocked the very foundation upon which our society is built.
09:42It's hard to overstate just how much expectation surrounded the Seinfeld finale.
09:47But there was so much energy around the wind down.
09:50Everyone was, the media was all over about, you know,
09:53what was the last episode going to be.
09:55When Seinfeld left the air in the spring of 1998,
09:58it was the most popular series on television,
10:01a rarity for any show ending its run.
10:03Its loss was preemptively mourned for months across magazine covers
10:07and preceded by a loving, hour-long retrospective,
10:10ending with the sort of weepy, sentimental song that's usually reserved for high school graduations.
10:15I hope you had the time of your life.
10:20While the finale aired, the classic TV network TV Land
10:24even paused its programming out of respect,
10:26implicitly coronating Seinfeld itself as a classic before it was even gone.
10:31All of this hype, along with the show's enormous, dedicated following,
10:35inevitably contributed to the feeling that Seinfeld would and should
10:39sign off with a proportionately big, equally heartwarming goodbye.
10:43I also don't know what any human being could have written
10:46that would have lived up to the hype and the expectations.
10:50The finale is certainly self-aware about those expectations.
10:54The whole country is going to be watching.
10:56And it largely turns them into a joke,
10:59making fun of the audience for even desiring that kind of conclusion.
11:02Well, ladies and gentlemen, who knows,
11:04maybe this trial will bring them closer together.
11:07Maybe they'll even end up getting married.
11:09But while it's safe to say that the 76 million people who tuned in
11:13may not have actually wanted to see Jerry and Elaine get married,
11:17or Jerry and George become successful TV moguls,
11:20or even Cramerica Industries finally take off,
11:22they probably didn't assume the characters would wind up in jail,
11:26or that they would be teased for having expected something more.
11:29What was it you were about to say to me on the plane when it was going down?
11:33I've always loved United Airlines.
11:39They surely didn't expect to be made to feel guilty
11:41for having ever enjoyed the show at all.
11:44This is a history of selfishness, self-absorption,
11:48immaturity, and greed.
11:50Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker criticized co-creator Larry David's choice
11:55to cast a moral judgment on the characters, and implicitly the audience.
11:59I'm trying to give you a moral compass.
12:00You have no moral compass.
12:01After all, as Tucker pointed out, it's not as though Jerry,
12:04George, and the gang had never paid for their various transgressions.
12:08They were punished constantly, just by virtue of continuing to live
12:11vexing lives filled with petty grievances.
12:14Where the hell do you get the nerve?
12:17You invite me up for coffee, and then you don't call me back for four days?
12:21I don't like coffee! I don't have to come up!
12:24The finale seemed to contradict the show's own internal sense of ethics.
12:28Across years of watching these characters scrutinize social interactions,
12:32the show had often sided with them in finding most of its rules ridiculous.
12:36This is my card. You threw it away.
12:38You signed your name and you addressed the envelope.
12:41It's not like you painted the picture and wrote the poem.
12:44As the critic Matt Zoller Seitz observed,
12:46Seinfeld carved a path for TV antiheroes like Tony Soprano,
12:50Walter White, and Don Draper,
12:52in that it let its characters be purely selfish,
12:55treating the rest of humankind as a resource or obstacle,
12:58while standing back and observing their shenanigans
13:01with a jaundiced detachment.
13:03So they just stood there and did nothing?
13:05Yeah, nothing.
13:07By suggesting, even as a joke,
13:09that fans shouldn't have approved these despicable people,
13:13the finale arguably betrayed both its spirit and the audience
13:17who'd gone along with it.
13:18It's modeled after the French law.
13:20I heard about it after Princess Diana was killed
13:22and all those photographers were just standing around.
13:24Oh, yeah.
13:26You're the first ones to be arrested on it,
13:28probably in the whole country.
13:29But while the finale strays from Seinfeld's typically small
13:32story structure and slippery moral sensibility,
13:35it's undeniable that it stays true to its characters.
13:39We gotta get out of here.
13:40We wanna beat the traffic!
13:42As Larry David later told Grantland,
13:44I was not interested in an emotional ride,
13:47and neither was Jerry.
13:48And there's no denying that the finale,
13:50like the entire series that preceded it, didn't offer one.
13:54Don't wait for me.
13:55All right.
13:56The finale doesn't take itself or the moment seriously.
14:00It approaches those implicit demands to offer a heartfelt goodbye,
14:03with the same prickly sensibility that made the show so beloved in the first place.
14:07Will you shut up?
14:10You are ruining the whole trip.
14:18You don't have to help anybody.
14:19That's what this country's all about.
14:21Decades later, it's hard to say the reputation of Seinfeld's finale has improved.
14:25It's become a sort of received wisdom that the finale was a letdown.
14:29Thanks for letting me take part in another hugely disappointing series finale.
14:36David even turned that disappointment into a running gag on his own show,
14:40Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he and the actors gather
14:43for a fictional Seinfeld reunion.
14:45Larry, we already screwed up one finale.
14:48We can't do another.
14:49We didn't screw up a finale.
14:50That was a good finale.
14:51Over David's protest, everyone seems to agree
14:53that Seinfeld could have ended better.
14:55It could make up for the finale, that's for sure.
14:58It could be a, you know, we know, we know, we're sorry.
15:00Curb's slightly fictionalized world only somewhat reflects
15:04the player's real-life attitudes.
15:05While Jerry Seinfeld has admitted,
15:07I sometimes think we really shouldn't have even done it.
15:10He's also said his main regret was bowing to pressure
15:13to do a big finish at all.
15:15And I think one of the things that people had a problem with
15:17is it didn't feel like the show because it wasn't small.
15:20It was big.
15:21Right.
15:22And we didn't really do big.
15:24Larry David has been even more reluctant to express any regrets,
15:28blaming audience disappointment largely on their own
15:31impossible expectations.
15:33They all have their little ideas of what should happen.
15:36Right.
15:36And your show isn't going to be better than the one
15:39that they had in their head.
15:40Right.
15:40So what do we expect from a series finale anyway?
15:43This conflict between audience expectation and what shows can
15:46actually deliver has only become more pronounced since Seinfeld went off the air,
15:51as the finale has been joined by even more controversial disappointments.
15:55And who has a better story than Bran the Broken?
16:01Creating a satisfying finale is an especially difficult proposition for sitcoms,
16:05which tend to lack the sort of big, overarching plotlines
16:09that naturally lead to equally momentous conclusions.
16:12Comedies emphasize character,
16:14which is why so many sitcom finales tend to hinge on relationships.
16:18For sitcoms about singles, it's a romantic resolution.
16:21I got off the plane.
16:24Family sitcoms typically end with the kids growing up and moving out,
16:28while workplace comedies usually find their makeshift families
16:31splitting up and moving on to new opportunities.
16:34I got my dream job at Cornell,
16:37and I'm still just thinking about my old pals.
16:40Only now they're the ones I made here.
16:42Sitcoms tend to end with emotional closure,
16:45something that leans into the bittersweet feeling of saying goodbye
16:49to people we've spent years hanging out with in our living rooms.
16:52I guess this is it.
16:54This is harder than I thought it would be.
16:56But Seinfeld didn't do closure, or emotions.
16:59I really don't think so-called relationship humor is what this show's all about.
17:05Yet at the same time, if the finale had been a smaller,
17:08more typical episode, it likely would have been deemed anticlimactic,
17:12a different kind of letdown that failed to live up to those months of anticipation.
17:16If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have kept it so secret.
17:19This created an unusual paradox for Seinfeld's creators,
17:23a no-win situation that the finale addressed in its usual ironic,
17:27self-referential nature, illustrating exactly how the burden of delivering
17:31a big finale can leave shows trapped in a prison of their own making.
17:35You suck! I'm gonna cut you!
17:37Hey, I don't come down to where you work and knock the license plate out of your hand.
17:40Most Seinfeld fans probably wouldn't list the finale among their favorite episodes.
17:46I thought it was a good episode, not a great episode.
17:48In some ways, it's the most off-model Seinfeld episode ever produced,
17:52which makes it even stranger that it was also the most watched.
17:56But unlike with some other shows that missed their landing,
17:59Seinfeld's final episode doesn't seem to have cast a pall over the show as a whole.
18:04Just keeps on getting better and better!
18:06The fact that it isn't like other Seinfeld episodes has instead allowed the finale
18:10to exist outside of the rest of the series.
18:12I was in the pool!
18:14Whatever final judgment the finale makes about its characters,
18:17it surely doesn't stick.
18:18Even in prison, we see that Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer
18:22will just keep talking about nothing, like nothing has changed.
18:26If I called Jill from prison,
18:28you think that would make up for the other ones?
18:31Sure.
18:31There's been no hugging, no learning, no something.
18:35Not that there's anything wrong with her.
18:36In this, a sense of larger, cyclical equilibrium is restored.
18:41They'll always be stuck here together,
18:43forever debating life's minutiae, just like they will in endless reruns.
18:47If we did one more scene, you know, it would be a coffee shop scene
18:51of them getting out of prison, and they'd get in the booth before them,
18:55and the first lie would be,
18:56that was brutal.
18:59So in the end, Seinfeld's finale may not have been what we thought we wanted,
19:04but it was ultimately what it needed to be.
19:06And doesn't that make it a success?
19:09Anything, everything, something, nothing,
19:11who the hell cares?
19:12Put me down!
19:13I'm down!
19:14All right.
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