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In celebration of New York Magazine's 50th anniversary, this weekly series, which will continue through October 2018, tells the stories behind key moments that shaped the city's culture.

Twenty-five years ago, on November 18, 1992, the quintessential episode of the quintessential New York sitcom, Seinfeld, aired on NBC for the first time. That episode was called "The Contest," and pitted its four principal characters, Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Kramer (Michael Richards), against each other in a battle of wills to see who could abstain from masturbating for the longest period of time. Famously, the bet and its ramifications were discussed extensively throughout the half hour, without the word masturbation ever being uttered.

It is a significant episode in the show's history for numerous reasons, including the fact that it won an Emmy Award for its writing, by Larry David; a Directors Guild of America award for its directing, by Tom Cherones; and was the buzziest episode in the only season of Seinfeld that ever received an Emmy for outstanding comedy series. It's also the first episode to feature Estelle Harris as Estelle Costanza, George's mother, a role that would become more prominent in subsequent episodes and prompt Jerry Stiller to join the cast as George's father, Frank.

More importantly, it was the episode that got people really talking about Seinfeld. Suddenly, this was becoming a show you had to see if you wanted to get the jokes your co-workers were repeating in the break room the next morning. The first time "The Contest" aired, it was viewed by 18.5 million people, according to Nielsen. When it was rerun on April 29, 1993, with the series having moved to its new post- Cheers Thursday night time slot, 28.8 million people tuned in, making it the third-most-watched program in America that week.

And it all started with George Costanza's ill-advised decision to pick up a Glamour magazine while he was at his parents' house. Actually, no: Technically it all started when Larry David made a bet while living in New York in the 1980s and proved he was master of his domain.

Larry David, writer of "The Contest": I can't believe I have to discuss this at my ripe age. I would say there was only one other person involved [in the actual contest]. Should I mention his name? I don't even know - my friend Frank Piazza. I don't remember what the bet was. There must have been some money involved. I think it was a small amount. [The contest lasted]two days. Maybe three. I just remember it didn't last very long. I was surprised at how quickly it ended. I won handily, yes.

Kenny Kramer, friend of Larry David, a.k.a. the real Kramer: I wasn't in [the contest] because I knew I would never win it.

David: By the way, [the idea] was in my notebook for some time and I never even mentioned it to Jerry [Seinfeld] because I didn't think there was any way that he would want to do it, and I didn't think there was any way the show actually could get done on the network. So it took me a couple years, you know, to even mention it to Jerry because it didn't even occur to me that it was a possibility. But he was all for it.

Warren Littlefield, former president of NBC: The series always was completely unpredictable, and Jerry and Larry never followed rules, right? They made up their own rules.

When it came time to do the table read for "The Contest," no one knew about the subject matter ahead of time. Rick Ludwin, the program executive on the show, he didn't know what was coming.

David: I remember being nervous because the NBC executives were there. I really had this thing going on in my head where, well, if they don't like it, I'm just going to quit the show. I really had this built up in my head where, there's no way they're going to do it and I'm just going to quit if they don't do it.

Michael Richards (Kramer): Larry was going to put his whole job on the line. I've known Larry since we did Fridays together, and that's Larry David. If he believes in something, he's just going to fight for it.

David: As soon as the read-through started, the laughs were huge. Big, satisfying laughs. I would glance at [the executives'] faces and they seemed to be enjoying it. You could sense it was a very special show. Then we all walked back to our office afterwards and I think one or two NBC executives were there and they had nothing. They just said, "Very funny." And I was shocked.

Littlefield: They read it and it was hilarious. And Rick, as an executive for NBC, knew, "Uh-oh, shit's going to hit the fan." The broadcast standards executive who was there, was like, "What the fuck?" And Rick was like, "I didn't know!"

Then, of course, it came to my desk, where I was like, "Okay, just show me the script." I read it quickly, I laughed out loud and said, "This is kind of brilliant." I got on the phone with the head of broadcast standards, Dr. Roz Weinman, who worked in New York. And broadcast standards doesn't report to programming, so I'm dealing with another arm of the corporation who doesn't answer to me. First of all, she was like, "What are you guys doing? Who's flying the plane? How come we didn't know?" And I just said, "Roz, don't take it personally. It's Seinfeld. We never know, it's just wildly unpredictable. It's part of what it is, it's their culture. Do we think they may have been hiding this story line? It's possible, but it's also their own brilliant chaos."

Kramer: I'd been out there [to L.A.] several times and saw the whiteboard. Although "The Contest" was never on the whiteboard. Did he tell you that?

David: We had this dry-erase board in the office where we would always put upcoming shows on the board. When the executives would come into our office, they'd go, "Oh, what's that one about? What's that one about?" For "The Contest," I didn't even put it up on the board because I didn't want them to ask me about it.

Littlefield: [Weinman] said, "Look, we're a little crazed about how this all went down, but I just read it and I have to say there's kind of a pact that Seinfeld has made with their audience, and they do outrageous and unpredictable things. Their characters, their stories, it's who they are." And the script, as I remember it, never had the word masturbation in it. It had "master of my domain." It had all these euphemisms that were brilliant, but it never said masturbation.

David: That was Jerry's idea from the get-go. He said let's not mention the word. It turned out to be a great idea. I had it in the first draft and he took it out.

Tom Cherones, director of "The Contest": In the first draft, George had a line about "there was some tugging," but that was eventually dropped. It was obvious it wasn't needed.

David: There may have been a couple of things [I had to cut out]. But nothing I couldn't live with.

Littlefield: [Weinman] said, "Look, we're going to watch this episode and the rewrites, and we're going to watch this very carefully. But fundamentally, we think this is not a violation of the pact that this show has established with its audience, as a 9 p.m. comedy." Once she said those words, I knew we were making the episode.

Richards: "The Contest," when we were at the table, we knew that was a winner. None of us were like, "Gee, I hope this hits," or "I hope this was as good as our last show." No way. We knew that show was swinging. It's not a matter of conceit that I say that I knew when I put the money down on the table and go, "I'm out," that that was going to get a laugh, particularly because it's so quick. And who's the first [one out]? Kramer, you know? It made me laugh!

David: That got a roar. That was a huge moment when Kramer came in. That was one of the biggest laughs we ever got, I think.

Cherones: We did not enhance laughs as a comedy usually does in the editing room or the finished mix of the show. We ended up, over the years, taking out more laughs that covered lines, than we did adding laughs. So it was all real. It just happened.

Pete Holmes, producer, writer, and star of HBO's Crashing: Nothing like that had been done on TV before and, honestly, I think at the time I questioned the legality of the episode. When I watched it, I remember feeling strange that grown men still masturbate.

Jessi Klein, comedian and writer for Inside Amy Schumer: I don't remember the first time I saw that specific episode. But I also feel like it's possible I missed it [the first time] because I was masturbating.

Holmes: I also remember the episode feeling strangely familiar. As a serious Christian teenager, I was constantly trying to not masturbate. In fact, that was the major issue of my life. So much so that I would place bets with friends to see how long you could go without doing it. Not for money. For holiness. So it was weird to see George doing it. Oh, and Elaine! I had NO IDEA WOMEN DID THAT.

Andrew Goldberg, co-creator of Big Mouth and co-executive producer and writer for Family Guy: When Elaine was out and they were like, "I thought you'd go into the spring," that was maybe an early "girls are horny, too" moment for me. Like: Oh. Elaine. Okay.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of the book Seinfeldia: One of the breakthrough moments for [Elaine] is "The Contest" because she's in the contest, and she honestly has the best story line of the four. The John F. Kennedy Jr. thing is hilarious. There's something about it to me where I think, that would actually happen in New York City. It's entirely possible that John F. Kennedy Jr. would be in your aerobics class.

Seinfeld ended in 1998, and Sex and the City started that year, also in New York.I still have this weird fantasy where I want Elaine to meet the Sex and the City girls. I think she'd have a better time. I'm not saying they're perfect, but I think it would be a better life choice for her than hanging out with these guys.

David: It was so taboo for network television to do a premise like that. When you hear something for the first time that hasn't been done before, it strikes a chord, I guess.

Littlefield: Sales was like, "What are you guys smoking? This is going to be a sales disaster!" And I was like, "Are you kidding me?" They said, "Well, we're going to have pull-outs from the show." I said, "Look, if there is a couple of spots that become available for Seinfeld because of this content, I want to raise the price by 30 percent and go out to the people. The advertisers who have supported the show are desperate to have spots in Seinfeld. You go, guess what? I have a couple avails for this week in Seinfeld. Come on, we're not taking a bath on this. It's just not going to happen. You will find someone who's desperate to be in Seinfeld and they don't give a shit about this content. They'll love it." And yeah, in fact, that happened. Sales was not beaten down and ultimately it went on the air as a brilliant, outrageous, wonderful, classic episode of that show.

From a Washington Post TV column by John Carmody, dated November 23, 1992: "A spokesman for NBC said Friday the network switchboard in New York had recorded only 62 viewer complaints following a Seinfeld episode Wednesday about masturbation. Another 32 callers said the episode was 'great,' according to NBC vice president Curt Block, who pointed out the program had been okayed by the network's standards and practices unit."

David: [The show] was always popular, but I think it hit another level after that. There were some other episodes that we did that year - "The Outing" was one of them. Those two, they ran fairly close together and they created a bit of a stir, I think.

Holmes: What makes this episode so special is its restraint and even its elegance in dealing with something so ... carnal? It's about jerking off, but it's so much more fun in the confines of network television because it forced the writers to play a very interesting game of censorship versus a real story - and the episode is better for it.

Littlefield: It starts with George's embarrassing moment with his family. An adult male has been caught by his mom, right? By introducing parents into the series and expanding that and doing this kind of an episode, we went outside of a niche base.

Now you're into a much larger playing field for audiences. Yes, we were an addiction for adults ages 18 to 49, but we were [now] going younger and far older. We were inviting everyone into the tent. So on every level, on every demographic, it became a mainstream hit, because there was something for everyone. Ironic, because early on, it was thought to be too Jewish, too New York.

Klein: I think there is something New York-ish [about the episode]. There's like a competitive spirit to who's having the worst time.

There is this kind of upside-down pride in how incredibly difficult getting from A to B physically and metaphorically is in that city. Like if you were on the subway and you stepped in barf on a day, like for sure all my friends are going to know about it. Because I had the worst day. And by the way I did step in barf on the subway and I need you guys to know that, and please publish it.

Goldberg: It is that kind of East Coast competitiveness as opposed to that West Coast kind of passive-aggressive competition.

David: I'm grateful to NBC for airing the show when I never thought they would. That was the most surprising thing about it.

Keishin Armstrong: This is like peak Seinfeld to me. That's what I always say. If you're going to watch one episode and understand everything that it does, this is it.

*This article appears in the October 30, 2017 issue of New York Magazine.
Order Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable: 50 Years of New York, a celebratory book chronicling the magazine's history with powerful images and behind-the-scenes stories from staff and subjects.

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The Oral History of Seinfeld's 'The Contest'

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In celebration of New York Magazine's 50th anniversary, this weekly series, which will continue through October 2018, tells the stories behind key moments that shaped the city's culture. Twenty-five years ago, on November 18, 1992, the quintessential episode of the quintessential New York sitcom, Seinfeld, aired on NBC for the first time.

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"The Contest" won Larry David an Emmy Award for writing, and was named the best TV episode of all time by TV Guide in 2009. It's considered, by many, if not most, to be one of the greatest episodes of all time. For the time that it aired, it was an incredibly edgy half-hour of television. It pushed the envelope, even though it never mentioned the topic at hand. That topic?

Masturbation.

This was in 1992, of course. Way back then, they had to talk around the subject on a network show. That can't help but date "The Contest" to some degree. So, here in 2016, over 20 years later, where does "The Contest" fit into our modern world?

For those who do not recall, and given how often Seinfeld airs in syndication this may be an exercise in futility, here's a brief synopsis of the plot. George's mother stumbles upon him masturbating in her house, and, in her shock, winds up in the hospital. As such, George vows to never masturbate again. Jerry is dubious, and thus the titular contest begins. Jerry, George, and Kramer put in 100 bucks in a competition to see who can go the longest without engaging in a bit of self-gratification, and Elaine chips in $150 to get in, given the presumption among the contestants not masturbating will be easier for her.

Naturally, a series of logistical issues begin to unveil themselves for our main quartet. There's a beautiful nude woman in an apartment across the street from Jerry, which leads to Kramer being knocked out of the contest very quickly, in the episode's biggest laugh moment. Jerry's also dating a virgin, played by Jane Leeves (who went on to play Daphne on Frasier), so he's still sexually frustrated. Elaine has the chance to get romantically involved with John F. Kennedy Jr., AKA John-John, which builds up her anxiety. George's mom is in the hospital next to a beautiful woman getting sponge baths from a beautiful nurse. Also, he's George-a man with little to no self-restraint anyway.

Throughout the episode, we see everybody in bed-those still in the contest tossing and turning, and the others sleeping soundly. Elaine ends up the second character out, much to everybody's surprise. We don't find out the winner during the episode, but Jerry's girlfriend is horrified when she finds out about the contest, and ends up dating JFK Jr. herself. It is alluded to, later, that George won, but then it becomes known that he cheated to win the contest. In the end, there are simply no winners when you try to see how long you and your friends can go without masturbating, or so "The Contest" posits.

Now, not only is masturbation never directly mentioned, but no real euphemisms are used, either. Phrases were invented to dance around the issue at hand (ahem)-"master of your domain" and things of that ilk. This is what people primarily remember "The Contest" for. (Well, that and the fact it's about jacking it.)

But the nature of edginess, by and large, is that eventually, the edge dulls. Today, people talk about masturbation on network television with impunity. You can joke about it without a single layer of euphemism. You can joke about teenagers doing it. This article has used the word "masturbation" a dozen times already, and you probably didn't even blink at it. So it's not surprising that "The Contest" no longer feels edgy, or dangerous, or iconoclastic. It feels like an episode of a sitcom. It happens to be about masturbation, but it could just as easily be about dating a woman with man hands, or a giant ball of oil being dropped out of a window. It's banal.

However, the true thrill of "The Contest" wasn't a result of the then-unmentionable subject. Sure, that's what made it stick out, but the concept of sexual self-satisfaction is not the reason it earned an Emmy, or laudations from the likes of TV Guide. The cleverness of the episode lies in that fact that it was really another vehicle through which to explore the extreme awfulness and shallowness of the gang. It's about George's inability to control his urges until he gets out of his mom's house. It's about all of them having the self-confidence to agree to bet all of this money on this particularly shallow subject, and the havoc it wreaks on their lives. In the end, this seemingly ridiculous contest blows up in their faces-unsurprisingly so. It's an excellent episode for George's mom, and Jerry has a great outburst, and, yes, Kramer's "I'm out!" is hilarious. It's a well-crafted half-hour of television, like most episodes of .

On the other hand, it's not that unbelievably great. The plot isn't as clever as other episodes from the series, and it doesn't build to as delightful a conclusion. People may love "master of your domain," but it's not as quotable or as iconic as other episodes of the show. If this wasn't "the masturbation episode," and if that wasn't considered so salacious, it probably wouldn't be considered as legendary. There are better episodes of . Several, in fact, and to call it the greatest sitcom episode of all-time, a la TV Guide, feels like a stretch. People who might happen to watch it now for the first time would probably agree. As Green Day once sang, masturbation has lost its fun.

was about sex all the time, and that didn't really cause people to turn their heads askance, but "The Contest" stuck out to audiences simply because it removed one person from the sexual equation. Time has removed the harsh edges from what is, actually, a relatively sexually soft (ahem) episode of TV by modern standards. Yes, it's still funny, and it's still classic , but the world is a different place now. You can be the master of your own domain in a more frank matter. But it's important to note that the changing tide of sexual exploration on TV hasn't completely defanged "The Contest." It's just worn those fangs down a bit.

Chris Morgan is not the author of THE book on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but he is the author of A book on Mystery Science Theater 3000. He's also on Twitter.

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unpacking the significance of seinfeld's "the contest" 24 years later

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Unpacking The Significance of Seinfeld's "The Contest" 24 Years Later

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"The Contest" won Larry David an Emmy Award for writing, and was named the best TV episode of all time by TV Guide in 2009. It's considered, by many, if not most, to be one of the greatest episodes of all time. For the time that it aired, it was an incredibly edgy half-hour of television.

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How 'Seinfeld' Revolutionized The Sitcom

" Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from 'I Love Lucy' to 'Community,'" the new book from critic and author Saul Austerlitz ("Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy") officially hits shelves tomorrow, March 1st, courtesy of the Chicago Review Press. Appealing to TV lovers, comedy enthusiasts and pop culture devotees, the book finds Austerlitz examining the critically underappreciated but eternally popular television genre, beginning with housewife Lucy and working husband Ricky Ricardo and going through to the postmodernism of Dan Harmon's community college show.

Austerlitz examines how the sitcom has evolved through 24 episode from 24 pivotal series, include "22 Short Films About Springfield" from "The Simpsons," "Chuckles Bites the Dust" from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and more. Indiewire's pleased to offer an excerpt from "Sitcom" about " Seinfeld," the "show about nothing," below. Find out more about the book here.

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"See, this should be the show. This is the show." "What?" "This. Just talking." "Yeah. Right... Just talking? What's the show about?" "It's about nothing." "No story?" "No, forget the story." "You've got to have a story." "Who says you gotta have a story? Remember when we were waiting for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time? That could be a TV show."

Balding, bespectacled, frazzled George Costanza ( Jason Alexander), he of the grandiose ideas and minimal follow-through, has latched onto a new one: for his best friend Jerry Seinfeld 's forthcoming sitcom pitch, he should present the gathered NBC executives with an idea for a show about nothing. Jerry, initially intensely skeptical, soon warms to the concept of nothing: "I think you may have something here."

At the pitch meeting, George steals the spotlight from Jerry, announcing to the dubious execs that "I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: nothing." Following through on his pithy initial summation, George notes that "nothing happens on the show. You see, it's just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read. You eat, you read, you go shopping." Over the increasingly frantic objections of his partner, George engages in a pointed back-and-forth with one of the skeptical executives: "No stories? So, what is it?" "What did you do today?" "I got up and came to work." "There's a show. That's a show." "How is that a show?"

As it happened, viewers could testify that it was a show, for what George was describing matched, in nearly every pertinent detail, the show we were already watching: "Seinfeld" (NBC, 1989-98). George and Jerry's waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant was not just an episode from their lives but also an episode of "Seinfeld": "The Chinese Restaurant," a standout from the show's second season. And so, having introduced an entirely new mode of comedy - highly stylized, exuberantly mundane - "Seinfeld" sought to pitch itself, as it were, into the stratosphere with this self-referential thrust. Though self-awareness had been a component of the sitcom's comic arsenal since Lucy and her TV commercial, "Seinfeld"'s version took a deeper interest in the clichés and stereotypes that served as the sitcom's building blocks. None of this was precisely new; Father Knows Best had covered much of the same ground with the episode "Father Is a Dope." But self-awareness was newly highlighted, newly essential to the task of crafting a sitcom.

This was the sitcom as Mobius strip: not only does fiction imitate reality, but the fiction within the fiction mimics the fiction as well as the reality. The series would fold in on itself, its characters confronted with doppelgangers, funhouse-mirror versions of themselves. Years before he played Ari Gold on "Entourage" - but around the same time as his stint as Larry Sanders's head writer on "The Larry Sanders Show" - Jeremy Piven auditions for the role of "George" on George and Jerry's sitcom-to-be in the episode "The Pilot." Kitted out in ill-fitting sweatpants and bulky glasses, Piven reduces everyone except George to helpless laughter. George balks, seeing no resemblance whatsoever between himself and this pseudo-George. In that same episode, Kramer (Michael Richards) demands the opportunity to audition for the part of Kramer - after all, who is better equipped to understand the role?

What was this strange thing we were watching? Who had invented it? The questions could be asked of "Seinfeld," but "Seinfeld" preferred to ask it first, interrogating television, and the sitcom in particular, for answers. The show enjoyed undercutting its medium, ridiculing its traditions and its unspoken assumptions, even as it maintained its most basic injunction to entertain. "Don't you hate 'to be continued' on TV?" Jerry asks the audience, even as we sat on our own living room couches, watching "Seinfeld" wrap up the first part of its own two-part tale. "If I wanted a long, boring story with no point to it, I have my life."

"Seinfeld" is, in essence, "a long, boring story with no point to it," at least as we generally understand "points." Its plots don't arc; its characters do not develop. The show's unofficial mantra was "no hugging, no learning," and it stuck to it assiduously for its nine seasons. (There were even jackets made up bearing the logo.) Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer never grow, never change, never adapt. They merely are, and their lives are less the stuff of art than accretions of the sort of niggling details art traditionally avoids - the petty annoyances, minor scuffles, and bits of personal housekeeping that form the barely audible background hum of mundane existence.

"Seinfeld" is a masterful exploration of minutiae, inspired by (and featuring, in bite-size bursts) star Jerry Seinfeld's pointillist stand-up routine. Alive with taglines, punch lines, and bursts of near-Dada nonsense poetry ("yada yada yada"), "Seinfeld" reinvents the sitcom as an experimental art form, its hyperrealism ultimately eschewing realism altogether in favor of a religious devotion to the oddball. Turning life inside out, "Seinfeld" empties it of all emotional or intellectual content - all that hugging and learning - and keeps only the dross, making it into a memorable potpourri of instantly recognizable details. Shrinkage. The puffy shirt. "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Spongeworthy. The Pez dispenser. Fusilli Jerry. Festivus. The Bubble Boy. "Shiksappeal." Mulva. The mimbo. The Soup Nazi. "Serenity now!" "They're real, and they're spectacular." And what of the epic question posed by the series' most justly beloved masturbation-themed episode "The Contest": "Are you still master of your domain?" Daily life was "Seinfeld"'s domain, and it was unquestionably the master there. It may have been about nothing, but that nothing grew until it seemed to include practically everything.

Before we enumerate the many ways in which "Seinfeld" revolutionized the sitcom, it might be wisest to mention the ways in which it did not. The show still had three cameras and a laugh track, an anomaly in the era of "M*A*S*H" and a dinosaur by the early 1990s. It insisted on welcoming the series regulars - particularly its house eccentric, Kramer - with deafening rounds of applause entirely not in keeping with the show's aesthetic. "The Larry Sanders Show" debuted on HBO the month before "The Pitch" aired on NBC, and its free-wheeling, single-camera, laugh-track-free style made "Seinfeld"'s style seem positively ancient.

Perhaps, having decimated so many of the traditions of the network sitcom, "Seinfeld" preferred to preserve some tenuous link to what had come before it, as if to remind viewers who echoed that NBC executive's concern that yes, this is a television show. It is also a nervous nod in the direction of those same executives, providing confirmation that "Seinfeld" was just as interested in crowd-pleasing entertainment as those earlier NBC smash hits "The Cosby Show" and "Cheers." "You don't think I could put asses in the seats?" Elaine huffily asks of her friends in the episode "The Shoes," skeptical of her erotic hold over a waffling NBC bigwig, and the same question could be seen as "Seinfeld"'s silent query. Even as it rewrote the rules for what a television sitcom was - what it might be - "Seinfeld" still assiduously devoted itself to putting asses in seats, in a manner that its more acid contemporary "The Larry Sanders Show" never did. One approach was not necessarily preferable to another; but the arc of sitcom history was clearly tilting away from the one and toward the other.

NBC executives had, indeed, approached Seinfeld, a thriving stand-up comic, in the late 1980s and asked him to pitch a show. Seinfeld, whose television experience ran to appearances on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" and a guest stint on the "Soap" spinoff "Benson" (ABC, 1979-86) alongside fellow future sitcom star Ted Danson, approached fellow comedian Larry David. Seinfeld and David realized that their joint taste for aimless conversation, like talking smack about the products on offer at a Korean grocer's, had never really been seen on television before. They initially planned for a one-time ninety-minute special following a comedian through his day, collecting shards of material. The show would culminate in the performer onstage, his material inevitably reflecting the course of his day. (The same kernel of an idea would inspire David's first post-"Seinfeld" television endeavor, the 1999 HBO special "Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm.")

Later, Seinfeld and David came up with a similar sitcom idea, about two stand-up comedians much like themselves who used their mundane adventures as source material for their comedy. Both ideas were eventually scrapped - ninety minutes was too long for the special, and Seinfeld and David did not want to pepper a twenty-two-minute sitcom with two separate stand-up acts. But the kernel of both - the link between the boredom of the everyday and the keenly honed observation of stand-up - became the fulcrum on which "Seinfeld" turns. They pitched the series to NBC - reportedly, the phrase "a show about nothing" was never uttered - and the network tentatively agreed to take it. NBC president Brandon Tartikoff, himself Jewish and from New York, worried that "it's too New York and it's too Jewish" but had the patience to leave "Seinfeld" on the air as it found an audience.

The show began as a midseason replacement in 1989-90 called "The Seinfeld Chronicles." In the pilot episode, instead of Elaine, there was a wisecracking waitress at Monk's. And George was more of a romantic guru, a successful real-estate mogul who belted out show tunes and dispensed relationship wisdom to Jerry. (It is hard to imagine the George of later seasons offering up any of his favorites from "Les Miserables" - or even having enough interest in the world beyond his testicles and his hairline to attend a performance of the show.) Soon enough, George was the Costanza America grew to love, observing in mock-professorial fashion that "I know less about women ... than anyone in the world." And after auditioning the likes of Megan Mullally and Rosie O'Donnell, David and Seinfeld happily settled on Julia Louis-Dreyfus for the role of Elaine.

The first two seasons of the show are decidedly uneven, but "The Chinese Restaurant," from the end of the second season, is a hint of where "Seinfeld" planned to go. Jerry, George, and Elaine head to their favorite Chinese joint for dinner and proceed to ... wait. George attempts to commandeer a pay phone to call his girlfriend, Elaine moans about her hunger pains, and Jerry fails in his attempts to bribe the maître d'. Jerry offers Elaine 50 dollars to grab an egg roll off some elderly patrons' table. As soon as they leave the restaurant, too hungry and frustrated to wait another minute, the maître d' calls their table. End of episode. There are no interruptions here, no breaks in the action, none of the compressions and elisions native to the sitcom. It is television comedy unadorned and unafraid. By the time of "The Pitch," written by Larry David, George is offering up this very incident - an anecdote from his life or an episode from our "Seinfeld" life - as the epitome of what his "Seinfeld"-esque series will feature.

There are, functionally speaking, two stand-up comics on "Seinfeld." There's Seinfeld himself, less an actor than a comedian parachuted into the war zone of television, his voice ascending into its whinier upper registers when he is inevitably agitated, and there is Alexander's George Costanza, a lightly disguised version of the phobic, disheveled, hyperarticulate David. George is socially maladjusted, romantically inept, and professionally incompetent, a connoisseur of diminished expectations whose list of potential conversational gambits with women begins and seemingly ends with "How I'm good at going in reverse in my car." He and Jerry are joined by their two compatriots and partners in crime: wild, magnificent Kramer, his tangled shocks of hair an exact correlative for his personality, prone to such flights of fancy as rebranding himself as an underwear model or designing a coffee table book about coffee tables; and Elaine, a tightly bundled mass of neuroses, given to slugging her friends ("Get out!") and ditching her boyfriends for not being "spongeworthy."

Transforming Larry into George was not the only sleight-of-hand trick the series played; "Seinfeld" is, at its core, about the self-absorbed lives of four lightly disguised neurotic New York Jews, their sensibilities transmogrified into more generic Manhattan personae that likely fooled no one. The Gentile backstories and non-Semitic last names - Benes? Costanza? - are hardly convincing evidence, given the show's recurring interest in mohels, babkas, marble ryes, Chinese restaurants, and South Florida. And what Italian in the history of the world has ever asked his host at an impromptu screening of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," as George Costanza does, "So, anything to, uh, nosh?"

One is reminded of the brilliant cold open to the fourth season of 30 Rock, and NBC network exec Jack Donaghy's suggestions for making their show within a show more marketable to mainstream America: "We'll trick those race-car-loving wide loads into watching your lefty homoerotic propaganda yet!" For nine seasons (including five in the top three of the Nielsen ratings), "Seinfeld"'s brand of Jewish Manhattanite propaganda was one of the most popular shows on television.

To fully grapple with the miracle of "Seinfeld," we must turn our attention to perhaps the most perfect of its 180 episodes, written by David and airing later that same fourth season. In "The Contest," as in every "Seinfeld" episode, the ineluctable, intermeshing gears of comic fate are set into motion by an improbable sequence of events. George is caught in an embarrassing position by his mother while flipping through a copy of Glamour magazine at his parents' house: "I didn't know whether to try and keep her from falling or zip up!" Humiliated, George pledges to never pleasure himself again - a pledge his friends believe him highly unlikely to fulfill. After all, as Jerry observes to Elaine about men in general, "We have to do it. It's part of our lifestyle." Elaine pleads to be included in the bet, arguing that it is best compared to shaving: just as men shave their faces, women shave their legs. ("Not every day," Kramer sagely observes.)

And so a four-way competition is established, with the last one to stay master of his - or her - domain declared the winner. The contestants are faced with an array of unprecedented erotic trials: a naked woman in the apartment across the street; the stunning nurse sponge-bathing an equally stunning patient in the bed next to George's mother; the temptation of Jerry's girlfriend Marla, the prudish virgin (played by Jane Leeves, later "Frasier"'s Daphne); and for Elaine, the sight of John F. Kennedy Jr. on the mat in front of her at the gym. Contestants drop, one by one. Kramer spots the nude beauty, retreats to his apartment, and returns, slamming his hundred dollars on the counter and shouting "I'm out!" - hand saucily posed on hip.

That night, Elaine, George, and Jerry toss and turn in their beds as Kramer sleeps the sleep of the satiated. A few days later, Elaine strolls in, calmly removes the cash from her wallet, and announces defeat, murmuring a new name to herself like a mantra: "Elaine Benes Kennedy Jr." George and Jerry are reduced to shouting at each other about matters of deep import like socks and coffee, their sexual frustration transmuted into a crabby "Odd Couple" dynamic. The episode doesn't reveal which of the final two contestants wins the wager - though George will claim the following season that he was the victor. The true champion, however, is Kramer, who is spotted by his friends in the naked woman's window across the street, waving, at episode's end. Jerry, on the other hand, loses a girlfriend in the bargain; horrified to learn of Jerry's bet with his "perverted friends," Marla the virgin storms out - into the arms of John F. Kennedy Jr.

The miracle of "The Contest" is that, following network strictures, no one ever says the word "masturbate." Instead, "Seinfeld" provides its own brand of instantly understandable jargon. George is "king of the county"; Jerry is "lord of the manor." Everyone is (at least temporarily) "master of their domain." Divergent subplots - George getting caught in the act, Elaine's run-in with JFK Jr., Jerry's girlfriend's prudery - are brilliantly woven together, with each unexpectedly bouncing off the other in a game of high-stakes comic ping-pong.

If there is a platonic ideal of the "Seinfeld" episode, it is the foursome encountering a new patsy and promptly proceeding to destroy their lives. Babu the Pakistani immigrant, his restaurant dreams destroyed by Jerry; the Bubble Boy, his protective sac trampled; George's girlfriend Susan's father, whose beloved cabin is burned to the ground with one of his own cigars, and whose secret homosexual relationship with the novelist John Cheever is exposed; Poppie the restaurateur, whose pro-life abortion views doom his flourishing pizza business. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are like roving assassins of others' well-being, their modus operandi the uncovering of others' secret shames.

An inordinate amount of the series is set in those receptacles of the tragically mundane: trains, buses, dry cleaners, coffee shops, restaurants. Over the course of its nine seasons, "Seinfeld" develops an urban cosmology akin to that of "The Simpsons," with its four central protagonists surrounded by a roiling scrum of memorably quirky supporting characters like Jerry's Uncle Leo, who makes a habit of fishing discarded wristwatches out of the trash and shoplifting books; George's hideously neurotic parents (played by Estelle Harris and the inimitable Jerry Stiller); New York Yankees boss George Steinbrenner (voiced by Larry David himself as an update on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"'s petulant, mostly absent Alan Brady), with a taste for calzones and a tendency toward ranting; and above all, Wayne Knight's gleefully odious postman Newman, who serves as Jerry's neighbor and all-purpose nemesis. Knight is the inspiration for the most cutting greeting in the history of television: Jerry's gritted-teeth "Hello, Newman." The show's grubby realism is borne of these eternally recurring, unshakable presences. They are emblems of an entire world of nagging, harassment, and petty hostility, which are "Seinfeld"'s preferred methods of interaction.

This penchant for unveiling and shaming extends to their own lives; "Seinfeld" is devoted to the ritual humiliation of its own featured characters. In "The Raincoats," Newman busts Jerry making out with his girlfriend during a screening of Schindler's List, to the eternal chagrin of his fretful Jewish parents. Jerry, unable to understand Kramer's "low-talking" fashion-designer girlfriend at dinner in "The Puffy Shirt," accidentally agrees to wear a career-damaging ruffled shirt for an appearance on the "Today" show. Jerry and George are wrongly exposed as gay lovers by an intrepid college reporter in "The Outing," reducing them to increasingly unlikely disavowals of homosexuality and pleas for tolerance: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" ("My father's gay!" George blurts out.) In "The Implant," Jerry schemes pathetically in order to determine whether his girlfriend (played by future "Desperate Housewives" star Teri Hatcher) has had a breast job. She discovers his ruse and memorably kisses him off: "They're real, and they're spectacular."

Much of "Seinfeld" is turned over to its star's observation of contemporary phenomena, passing judgment on the minute questions of propriety to which it - and only it - turns its attention, like the world's quirkiest advice column. Who controls a parking spot - the car backing in or the one pulling in? What is the appropriate amount of time to surreptitiously glance at a woman's cleavage? Is it permissible for a man to steal another man's signature move in bed? Is cinnamon the "lesser babka"? Seinfeld's stand-up turns on such points of etiquette, and the show itself functions as a dramatization of the issues enumerated in Jerry's routines.

"Seinfeld" is, like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Cheers" before it, a show about single people in a big city, but unlike those will-they-or-won't-they soap operas, it is abundantly clear that there will be no happy endings on "Seinfeld." "The idea," Jerry tells Elaine early on, attempting to sell her on a no-strings-attached sexual relationship, "is to combine the this" - his hands rapidly dance between the two of them in a speed-walking maneuver, indicating the back-and-forth of good conversation - "and the that," jerking his thumb backward to point at the bedroom. Peter Mehlman, soon to be a writer on the show, watched this scene being filmed and decided that this moment, with its judicious depiction of a quintessential human conundrum, was "the greatest single scene in the history of sitcoms." Yet the entire crux of "Seinfeld" is that, like Jerry's beloved Superman and Kryptonite, there is no genuine combination of the this and the that that does not result in calamity. During a stand-up tour after the episode aired, Seinfeld polled audiences about whether they wanted Jerry and Elaine to wind up together. He returned to the show convinced that the characters would have to be kept apart, and the intimation of their friends-with-benefits bliss was unceremoniously dropped.

"Seinfeld" is a show about the eternality of small annoyances, and its fundamental tone - speedy, easily agitated, fundamentally shallow - could never be altered by marital bliss. The show about nothing feints at something before pulling back, taunting us for even considering the possibility of maturity and responsibility for these characters. "What in God's name are we doing?" George cries out at the start of the seventh season. "We're like children - we're not men!" Jerry and George pledge to become responsible adults but prefer bickering about who may or may not have reneged on their agreement to settle down than actually, you know, settling down. Jerry meets the perfect woman (played by Janeane Garofalo), his identical twin in every quirk of their shared personalities, and rashly proposes marriage before reconsidering: "I can't be with someone like me! I hate myself!"

Would we prefer emotional honesty? In another episode, Jerry cries over the latest in his interchangeable array of here-today, gone-tomorrow girlfriends, experiencing something new. "What is this salty discharge?" he wonders, rubbing at his wet eyes. "This is horrible. I care." The new, emotionally open Jerry is a much improved human being. What he is not, as he well knows, is himself. "Sure, I'm not funny anymore," he excuses himself, "but there's more to life than making shallow, fairly obvious observations." Not in the world of "Seinfeld" there wasn't. Emotion would only have clogged the pipes.

Even George's impromptu engagement to Susan (Heidi Swedberg) is merely a dodge, an extended jab at the very notion of maturity, audaciously unraveled by her unexpected death from licking defective envelopes for their wedding invitations. (Taking a page out of "MTM"'s "Chuckles the Clown," her unexpected death is played primarily for laughs.) Girlfriends and boyfriends are dismissed for reasons so patently ludicrous even the characters themselves must admit their inadequacy. One fails to place an exclamation mark after a phone message announcing a friend's new baby; another is dismissed for liking an annoying commercial for Dockers pants; a third bites the dust because Jerry failed to remember her name, which he knew rhymed with a female body part. (Was it Mulva?) "So essentially," Elaine wonders in "The Soup Nazi," "you chose soup over a woman?" "It was a bisque," Jerry mutters in his own defense. It is, as Elaine diagnoses Jerry, a disorder rapidly heading toward outright dementia: "So now you're finding fault at a subatomic level?"

"Seinfeld" was so popular, and so thoroughly unlike what had preceded it on television, that a legion of imitators were introduced over the next few seasons, each hoping to capitalize on its enormous success. Its television shadow was long enough to encompass other near-legendary shows that emerged in its wake. One pictures legions of television executives - close kin to Bob Balaban's fictional NBC president Russell Dalrymple - throwing telephone handsets at their underlings, demanding they be brought the next "Seinfeld." There would be no next "Seinfeld," but there were numerous imitators and impersonators that sought to capture some fleeting measure of the original's quirky magic.

"Ellen" (ABC, 1994-98) began life as "These Friends of Mine," a title so generic it could have been pressed into service as an alternate name for "Seinfeld" - or another show debuting that same season on NBC, "Friends." Eventually, "These Friends of Mine" would be renamed after its star, but it would remain a show about aimless Gen Xers sipping coffee and getting into low-impact scrapes. Star Ellen DeGeneres was, like Seinfeld, another stand-up vet with a charmingly frictionless affect, as if she had just been awoken from an afternoon nap, and a fondness for observational humor.

"Ellen" honors "Seinfeld"'s commandment to elide all emotional content but never connects with audiences until the landmark "The Puppy Episode." Ellen comes out as a lesbian through an experience of the very kind "Seinfeld" is least interested in - a genuine encounter with another human being (played by Laura Dern). "Seinfeld" deflects uncomfortable sensation with humor and aimless chatter; "Ellen" mostly fails to entertain, but on this one occasion, it succeeds by rendering homosexuality less "not that there's anything wrong with that" than another matter for pointed observation. Ellen comes out to her friends, and Joe (David Anthony Higgins) offers his congratulations, then turns to the others: "OK, pay up." This landmark moment in television is also an opportunity to revisit "Cheers"' fondness for relationship-themed betting.

Then there is "Everybody Loves Raymond" (CBS, 1996-2005), with Ray Romano stepping in for Seinfeld as the designated straight man surrounded by eccentrics and paranoids. In this case, the oddballs are all members of Raymond's family, living next door to him and his wife (Patricia Heaton) and doing their best to spoil their version of middle-class Long Island bliss. This being a CBS show, the entire mood of "Raymond" is less subtle, less devoted to wordplay, and more aggressively normal than "Seinfeld" could ever have been. And yet, something of "Seinfeld" lingers in the Kramer-esque convolutions of Brad Garrett as Raymond's police officer brother (who had played Jerry's hectoring mechanic in the "Seinfeld" episode "The Bottle Deposit"), he of the gangly limbs and gravelly voice, and the persistent nagging of Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle as Raymond's irrepressible parents. It is as if Morty and Helen Seinfeld had left Florida to move in with Jerry and refused ever to go home.

"The King of Queens" (CBS, 1998-2007) made so bold as to hijack George's dad, Jerry Stiller, to play star Kevin James's rambunctious father-in-law. The gap between Frank Costanza and Arthur Spooner is so minimal as to be unnoticeable, with King functioning, as a result, as an off-license spinoff of "Seinfeld."

NBC, meanwhile, attempted to recreate the magic time and again, usually with more heart, mostly to indifferent results. There was "The Single Guy" (1995-97), in which Jonathan Silverman's urban ne'er-do-well is surrounded by a passel of quirky friends, including Dan Cortese, who had memorably played Elaine's "mimbo" boyfriend. Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt's Paul and Jamie are like a kinder, gentler Jerry and Elaine on "Mad About You" (1992-99), its aura of Manhattan madness like "The Thin Man" without the mysteries and the martinis. Reiser and Seinfeld even appear to be related, with Jerry's Uncle Leo also Paul's Uncle Arnold, as documented in the "Citizen Kane"-flavored episode "Citizen Buchman." Paul and Jerry are each anxious Jewish men, their fragile equilibrium rattled by the meddling of others. Like Jerry, Paul spends much of his time fending off the well-meaning interventions of his relatives. Like Jerry, Paul's female companion - his wife, in his case - is an outsider to his neurotic Jewish world, a blatant case of mainstream-skewing "shiksappeal."

The two shows share a fascination with the brusqueness of New York living, where even a pregnant woman's trip to the hospital (as in "Mad About You"'s "The Birth") could become a squabble over which expectant mother was first in line for the delivery room. And yet, there the similarities mostly end. Reiser is never the transformational figure Seinfeld was, and his show exists in a lower, less daring register than its inspiration. The entire tone of "Mad About You," its fascination with the relationship dynamics between Reiser and wife Helen Hunt, is downright mushy in comparison with the acerbic "Seinfeld." It would be "Seinfeld," in fact, that would have the definitive last word on the show, when George, having proposed marriage to Susan in "The Engagement," is doomed to a lifetime of snuggling in bed while watching "Mad About You." Hell is Paul Reiser.

Above all, there was "Friends," which numerous critics immediately labeled as a "Seinfeld" knockoff, but which parlayed its predecessor's only-in-New-Yorkness and quirkiness in a less abrasive, more conventional package. "Friends," easily the most successful of the "Seinfeld" acolytes, and the only one to match its popularity, borrows its New York setting and its gang-of-friends dynamic (and "Mad About You"'s quirky waitress Ursula, played by series regular Lisa Kudrow), while ignoring its "no hugging, no learning" aesthetic and its astringent brand of comedy. Could anyone imagine Elaine and Kramer commencing a romance, or George fathering a baby with Susan? "No hugging" gave way to the roundelay of bruised hearts that was "Friends"' bread and butter (about which more in chapter 17).

While most of "Seinfeld"'s imitators celebrated the ordinary, none could capture the comic audacity of its relentless pursuit of the prosaic, or its expert juggling and intertwining of initially divergent subplots. Given that the only show that has ever approached "Seinfeld"'s sophistication is its quasi-successor "Curb Your Enthusiasm," one might presume that this particular form of multistranded sitcom genius is reserved for Larry David alone.

By the latter third of its run, "Seinfeld" was somewhat exhausted by its own commitment to mundanity, even as it continued to occasionally turn out classic episodes and discover untapped nodes of absurdity in new secondary characters such as catalog mogul J. Peterman (John O'Hurley), Elaine's boyfriend Puddy (Patrick Warburton), and George Steinbrenner. Larry David left the show after the seventh season, and "Seinfeld" became, in the words of one David associate, "more postmodern." "I can't spend the rest of my life coming in to this stinking apartment every ten minutes to pore over the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event," Elaine moans. Jerry responds by immediately launching into a story about his trip to the bank. The self-referentiality of "The Pitch" is returned to time and again, if on less inspired terms, with Elaine turning Kramer's meandering stories into sellable material for the J. Peterman catalog, and Kramer peddling the Real Peterman Reality Bus Tour (a play off a similar endeavor by the supposed real-life inspiration for Kramer).

Instead of happy endings, or some "Mary Tyler Moore" huddle of friends, "Seinfeld" decided to go out the way it had come in: rubbing against the grain of the medium that had borne it. Larry David returned to pen "The Finale," "Seinfeld"'s last episode, which is generally considered to be a textbook example of a disappointing conclusion to a beloved television series. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are flying to Paris on NBC's private jet after a new executive expresses interest in Jerry and George's long-discarded sitcom pitch. "Do you think this is the plane that Ted Danson gets?" George wonders, still concerned about his place in the sitcom hierarchy. (In "The Ticket," the episode after "The Pitch," George insists, "I can't live knowing that Ted Danson makes that much more than me.") The plane hits some unexpected fierce turbulence, and George has a confession to make, thoroughly reorienting our understanding of what took place in "The Contest." This is "Seinfeld"'s deepest concern, the truth that emerges when its characters appear to be headed toward an imminent and fiery death: who did or did not secretly cheat during a masturbation contest some five years prior.

During an impromptu layover in Massachusetts, the quartet are arrested for standing by idly and cracking jokes while a man is being held up at gunpoint. "This time," proclaims the district attorney arguing their case, "they are going to be held accountable. This time, they are the ones who will pay."

"Seinfeld" is setting up a belated reckoning for its criminally negligent protagonists, allowing the real world to have its revenge on these clinicians of narcissism. Their victims - the Bubble Boy and Babu and the Soup Nazi and the puffy-shirt designer and Marla the virgin - return to testify to their callousness and cruelty. But even this audacious narrative gambit - a sitcom's characters on trial! - has no effect on the four defendants. We close on them locked into a lone jail cell, the camera receding down a long hallway as Jerry and George discuss the placement of shirt buttons. Astute viewers would remember this as the very first conversation from the very first episode of what was then called "The Seinfeld Chronicles." "Seinfeld" was a closed loop; we ended exactly where we began.

Audiences were furious, and Larry David's next series, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," would devote an entire season to, in effect, apologizing for having left fans in the lurch. But "Seinfeld" had always been about upsetting sitcom viewers used to bland comfort. Its final act was merely the last twist of the knife, reminding audiences that sitcoms no longer existed merely to please them. The joke was on them.

Like the stars of "M*A*S*H" or "Cheers," the "Seinfeld" foursome were weighed down by the burden of their success. How do you top having starred in the defining sitcom of its era? Jerry Seinfeld wisely opted to mostly leave television behind, honing his stand-up act, writing an animated film, and producing a documentary on comedians. He also made a memorable appearance on the third season of "Louie" as Louis C.K.'s backstabbing rival for a late-night talk show host job. Julia Louis-Dreyfus put together the strongest resume of the "Seinfeld" stars. After the short-lived "Watching Ellie" (NBC, 2002-03), she rebounded with a strong guest run as Jason Bateman's love interest and foil on "Arrested Development," and a popular if undistinguished CBS series, "The New Adventures of Old Christine" (2006-10). Louis-Dreyfus went on to win an Emmy as the star of Armando Iannucci's HBO series "Veep" (2012- ), playing an underutilized vice president desperate for some political traction.

Jason Alexander, perhaps the most acclaimed performer of the "Seinfeld" quartet, struck out with each of his next two sitcom efforts, "Bob Patterson" (ABC, 2001), about "America's #3 Self-Help Guru," and "Listen Up" (CBS, 2004-05), costarring "The Cosby Show"'s Malcolm-Jamal Warner. "The Michael Richards Show" (NBC, 2000), reteaming Richards with a team of "Seinfeld" writers, was also a bust. "Seinfeld" was a gilded prison, shackling its stars even as it feted them. The only roles they could truly be suited for, as their triumphant guest run on Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" would prove, was as their "Seinfeld" personae.
Find out more about "Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from 'I Love Lucy' to 'Community'" at Saul Austerlitz's website.
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How 'Seinfeld' Revolutionized The Sitcom

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How 'Seinfeld' Revolutionized The Sitcom " Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from 'I Love Lucy' to 'Community,'" the new book from critic and author Saul Austerlitz ("Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy") officially hits shelves tomorrow, March 1st, courtesy of the Chicago Review Press.

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Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, originally aired on NBC from July 5, 1989 to May 14, 1998. Set predominantly in an apartment bloc in Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York City, the series follows a roster of characters including comedian Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Kramer (Michael Richards) and George (Jason Alexander) as they try to find their place in the postmodern world.

Postmodern is defined as the era after the modern one; various movements in reaction to modernism, typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms or by ironic self-reference and absurdity; or a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language.

Popular examples of postmodern literature include Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho, published in 1991, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, published in 1996, and Don DeLillo's Underworld, published in 1997. Notable examples of postmodern film include Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), whose unfamiliar environment and plot twists challenge our assumptions about human existence, and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), whose jumbled structure challenges our ideas of drama, comedy, and the "happy ending" (considering that all its characters are alive at the end of the movie although some die in the middle).

Like the characters in American Psycho, Seinfeld and his friends can often be described as conniving, dishonest, petty and self-centered. They also face a slew of uniquely first-world problems, such as establishing a friends-with-benefits deal, writing a television pilot, and waiting in line at a Chinese restaurant -- all situations that come from living in a wealthy society in the postmodern era.

Jerry's friends, for the most part, lack any kind of direction. Elaine and George go from job to job, and Kramer -- besides his several business ventures such as Kramerica Industries, one writing effort (a coffee table book about coffee tables) and a few days at H&H Bagels -- never even holds a job.

Although these characters never turn to violence or create an underground boxing ring as the unnamed narrator does in (1999), it is easy to see how they could become disenfranchised with the society that they live in. Perhaps they might adopt violent tactics if their poor choices ever led to harsher consequences.

Like Pulp Fiction and Underworld, Seinfeld is full of allusions to events and other works of popular culture, such as the Son of Sam and Joel Rifkin serial killers, Abscam (a two-year FBI undercover operation that began in 1978 to uncover political corruption), Mary Hart, Lonnie Anderson, the Wiz and Last Tango in Paris (1972).

In "The Bubble Boy," the titular character is based on David Vetter (b. 1971), who was diagnosed with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID). It is ironic that George gets into a fight and ultimately pops the boy's bubble over a game of Trivial Pursuit. They fight over the question, "Who invaded Spain in the eight-century?" Whether the answer is the Moors or the "moops," the question itself is can be seen as irrelevant in the postmodern world.

Advertising and comedic forms of product placement are also notable hallmarks in the show. Like Underworld 's slight alteration of DuPont's advertising slogan, "Better Things for Better Living... Through Chemistry," Kramer improvises a commercial for the fictional scotch, Hennigans, in the "Red Dot." Real-life products like Junior Mints, Snapple and a PEEZ dispenser also make an appearance. These examples satirize the ubiquity of commercialism in the postmodern age.

Underworld depicts a reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviet Union's atomic weapons program. Likewise, Seinfeld features its share of Cold War references: Elaine states that the coffee stain on her shirt resembles Fidel Castro, while Kramer and his friend Mickey (Danny Woodburn) argue the pros and cons of communism after the two take a job as a department store Santa and his helper.

Perhaps the most crucial factor in Seinfeld's success was the decade in which it aired. The 90's were an era of rest and relaxation, as the United States had finally come out on top in the ideological battle with the Soviet Union. Like the characters in Seinfeld, this left the country with little direction for a short time.

Arguably, the most important album of the decade was Nirvana's Nevermind, released in 1991. Its cover, depicting an infant swimming for a dollar bill attached to the end of a fishing pole, is oddly similar to one such predicament involving George and a loaf of marble rye bread. This image perfectly captures the nihilistic mindset of a decade that spawned the "show about nothing."

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How is "Seinfeld" a reflection of the postmodern era and the 1990s mindset | ScreenPrism

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ScreenPrism is the hub for film and TV analysis. Currently, we are building the largest digital library of film and television inquiry and related content by producing original articles, curating content from other esteemed sources and facilitating user generated comment and discussion.

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How many sitcom episodes with an A-plot about masturbation can you name? And to narrow that down, how many multi-cam sitcom episodes have tackled that taboo? Narrow it down further, multi-cam network sitcom episodes? It's gotta be a short list, right? Sure, cable and streaming sitcoms (It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, ) go where network shows don't dare, seemingly more so this year than ever before, but network comedies that aren't tend to steer clear of such bawdy matters to this day. That's why it is downright bananas that , a primetime, network, multi-cam sitcom, did a whole episode about masturbation 25 years ago -and got awards for it!

The Season 4 episode of Seinfeld titled "The Contest" aired a quarter century ago today, on November 18, 1992. Written by series co-creator and current Bernie Sanders lookalike Larry David, the episode is all about self pleasure, arousal and stimulation. And I mean the entire episode is all about sexual solitaire, not just a stray joke or one plot.

This laser-focused episode kicks off when a mortified George ( Jason Alexander) tells his friends a tale of horrific embarrassment.

While stopping off at his parents' house, a Glamour magazine caught George's eye and since his folks weren't home, he decided to (as his mother Estelle later says) "treat his body like an amusement park." Unfortunately for George, his mom caught him in the act, the shock so overwhelming that she fell and hurt her back. After that, George swears off jerking off, which all of his friends immediately call out as impossible. That leads to a contest between the show's four leads to see who can go the longest without doing the deed.

And that's how we get a sitcom episode from 1992 that is 100% about masturbation. To put this in context, here's what also aired the same week as this Seinfeld episode:

Brad and Randy built a human catapult while Tim and Jill fretted about their will on Home Improvement

Doogie Howser tried to get a guy waiting for a heart transplant to give up smoking

Darlene stayed out way too late after going to a rock concert on

And Craig T. Nelson had a run-in with a *gasp* man that makes wedding dresses on

Seinfeld strove to be different from the get-go. While it's often called "a show about nothing," it was really always about something-it's just that Seinfeld's "something" was usually a life experience deemed inconsequential by other sitcoms. Like, how entertaining is trying to find your car in a parking garage or waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant when compared to heart transplants and human catapults? Of course masturbation, a ritual that's done alone and in private ( which shouldn't have to be clarified, but apparently it needs to be in 2017!), is too mundane for other sitcoms to handle.

It was also too taboo. Larry David, who actually won the IRL contest that inspired this episode, was actually too embarrassed to pitch this idea for the first few seasons. He eventually brought it up to Jerry Seinfeld, who was on board, and the show went for it. Of course NBC told them they couldn't actually use the word "masturbation" in this episode. Did that deter the Seinfeld cast and crew? No! They instead came up with euphemisms ("Master of my domain," "King of the county," "Lord of the manor," "Queen of the castle") that have entered the pop culture lexicon.

"The Contest" is masterful in how singularly focused it is, and it's even more remarkable that they stuck with this all-encompassing self-pleasure plot after NBC told them they couldn't even use the one word they needed to use. All four characters encounter temptation: neighbors Jerry and Kramer ( Michael Richards) are tormented from afar by a nudist in the apartment building across the street, George schedules visits to his mother's hospital room so he can watch the girl-on-girl sponge-bath action going on next to her, and Elaine ( Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is put in close proximity to a sweaty John F. Kennedy Jr., quite possibly the sexiest man of the early '90s. They're tempted throughout, and Kramer-after getting one look at the nudist neighbor-is the first to cave.

Think about how insane this is: this might be the first time in TV history that a show asked viewers to picture one of the lead characters masturbating off-camera! Kramer leaves Jerry's apartment in a skittish hurry and returns a minute later, slapping money down on the counter. He just did it, and it's essential to the show's plot and this fantastic joke that you know that he just did it.

It's also wild (and progressive!) that the show comes down firmly on the pro-masturbation side. Obviously! It should! Whatever hang-ups there are about self stimulation, these four don't have them. The self-love drought causes Jerry, George, and Elaine to lose their minds (George accuses Jerry of stealing socks) and plenty of sleep. The episode includes montages of the cast trying to sleep, with only those that have lost the contest getting any rest.

The show doesn't just skate by on it's risqué subject matter, although it easily could have. Any show doing an entire episode devoted to masturbating would have easily been the talk around ever water-cooler on November 19, 1992. This episode is a classic because it's a tour de force for all four cast members, as the pressure of the contest gets to them. The way Jason Alexander chokes on the air the instant the sponge-bath starts, the way Michael Richards' totally liberated energy clashes with a hilariously tense Jerry (" I can't sleep. I can't leave the house. I'm here, I'm climbing the walls! Meanwhile, I'm dating a virgin, I'm in this contest. Something's gotta give! ").

Louis-Dreyfus is, of course, a joy in this episode, as Elaine descends into manic aggression the instant she hears that John-John asked about her. The embarrassment on her face when she sheepishly places her money on the counter and names her sexual kryptonite, it's fantastic.

This gutsy, fearless episode won Larry David an Emmy, and also earned David and director Tom Cherones WGA and DGA awards, respectively. TV Guide also named "The Contest" the greatest TV episode ever in 2009. The episode is still great 25 years later, an example of boundary-pushing comedy writing that feels fresh and more in line with the shows of today than those from 1992. This is an episode all about delayed pleasure that is pleasing from beginning to end.
Where to stream Seinfeld

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'Seinfeld's' "The Contest" Is Still Master Of Its Domain 25 Years Later

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How many sitcom episodes with an A-plot about masturbation can you name? And to narrow that down, how many multi-cam sitcom episodes have tackled that taboo? Narrow it down further, multi-cam network sitcom episodes? It's gotta be a short list, right?

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Seinfeld is an American sitcom television series created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld for NBC. The show stars Seinfeld as a fictionalized version of himself, and mostly focuses on his personal life with a handful of friends and acquaintances, including best friend George Costanza ( Jason Alexander), friend and former girlfriend Elaine Benes ( Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and neighbor across the hall Cosmo Kramer ( Michael Richards). Seinfeld is set predominantly in an apartment building in Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York City. It is often described as being "a show about nothing", as many of its episodes are about the minutiae of daily life.

Seinfeld was produced by West-Shapiro Productions and Castle Rock Entertainment and ran from 1989 to 1998. In syndication, the series is distributed by Sony Pictures Television. It was largely written by David and Seinfeld with script writers who included Larry Charles, Peter Mehlman, Gregg Kavet, Carol Leifer, David Mandel, Jeff Schaffer, Steve Koren, Jennifer Crittenden, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Dan O'Keefe, Charlie Rubin, Marjorie Gross, Alec Berg, Elaine Pope, and Spike Feresten. A favorite among critics, the series led the Nielsen ratings in seasons six and nine, and finished among the top two (with NBC's ) every year from 1994 to 1998.

Seinfeld is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential sitcoms of all time. It has been ranked among the best television shows of all time in publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and . The show's most renowned episodes include " The Chinese Restaurant", " The Parking Garage", and " The Contest". In 2013, the Writers Guild of America voted it the No. 2 Best Written TV Series of All Time (second to The Sopranos). E! named the series the "Number 1 reason the '90s ruled", and quotes from numerous episodes have become catchphrases in popular culture.

Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) - Jerry is a "minor celeb" stand-up comedian who is often depicted as "the voice of reason" amidst the general insanity generated by the people in his world. The in-show character is a mild germaphobe and neat freak, as well as an avid Superman, New York Mets and breakfast cereal fan. Jerry's apartment is the center of a world visited by his eccentric friends and a focus of the show.

Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) - Elaine is Jerry's ex-girlfriend and later friend. She is attractive and genial, while also being humorous, arrogant and occasionally impulsive. She sometimes has a tendency to be too honest with people (usually by losing her temper), which often gets her into trouble. She usually gets caught up in her boyfriends' quirks, eccentric employers' unusual behaviors and idiosyncrasies, and the maladjustment of total strangers. She tends to make poor choices in men she chooses to date and is often overly reactive. First she works at Pendant Publishing with Mr. Lippman, is later hired as a personal assistant for Mr. Pitt, and later works for the J. Peterman catalogue as a glorified assistant. Elaine is popularly described as an amalgamation of David's and Seinfeld's girlfriends during their early days in New York as struggling comedians.

Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) - Kramer is Jerry's lovable rogue neighbor. His trademarks include his humorous upright pompadour hairstyle, vintage clothes, and energetic sliding bursts through Jerry's apartment door. Kramer was heavily based on a neighbor of David's during his amateur comedic years in Manhattan. At times, he appears naïve, gullible, and ignorant, and at other times, intelligent, understanding, and well-read; similarly, he is exaggeratedly successful, socially, with his charisma and laid-back personality. This is seen in his success with women and employers. He has been described as a "hipster doofus". Although he never holds a steady job, he is rarely short of money and often invents wacky schemes that often work at first then eventually fail. Kramer is longtime friends with Newman, and they work well together despite their differences.

George Costanza (Jason Alexander) - George is Jerry's best friend, and has been since high school. He is miserly, dishonest, petty and envious of others' achievements. He is depicted as a loser who is perpetually insecure about his capabilities. He complains and lies easily about his profession, relationships and almost everything else, which usually creates trouble for him later. He often uses the alias Art Vandelay when lying or concocting a cover story. Despite these shortcomings, George has a sense of loyalty to his friends and success in dating women and eventually secures a successful career as Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the New York Yankees.

Many characters have made multiple appearances, like Jerry's nemesis Newman and his Uncle Leo. In addition to recurring characters, Seinfeld features numerous celebrities who appear as themselves or girlfriends, boyfriends, bosses and other acquaintances. Many actors who made guest appearances became household names later in their careers, or were already well known.

Many Seinfeld episodes are based on the writers' real-life experiences, with the experiences reinterpreted for the characters' storylines. For example, George's storyline, " The Revenge", is based on Larry David's experience at Saturday Night Live. " The Contest" is also based on David's experiences. " The Smelly Car" storyline is based on Peter Mehlman's lawyer friend, who could not get a bad smell out of his car. " The Strike" is based on Dan O'Keefe's dad, who made up his own holiday- Festivus. Other stories take on a variety of turns. " The Chinese Restaurant" consists of George, Jerry and Elaine waiting for a table throughout the entire episode. " The Boyfriend", revolving around Keith Hernandez, extends through 2 episodes. " The Betrayal" is famous for using reverse chronology, and was inspired by a similar plot device in a Harold Pinter play, Betrayal. Some stories were inspired by headlines and rumors, as explained in the DVD features "Notes About Nothing", "Inside Look", and "Audio Commentary". In " The Maestro", Kramer's lawsuit is roughly similar to the McDonald's coffee case. " The Outing" is based primarily on rumors that Larry Charles heard about Jerry Seinfeld's sexuality.

The series was often described as "a show about nothing". However, Seinfeld in 2014 stated "the pitch for the show, the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it's the opposite of that." Much of the show's humor is based upon repeated use of irony, incongruity, and (oftentimes unfortunate) coincidence(s) as plot devices for many of the individual episodes' plots and humorous moments.

Seinfeld broke several conventions of mainstream television. Larry David is credited with refusing to follow the predictable sitcom formula that would have a blossoming romantic relationship develop between Jerry and Elaine. The show offers no growth or reconciliation to its characters. It eschews sentimentality. An episode is typically driven by humor interspersed with the superficial conflicts of characters with peculiar dispositions. Many episodes revolve around the characters' involvement in the lives of others with typically disastrous results. On the set, the notion that the characters should not develop or improve throughout the series was expressed as the "no hugging, no learning" rule. Also unlike most sitcoms, there are no moments of pathos; the audience is never made to feel sorry for any of the characters. Even Susan's death elicits no genuine emotions from anybody in the show. Seinfeld does not shy away from making light of tough topics, from death to illness to handicaps.

The characters are "thirty-something singles with vague identities, no roots, and conscious indifference to morals". Usual conventions, like isolating the characters from the actors playing them and separating the characters' world from that of the actors and audience, were broken. One such example is the story arc where the characters promote a TV sitcom series named Jerry. The show within a show, Jerry, was much like Seinfeld in that it was "about nothing" and Seinfeld played himself. The fictional Jerry was launched in the season four finale, but unlike Seinfeld, it wasn't picked up as a series. Jerry is one of many examples of metafiction in the show. There are no fewer than twenty-two fictional movies featured, like Rochelle, Rochelle. Because of these several elements, Seinfeld became the first TV series since Monty Python's Flying Circus to be widely described as postmodern.

Jerry Seinfeld is an avid Abbott and Costello fan, and has cited the Abbott and Costello Show as an influence on Seinfeld. "Everybody on the show knows I'm a fan. We're always joking about how we do stuff from their show. George and I will often get into a riff that has the rhythm from the old Abbott and Costello shows. And sometimes I'll hit George in the chest the way Abbott would hit Costello." The series includes numerous references to the team. George Costanza's middle name is "Louis," after Costello. " The Old Man" episode features a cantankerous character named "Sid Fields" as a tribute to the landlord on the team's TV show. Kramer's friend is named Mickey Abbott. A copywriter for the J. Peterman catalog is named Eddie Sherman, after the team's longtime agent. In Episode 30, Kramer hears the famous Abbott and Costello line, "His father was a mudder. His mother was a mudder."

Many terms were coined, popularized, or re-popularized in the series' run and have become part of popular culture. Notable catchphrases and terms include:

The lexicon of Seinfeldian code words and recurring phrases that evolved around particular episodes is referred to as Seinlanguage, the title of Jerry Seinfeld's best-selling book on humor.

A signature of Seinfeld is its theme music. Composed by Jonathan Wolff, it consists of distinct solo sampled bass synthesizer riffs (played on a Korg M1 synthesizer) which open the show and connect the scenes, often accompanied by beatboxing. The bass synthesizer music eventually replaced the original piano/synth music by Jep Epstein when it was played again after the first broadcast of the pilot episode. The show lacked a traditional title track and the riffs were played over the first moments of dialogue or action. They vary throughout each episode and are played in an improvised funk style. An additional musical theme with an ensemble, led by a synthesized mid-range brass instrument, ends each episode.

In " The Note", the first episode of season three, the bumper music featured a scatting female jazz singer who sang a phrase that sounded like "easy to beat". Jerry Seinfeld and executive producer Larry David both liked Wolff's additions, and three episodes were produced with this new style music. However, they had neglected to inform NBC and Castle Rock executives of the change, and when the season premiere aired, the executives were surprised and unimpressed, and requested that they return to the original style. The subsequent two episodes were redone, leaving this episode as the only one with additional music elements. In the commentary of "The Note", Louis-Dreyfus facetiously suggests it was removed because the perceived lyric related closely to the low ratings at the time.

In the final three seasons, the bits were tweaked slightly with more frantic rhythms; a bass guitar was added in addition to the sampled bass from earlier seasons. Throughout the show, the main theme could be restyled in different ways depending on the episode. For instance, in "The Betrayal", part of which takes place in India, the theme is heard played on a sitar.

Seinfeld stood out from family and group sitcoms of its time. The principal characters are not related by family or work connections but remain distinctively close friends throughout the series.

Many characters were based primarily on Seinfeld's and David's real-life acquaintances. Two prominent recurring characters were based on well-known people: Jacopo Peterman of the J. Peterman catalog (based on John Peterman), and George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees. Many characters were introduced as new writers got involved with Seinfeld. Other characters based on real people include the Soup Nazi and Jackie Chiles, who was based on Johnnie Cochran.

Seinfeld follows its own structure: story thread is presented at the beginning of every episode, which involves the characters starting in their own situations. Rapid scene-shifts between plot lines bring the stories together. Even though it does not follow a pattern as other sitcoms, the characters' stories variously intertwine in each episode. Despite the separate plot strands, the narratives reveal the creators' "consistent efforts to maintain the intimacy" among the small cast of characters.

The show maintains a strong sense of continuity-characters and plots from past episodes are often referenced or expanded on. Occasionally, story arcs span multiple episodes and even entire seasons, the most memorable being season four, which revolved around the pilot pitch to NBC by Jerry and George. Another example is Jerry's girlfriend Vanessa, who appears in " The Stake Out" and he ends the relationship when things do not work out in " The Stock Tip". Other examples are Kramer getting his jacket back and Elaine heading the "Peterman catalog". Larry David, the head writer and executive producer for the first seven seasons, was praised for keeping a close eye on minor details and making sure the main characters' lives remained consistent and believable. Curb Your Enthusiasm-David's later comedy series-expanded on this idea by following a specific theme for all but one season in the series.

A major difference between Seinfeld and sitcoms which preceded it is that the principal characters never learn from their mistakes. In effect, they are indifferent and even callous towards the outside world and sometimes one another. A mantra of the show's producers was: "No hugging, no learning". Entertainment Weekly's TV critic Ken Tucker has described them as "a group dynamic rooted in jealousy, rage, insecurity, despair, hopelessness, and a touching lack of faith in one's fellow human beings". This leads to very few happy endings, except at somebody else's expense. More often in every episode, situations resolve with characters getting a justly deserved comeuppance.

The show premiered as The Seinfeld Chronicles on July 5, 1989. After it aired, a pickup by NBC seemed unlikely and the show was offered to Fox, which declined to pick it up. Rick Ludwin, head of late night and special events for NBC, however, diverted money from his budget by canceling a Bob Hope television special, and the next 4 episodes were filmed. These episodes were highly rated as they followed summer re-runs of on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m., and the series was finally picked up. At one point NBC considered airing these episodes on Saturdays at 10:30 p.m., but gave that slot to a short-lived sitcom called FM. The series was renamed simply Seinfeld after the failure of short-lived 1990 ABC series The Marshall Chronicles. After airing the remaining four episodes of its first season the summer of 1990, NBC ordered thirteen more episodes. Larry David believed that he and Jerry Seinfeld had no more stories to tell, and advised Seinfeld to turn down the order, but Seinfeld agreed to the additional episodes. Season two was bumped off its scheduled premiere of January 16, 1991, due to the outbreak of the (Persian) Gulf War. It settled into a regular time slot on Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. and eventually flipped with veteran series Night Court to 9:00.

TV critics championed Seinfeld in its early seasons, even as it was slow to cultivate a substantial audience. For the first three seasons, Jerry's stand-up comedy act would bookend an episode, even functioning as cut scenes during the show. A few episodes set a benchmark for later seasons. " The Deal" establishes Jerry and Elaine's relationship by setting rules about sleeping together and remaining friends. " The Parking Garage" was the first episode shot with no audience for the episode and, after " The Chinese Restaurant", with not showing Jerry's apartment. " The Keys" contains a crossover to CBS show Murphy Brown, marking the first such cooperation between rival networks. " The Busboy" introduces George, Kramer and Elaine as having their own storylines for the first time. Although Castle Rock Entertainment's Glenn Padnick thought Jerry Seinfeld was too generous, showcasing his co-stars' comedic talent became a trademark throughout the series.

Larry Charles wrote an episode for season two, "The Bet", in which Elaine buys a gun from Kramer's friend. This episode wasn't filmed because the content was deemed unacceptable, and was replaced by the episode " The Phone Message". " The Stranded", aired in season three, was intended for season two. In the beginning of this episode, Jerry clears up the continuity error over George's real estate job.

Season four marked the sitcom's entry into the Nielsen ratings Top 30, coinciding with several popular episodes, such as " The Bubble Boy" in which George and the bubble boy argue over Trivial Pursuit, and " The Junior Mint" in which Jerry and Kramer accidentally fumble a mint in the operating room. This was the first season to use a story arc of Jerry and George creating their own sitcom, Jerry. Also at this time, the use of Jerry's stand-up act slowly declined, and the stand-up segment in the middle of Seinfeld episodes was cut.

Much publicity followed the controversial episode, " The Contest", an Emmy Award-winning episode written by co-creator Larry David, whose subject matter was considered inappropriate for prime time network TV. To circumvent this taboo, the word " masturbation" was never used in the script, instead substituted for by a variety of oblique references. Midway through that season, Seinfeld was moved from its original 9:00 p.m. time slot on Wednesdays to 9:30 p.m. on Thursdays, following again, which gave the show even more popularity. Ratings also sparked the move, as Tim Allen's sitcom Home Improvement on ABC had aired at the same time and Improvement kept beating Seinfeld in the ratings. NBC moved the series after Ted Danson announced the end of Cheers and Seinfeld quickly surpassed the ratings of the 9:00 p.m. Cheers reruns that spring. The show won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993, beating out its family-oriented, time-slot competitor Home Improvement, which was only in its second season on rival network ABC.

Season five was an even bigger ratings-hit, consisting of popular episodes, such as " The Puffy Shirt" in which Jerry feels embarrassed wearing a "pirate" shirt on The Today Show, " The Non-Fat Yogurt" featuring Rudy Giuliani, the Republican then-mayor-elect of New York, and " The Opposite" in which George, doing the opposite of what his instincts tell him he should do, lands a job with the New York Yankees and Elaine leaves "Pendant Publishing" because of a comedy of errors that lead to its demise. Another story arc has George returning to live with his parents. In the midst of the story arc, Kramer creates and promotes his coffee table book. The show was again nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series, but lost to the Cheers spin-off , then in its first season. Seinfeld was nominated for the same award every year for its entire run but, after its win at the 45th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1994, always lost to Frasier, which went on to win a record thirty-nine Emmy Awards in its eleven-season run.

In season six, Andy Ackerman replaced Tom Cherones as director of the show. The series remained well-regarded and produced some of its most famous episodes, such as " The Beard" in which Jerry is put through a lie detector test to make him admit that he watched Melrose Place, " The Switch" in which Kramer's mom, Babs, reveals that his first name is Cosmo, and " The Understudy" in which Elaine meets J. Peterman for the first time. Story arcs used in this season were Elaine working as a personal assistant to her eccentric boss Justin Pitt and George's parents' temporary separation. This was the first season in which Seinfeld reached No. 1 in the Nielsen Ratings. The use of Jerry's stand-up act declined with the end stand-up segment no longer appearing, as the storylines for all four characters grew denser.

In season seven, a story arc involved George getting engaged to his ex-girlfriend, Susan Ross, after the pilot Jerry proved unsuccessful. In it, George spends most of the season regretting and trying to get out of the engagement. Along with the regular half-hour episodes, two notable one-hour episodes were " The Cadillac" in which George plans to date award-winning actor Marisa Tomei and " The Bottle Deposit" with Elaine and Sue Ellen participating in a bidding war to buy JFK's golf clubs in an auction.

The show's ratings were still going strong in its final two seasons. Larry David left at the end of season seven, although he continued to voice Steinbrenner, so Seinfeld assumed David's duties as showrunner, and, under the direction of a new writing staff, Seinfeld became a faster-paced show. The show no longer contained extracts of Jerry performing stand-up comedy-Jerry had no time or energy for this with his new responsibilities-and storylines occasionally delved into fantasy and broad humor. For example, in " The Bizarro Jerry", Elaine is torn between exact opposites of her friends and Jerry dates a woman who has the now-famed "man hands". Some notable episodes from season eight include " The Little Kicks" showing Elaine's horrible dancing, and " The Chicken Roaster" which portrays the Kenny Rogers Roasters chicken restaurant which opened during that time. A story arc in this season involves Peterman going to Burma in " The Foundation" until he recovered from a nervous breakdown in " The Money", followed by Elaine writing Peterman's biography in " The Van Buren Boys", which leads to Kramer's parody of Kenny Kramer's Reality Tour seen in " The Muffin Tops".

The final season included episodes like " The Merv Griffin Show" in which Kramer converts his apartment into a talk-show studio and plays the character of talk-show host, " The Betrayal" that presents in reverse chronological order what happened to Sue Ellen's wedding in India, and " The Frogger" in which George pushes a machine across the street, mimicking the action of the game itself. The last season included a story arc in which Elaine has an on/off relationship with Puddy. Despite the enormous popularity and willingness of the cast to return for a tenth season, Seinfeld decided to end the show after season nine, believing he would thereby be able to ensure the show would maintain its quality and go out on top. NBC offered him over $100 million for a tenth season, but Seinfeld declined.

A major controversy caused in this final season was the accidental burning of a Puerto Rican flag by Kramer in " The Puerto Rican Day". This scene caused a furor among Puerto Ricans, and as a result, NBC showed this episode only once. Jerry Seinfeld defused the protestors by not letting this episode continue in syndication, as revealed in "Inside Look" on DVD. However, the episode would be added to the syndicated rerun package several years later uncut.

After nine years on the air, NBC and Jerry Seinfeld announced on December 25, 1997, that the series would end production the following spring in 1998. The announcement made the front page of the major New York newspapers, including the New York Times. Jerry Seinfeld was featured on the cover of magazine's first issue of 1998. The series ended with a seventy-five-minute episode (cut to 60 minutes in syndication, in two parts) written by co-creator and ex-executive producer Larry David, which aired on May 14, 1998. Before the finale, a forty-five-minute retrospective clip show, " The Chronicle", was aired. The retrospective was expanded to an hour after the original airing and aired again on NBC as an hour-long episode, and has since aired in syndication.

It was the first episode since the finale of season seven, " The Invitations", to feature opening and closing stand-up comedy acts by Jerry Seinfeld. The finale was filmed before an audience of NBC executives and friends of the show. The press and public were shut out of the taping in order to keep its plot secret; those who attended the shoot of the final episode were required to sign written "vows of silence". The secrecy only seemed to increase speculation about how the series would end. The producers of the show tweaked the media about the hype, spreading a false rumor about Newman ending up in the hospital and Jerry and Elaine sitting in a chapel, presumably to marry.

The final episode enjoyed a historic audience, estimated at 76.3 million viewers (58% of all viewers that night) making it the fourth most watched regular series finale in U.S. TV history, behind , and The Fugitive. However, the finale received mixed reviews from critics and fans of the show. The finale poked fun at the many rumors that were circulating, seeming to move into multiple supposed plots before settling on its true storyline-a lengthy trial where the gang is prosecuted for violating a " Duty to Rescue" law and sentenced to prison terms.

According to magazine, Jerry Seinfeld's earnings from the show in 1998 came to US$267 million, including syndication earnings. He refused NBC's offer of $5 million per episode, or over $100 million total, to continue the show into a tenth season. The offer NBC made to Seinfeld was over three times higher per episode than anyone on TV had ever been offered before. Seinfeld told the network that he was not married nor had children, and wished to focus on his personal life. As reported in July 2007, he was the second-highest earner in the TV industry, earning at the time $60 million a year. The show became the first TV series to command over $1 million a minute for advertising-a mark previously attained only by the Super Bowl.

According to Barry Meyer, chairman of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Seinfeld made $2.7 billion through June 2010. As of February 2017 the show has made an estimated $4.06 billion in syndication. Steve Bannon, who invested in the show, later said, "We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication. We were wrong by a factor of five". In September 2019, it was announced Viacom had acquired cable syndication rights to the series, with it airing on Paramount Network, Comedy Central and TV Land beginning in October 2021.

Seinfeld began as a twenty-three-minute pilot titled The Seinfeld Chronicles. Created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, developed by NBC executive Rick Ludwin, and produced by Castle Rock Entertainment, it was a mix of Seinfeld's stand-up comedy routines and idiosyncratic, conversational scenes focusing on mundane aspects of everyday life like laundry, the buttoning of the top button on one's shirt and the effort by men to properly interpret the intent of women spending the night in Seinfeld's apartment.

The pilot was filmed at Stage 8 of Desilu Cahuenga studios, the same studio where The Dick Van Dyke Show was filmed (this was seen by the crew as a good omen), and was recorded at Ren-Mar Studios in Hollywood. The pilot was first screened to a group of two dozen NBC executives in Burbank, California in early 1989. It didn't yield the explosion of laughter garnered by the pilots for the decade's previous NBC successes like The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls. Brandon Tartikoff was not convinced that the show would work. A Jewish man from New York himself, Tartikoff characterized it as "Too New York, too Jewish" (a sentiment which would also lead to the Cosmo character's later surname change from the more Jewish-sounding Kessler to Kramer). Test audiences were even harsher. NBC's practice at the time was to recruit 400 households by phone to ask them to evaluate pilots it aired on an unused channel on its cable system. An NBC research department memo summarized the pilot's performance among the respondents as "weak", which Warren Littlefield, then second-in-command in NBC's entertainment division, called "a dagger to the heart". Comments included, "You can't get too excited about two guys going to the laundromat"; "Jerry's loser friend George isn't a forceful character"; "Jerry needs a stronger supporting cast"; and "Why are they interrupting the stand-up for these stupid stories?" Seinfeld and David didn't see the memo for several years, but after they became aware of it, they hung it in a bathroom on the set. Seinfeld comments, "We thought, if someone goes in to use this bathroom, this is something they should see. It fits that moment."

Around the time the show's pilot was filmed, Castle Rock Entertainment, which produced the show, had also produced another pilot for NBC that featured Ann Jillian in her almost-similarly eponymous TV series. After The Seinfeld Chronicles tested poorly among audiences, Castle Rock then devoted their focus to Jillian's series, which tested better with audiences and received a full-season order. Ann Jillian would last only a single season of 13 episodes and would be off the air by the end of 1990.

When NBC announced its 1989-90 primetime schedule in May 1989, The Seinfeld Chronicles was not included, but supporters of the show didn't give up on it. The pilot first aired on July 5, 1989, and finished second in its time slot against the CBS police drama Jake and the Fatman, receiving a Nielsen rating of 10.9/19. The ratings didn't exhibit regional skew that Tartikoff predicted, much to the encouragement of the show's supporters. Despite the poor test results, Ludwin cancelled one of the Bob Hope specials budgeted for that season so that the entertainment division had the money to order four more episodes of The Seinfeld Chronicles, which formed the rest of the show's first season (the series was by then retitled to just Seinfeld); a move without which Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal later stated there would be no Seinfeld. Although this was a very low order number for a new series (the smallest sitcom order in TV history), Castle Rock failed to find any other buyers when it shopped the show to other networks, and accepted the order. The show was renamed simply Seinfeld, but it wouldn't return to the airwaves until May 30, 1990, and it would be another three years before it became a Top 5-rated show. Preston Beckman, who was in charge of NBC's research department at the time, reminisced, "The show was different. Nobody had seen anything like it. It wasn't unusual for poor-testing shows to get on the air, but it was very rare that they became hits."

When it was first repeated on July 5, 1990, it received a rating of 13.9/26. These ratings were high enough to secure a second season. NBC research showed that the show was popular with young male adults, a demographic sought after by advertisers. This gave NBC an incentive to keep broadcasting the show. One DVD reviewer, Britt Gillette, wrote that "this initial episode exhibits the flashes of brilliance that made Seinfeld a cultural phenomenon."

High-definition versions

There are two high-definition versions of Seinfeld. The first is that of the network TV (non-syndicated) versions in the original aspect ratio of 4:3 that were downscaled for the DVD releases. Syndicated broadcast stations and the cable network TBS began airing the syndicated version of Seinfeld in HD. Unlike the version used for the DVD, Sony Pictures cropped the top and bottom parts of the frame, while restoring previously cropped images on the sides, from the 35mm film source, to use the entire 16:9 frame.

Elizabeth Magnotta and Alexandra Strohl analyze the success of Seinfeld with recourse to the incongruity theory of humor: "The Incongruity Theory claims that humor is created out of a violation of an expectation. For humor to result from this unexpected result, the event must have an appropriate emotional climate, comprised of the setting, characters, prior discourse, relationships of the characters, and the topic." Specifically, Magnotta and Strohl focus on " The Marine Biologist", where George is embroiled in yet another lie, and on " The Red Dot", where George tries to save a few dollars at Elaine's expense by giving her a marked-down cashmere sweater.

Seinfeld has not reached the same level of popularity around the globe as it has reached in America. In "Translating Seinfeld", Jennifer Armstrong notes that Seinfeld's unique style of humor is apparently "too cultural and word-based to make for easy translation". Carol Iannone sums up the legacy of this American hit in her Modern Age article " Seinfeld: The Politically Incorrect Comedy" when she says, "It may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art".

Nod Miller, of the University of East London, has discussed the self-referential qualities of the show:

Seinfeld is suffused with postmodern themes. To begin with, the boundary between reality and fiction is frequently blurred: this is illustrated in the central device of having Jerry Seinfeld play the character Jerry Seinfeld. In the show's fourth season, several episodes revolved around the narrative of Jerry and George (whose character is co-creator Larry David's alter ego) pitching 'a show about nothing' based on the everyday life of a stand-up comedian to NBC. The reaction of the fictional NBC executives, by all accounts, mirrored the initial responses of those who eventually commissioned Seinfeld. The fourth season ends with 'The Pilot', an episode focusing on the casting, taping and screening of the show-within-the-show, Jerry. This episode also illustrates neatly the self-referential quality which is one of Seinfeld's hallmarks. The series finale was so replete with references to earlier shows as to render it largely incomprehensible to those not already well-versed in the personae and preoccupations of the Seinfeld universe.

William Irwin has edited an anthology of scholarly essays on philosophy in Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing. Some entries include "The Jerry Problem and the Socratic Problem", "George's Failed Zest for Happiness: An Aristotelian Analysis", "Elaine's Moral Character", "Kramer the 'Seducer'", "Making Something Out of Nothing: Seinfeld, Sophistry and the Tao", "Seinfeld, Subjectivity, and Sartre", "Mr. Peterman, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Me", and "Minimally Decent Samaritans and Uncommon Law".

Seinfeld has received awards and nominations in various categories throughout the mid-1990s. It was awarded the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993, Golden Globe Award for Best TV-Series (Comedy) in 1994 and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 1995, 1997 and 1998. Apart from these, the show was also nominated for an Emmy award from 1992 to 1998 for Outstanding Comedy series, Golden Globe award from 1994 to 1998 for Best TV-Series (Comedy), and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series from 1995 to 1998.

named it the greatest TV show of all time in 2002. and in 2013, the magazine ranked it as the second greatest TV show. A 2015 The Hollywood Reporter survey of 2,800 actors, producers, directors, and other industry people named Seinfeld as their #5 favorite show.

A recurring feature of Seinfeld was its inclusion of specific products, especially candy, as plot points. These might be a central feature of a plot (e.g., Junior Mints, Twix, Chuckles, Jujyfruits, bite size Three Musketeers, Snickers, Nestlé Chunky, Oh Henry!, Drake's Coffee Cake and PEZ), or an association of candy with a guest character (e.g. Oh Henry! bars) or simply a conversational aside (e.g., Chuckles, Clark Bar, Twinkies). A large number of non-candy products were also featured throughout the series.

The show's creators claim that they weren't engaging in a product placement strategy for commercial gain. One motivation for the use of real-world products, quite unrelated to commercial considerations, is the comedy value of funny-sounding phrases and words. "I knew I wanted Kramer to think of watching the operation like going to see a movie", explained Seinfeld writer/producer Andy Robin in an interview published in The Hollywood Reporter. "At first, I thought maybe a piece of popcorn falls into the patient. I ran that by my brother, and he said, 'No, Junior Mints are just funnier.'"

Many advertisers capitalized on the popularity of Seinfeld. American Express created a webisode where Jerry Seinfeld and an animated Superman (voiced by Patrick Warburton, who played the role of Puddy) starred in its commercial. The makers of the Today Sponge created the "Spongeworthy" game, on their website, inspired by " The Sponge". An advertisement featured Jason Alexander in a Chrysler commercial. In this, Alexander acts much like his character George, and his relationship with Lee Iacocca plays on his George's relationship with Steinbrenner. Similarly, Michael Richards was the focus of a series of advertisements for Vodafone which ran in Australia where he dressed and acted exactly like Kramer, including the trademark bumbling pratfalls.

In addition, the show occasionally incorporated fictional products like a Scotch brand called "Hennigan's" (a portmanteau of " Hennessy" and " Brannigans") and a canned meat product called "Beef-a-reeno" (a parody of " Beef-a-roni").

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released all nine seasons of Seinfeld on DVD in Regions 1, 2 and 4 between 2004 and 2007. On November 6, 2007, Seinfeld: The Complete Series was released on DVD. The complete series box set includes a 2007 "roundtable" reunion of the four main cast members and Larry David; only highlights of this were also included in the Season 9 set.

On April 29, 2015, it was officially announced, during Hulu's upfronts presentation in New York, that all nine seasons of Seinfeld would be available for online streaming, via the video service, starting in June 2015. The news was first reported by and , citing the deal at around $130 million to $180 million. On May 20, 2015, Hulu announced that every episode would be available starting June 24, 2015.

Prime Video (UK)

In January 2017, Amazon acquired the UK rights to all seasons of Seinfeld for its Prime Video streaming service.

Stan (Australia)

On November 8, 2016, the Australian streaming service Stan announced via Twitter that later in the week all episodes would be available to stream for the first time in Australia. All episodes were available from November 11, 2016 with the remastered versions of all episodes on the service featuring HD and Widescreen enhancements. The widescreen offered was cropped from the original 4:3 format negatives, thus resulting in better visual quality than the previously available DVD version, however, the top and bottom portions of the frame were cut out to achieve the widescreen aspect ratio.

In September 2019, Netflix and Sony Pictures announced that Netflix had acquired the exclusive global streaming rights for Seinfeld, starting in 2021, superseding the above Hulu and Amazon rights. When it airs, Netflix's version of Seinfeld will be available in 4K resolution via a new scan from the original 35mm film source.

On the November 1, 2007, episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld mentioned the possibility of shooting one last scene, after the characters leave jail. He mentioned that he was too busy to do it at the time, but didn't announce what the scene would entail, as its production isn't a certainty.

In commentary from the final season DVD, Seinfeld outlines that he and Jason Alexander spoke about this scene being in Monk's Cafe, with George saying "That was brutal" in reference to the foursome's stint in prison.

On an episode of Saturday Night Live that Jerry Seinfeld hosted on October 2, 1999, a sketch was produced that showed what life was like for Jerry behind bars after being transferred to the fictional prison portrayed on the HBO series . The roughly four-minute sketch shows the opening credits for the HBO series with clips of Jerry mixed in doing various activities around the prison. The sketch continues and mixes in different story lines from both Oz and Seinfeld and has Jerry interacting with various characters from the show in his typical quick-witted, sarcastic way.

Louis-Dreyfus, Alexander, and Richards have all tried to launch new sitcoms as title-role characters. Almost every show was canceled quickly, usually within the first season. This gave rise to the term Seinfeld curse: the failure of a sitcom starring one of the three, despite the conventional wisdom that each person's Seinfeld popularity should almost guarantee a strong, built-in audience for the actor's new show. Shows specifically cited regarding the Seinfeld curse are Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Watching Ellie, Jason Alexander's Bob Patterson and , and Michael Richards' The Michael Richards Show.

This phenomenon was mentioned throughout the second season of Larry David's HBO program Curb Your Enthusiasm, which aired in 2001. In real life, David has repeatedly dismissed the idea of a curse, saying, "It's so completely idiotic. It's very hard to have a successful sitcom."

The success of Louis-Dreyfus in the 2006-2010 CBS sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine, which included winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2006, led many to believe that she had broken the curse. In her acceptance speech, Louis-Dreyfus held up her award and exclaimed, "I'm not somebody who really believes in curses, but curse this, baby!" The show produced enough episodes to air in reruns in syndication for several years, something the other shows did not achieve. The Saturday Night Live episode guest-hosted by Louis-Dreyfus made references to the curse. She went on to win six further Lead Actress in a Comedy Emmys for her acclaimed performance as Vice President Selina Meyer in the HBO comedy series .

Early in March 2009, it was announced that the Seinfeld cast would reunite for season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The cast first appeared in the third episode of the season, all playing their real life selves. The season-long story is that Larry David tries to initiate a Seinfeld reunion show as a ploy to get his ex-wife, Cheryl, back. Along with the four main characters, some Seinfeld supporting actors like Wayne Knight, Estelle Harris and Steve Hytner appeared in the ninth episode at a table read for the reunion show. Though much dialogue in Curb Your Enthusiasm is improvised, the plot was scripted, and the Seinfeld special that aired within the show was scripted and directed by Seinfeld regular Andy Ackerman, making this the first time since Seinfeld went off the air that the central cast appeared together in a scripted show.

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Wayne Knight, playing their respective Seinfeld characters, appeared in a spot presented during halftime of Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2, 2014. FOX came up with the idea of doing such a spot, due in part to the Super Bowl's location being New York that year. An uncut version appeared on Crackle.com immediately afterward, as an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee titled "The Over-Cheer". Although the spot was used to advertise Seinfeld's web series, it was not considered a commercial, as Sony, which produces the series, did not pay for it. Seinfeld has indicated that he thinks the webisode will probably be the last cast reunion, saying, "I have a feeling you've seen the final coda on that very unique experience." Since then, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have also appeared in episodes.

1. Fretts, Bruce; Roush, Matt. "The Greatest Shows on Earth". TV Guide Magazine. 61 (3194-3195): 16-19.

2. ^ "Special Collector's Issue: 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time". TV Guide (June 28 - July 4). 1997.

3. "TV's Top 100 Episodes of All Time and over 6.5 billion different people have watched an episode" ^ TV Guide; June 15, 2009; pp. 34-49.

4. ^ Hurd, Robert. (2006). "Taking Seinfeld Seriously: Modernism in Popular Culture". New Literary History. 37 (4): 761-776. doi:10.1353/nlh.2007.0005. ISSN 1080-661X.

5. Grenz, Stanley J. (February 1996). A Primer on Postmodernism. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-8028-0864-6.

6. ^ Caryn James (May 12, 1998). "Goodbye! Already". New York Times. Archived from the original on January 23, 2008.

7. Gantz, Katherine. ^ "Not That There's Anything Wrong with That": Reading the Queer in Seinfeld. In Calvin Thomas (Ed.). Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. Champaign. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06813-0

8. Tucker, Ken. "The Fantastic 4" in ^ Entertainment Weekly: Special Seinfeld Issue. Entertainment Weekly. May 4, 1998, p. 13.

9. ^ Littlefield, Warren (May 29, 2012). "QA: Former NBC honcho offered Jerry Seinfeld over $100 million for one more 'Seinfeld' season". Fox411 (Interview). Interviewed by Gostin, Nicki.

10. ^ Nigro, Nicholas (June 1, 2015). Seinfeld FAQ: Everything Left to Know About the Show About Nothing. Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 9781495035357.

11. ^ Andreeva, Nellie (September 21, 2019). "'Seinfeld': Viacom Nabs Cable Rights To Comedy Series". Deadline Hollywood.

12. ^ Battaglio, Stephen (June 30, 2014). "'Annoying' 'Disorienting' 'Boring': On Seinfeld's 25th anniversary an exclusive look at the memo that almost killed the show". . pp. 18-19.

13. ^ Seinfeld Seasons 1 & 2: Notes about Nothing - "The Seinfeld Chronicles" (DVD). Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. November 23, 2004.

14. ^ Krieger, Rosalin (October 2003). ""Does he actually say the word Jewish?" - Jewish representations inSeinfeld". Journal for Cultural Research. 7 (4): 387-404. doi:10.1080/1479758032000165048. ISSN 1479-7585.

15. ^ Freeman, Marc (May 13, 2018). "'Seinfeld' Finale at 20: Hidden Tales From the Vault of a Comedian's Bizarro World". Encyclopedia of Things. Hollywood Reporter. Castle Rock, which owned the series, had two pilots at NBC that year: Seinfeld and one with Ann Jillian. Whereas Seinfeld tested poorly, Ann Jillian tested through the roof and earned a 13-episode commitment. Castle Rock decided to focus on that.

16. ^ Duffy, Mike (November 24, 2004). "Give thanks for 'The 'Seinfeld' Story'". azcentral.com. Archived from the original on July 23, 2012.

17. ^ Magnotta, Elizabeth and Alexandra Strohl (November 14, 2011). "A linguistic analysis of humor: A look at Seinfeld". Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle. 21 (1): 126-135.

18. ^ Irwin, William (2000). Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing. Open Court 2000. ISBN 9780812694093.

19. ^ Brooks, Tim; Marsh, Earle (2007). The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present (Ninth Edition). Ballantine Books. pp. 1693-1695. ISBN 978-0-345-49773-4.

20. Excluding (76.26 million viewers) and The Clip Show (58.53 million viewers)

21. ^ Emmy Awards official site Archived October 14, 2011, at the Wayback Machine "Seinfeld" "1993" emmys.org. Retrieved on May 8, 2008

22. ^ Emmy Awards official site Archived October 14, 2011, at the Wayback Machine search "Seinfeld" and years "1992 to 1998" emmys.org. Retrieved on May 8, 2008

23. ^ Staff (April 28, 2005). "A look at some of the biggest hits in movie and TV product placement". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on October 11, 2007.

24. ^ Machkovech, Sam (September 16, 2019). "It's real and it's spectacular: Netflix buys exclusive rights to stream Seinfeld". Ars Technica.

25. ^ Axler, Rachel; Bleyer, Kevin; Blomquist, Richard; Bodow, Steve; Carvell, Tim; Havlan, J.R.; Scott Jacobson, Scott; Javerbaum, David; Karlin, Ben; Kutner, Rob; Lieb, Josh; Means, Sam; Reich, Jason; Ross, Jason; Stewart, Jon (November 1, 2007). "Episode dated 1 November 2007". The Daily Show. Comedy Central.

26. ^ Seinfeld Season 9: Notes about Nothing - "The Finale" (DVD). Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. November 6, 2007.

27. Susman, Gary (March 21, 2006) "^ Has Julia Louis Dreyfus broken the 'Seinfeld' curse?" Entertainment Weekly Retrieved August 29, 2008

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Seinfeld". British Film Institute, TV Classics. 2007. ISBN 1-84457-201-3.

Fretts, Bruce. The Entertainment Weekly Seinfeld Companion. New York: Warner Books. 1993. ISBN 0-446-67036-7.

Dawson, Ryan (2006). "Seinfeld: a show about something" Cambridge University.

William Irwin (Ed.). Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing. Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company. 1999. ISBN 0-8126-9409-0.

Gantz, Katherine. "Not That There's Anything Wrong with That": Reading the Queer in Seinfeld. In Calvin Thomas (Ed.). Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. Champaign. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06813-0.

Gattuso, Greg. The Seinfeld Universe: The Entire Domain. New York: Citadel Press. 1996. ISBN 0-8065-2001-9.

Murphy, Noah. Seinfeld: A Beginner's Guide. Brisbane: Penguin Books. 2011.

Seinfeld, Jerry. Sein Language. Bantam. 1993. ISBN 0-553-09606-0.

Weaver, D.T. & Oliver, M.B. (2000) Summary of the paper: "Television Programs and Advertising: Measuring the Effectiveness of Product Placement Within Seinfeld".

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Seinfeld is an American sitcom television series created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld for NBC. The show stars Seinfeld as a fictionalized version of himself, and mostly focuses on his personal life with a handful of friends and acquaintances, including best friend George Costanza ( Jason Alexander), friend and former girlfriend Elaine Benes ( Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and neighbor across the hall Cosmo Kramer ( Michael Richards).

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That was the research report verdict on the 1989 pilot of new NBC sitcom Stand Up, written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. The episode had excited "lukewarm reactions among adults and teens and very low reactions among kids." The audience found it annoying that the main character, a fictionalized version of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, "needed things to be explained to him." The lead was too wimpy, the show was "too New York" (and therefore too Jewish) and worst of all, nothing happened in it. "You can't get too excited about going to the Laundromat," as one respondent put it. The report's conclusion was stark: "No viewer was eager to watch the show again."

"Garbage dump theatre"

Any of the show's cast and creators will tell you that they were hanging on by the skin of its teeth in the early days. The research audience weren't the only ones unmoved by the pilot. Instead of picking up the sitcom (then renamed The Seinfeld Chronicles) for the autumn season, the network aired it in what NBC's former late-night overseer Rick Ludwin called the "garbage dump theatre" summer slot, where it died an unsurprising death.

Seinfeld's co-star Jason Alexander, the actor who brought George Costanza - a thinly veiled version of David - to life, had a similarly downbeat response. His verdict on whether their pilot would be a hit was, "No way. No way. I said to Jerry, 'I think the number one show in America at the moment is ALF. If that's the number one show in America, who's going to watch this?"

Before all that though, the show had to decide what it was.

"Just, you know, making fun of stuff"

Seinfeld and David met on the New York comedy club circuit in the early '80s, and as they and others tell it, their first creative collaboration came about haphazardly. At the birthday party of a friend (comedy writer Carol Leifer), Seinfeld read aloud some material David had written for Leifer in lieu of a gift. "I got big laughs reading this routine, and it was the first time that I thought his material really works well with my voice," Seinfeld remembers. The next night, after performing at a club, the pair went to a diner and swapped ideas on potential TV shows. Following spots on The Tonight Show, Jerry Seinfeld had been approached by NBC to pitch a series, and he needed a writer.

It wasn't until the duo's post-diner visit to a Korean grocery where they set about riffing about the shop's products, that the idea for Seinfeld began to form. "It occurred to me," remembered David, "that this is the kind of discussion you never really hear on television... and that it would be funny." "Larry said this is what the show should be," recalls Seinfeld, "Just, you know, making fun of stuff..."

Unable to stretch that premise to the planned 90-minute special, the idea for a half-hour series was born. Rob Reiner at Castle Rock Entertainment pin-pointed the central dynamic that eventually drove the series to success. "Larry and Jerry shared such a great sensibility. What was wonderful was you had this curmudgeonly, misanthropic, dyspeptic Larry David being pushed through by this very accessible, likeable Jerry Seinfeld... it was a marriage made in heaven."

"He was not the kind of stand-up who embraced the audience"

The partnership may have been made in heaven but David was hardly an angel to work with, as he readily admits. Having quit a writing position on Saturday Night Live midseason (and then, brilliantly providing the inspiration for episode "The Revenge," going back and pretending it had never happened after realising the financial error of his ways), David had a well-deserved reputation for volatility that led to him eventually being banned from network meetings.

Fiercely protective of his work and resistant to any and all network notes, David remembers being on the attack from the off. Seinfeld recalls the initial NBC pitch meeting (which apparently bore a striking similarity to the way George and Jerry's played out in season four episode "The Pitch") in which David berated the studio for imagined interference. "Nobody had even suggested we change it yet, but he was throwing down the meaningless gauntlet."

When changes were made to the pilot script, David remembers being incensed. "It wouldn't have mattered who rewrote it, Woody Allen could have rewritten it, I would have hated it. [...] To this day I have a lot of difficulty watching that pilot".

This, from the stand-up who famously walked off stage during one lacklustre gig, swearing at the audience and telling them "Fuck you. I don't need this", was par for the course. As Carol Leifer remembers of David at that time, "he was a great stand-up, but he was not the kind of stand-up who embraced the audience."

"Jerry, Larry, doesn't something have to happen in this show?"

And neither would Seinfeld be that kind of comedy.

Director Tom Cherones, who would go on to be behind the camera for no fewer than 81 Seinfeld episodes recalls thinking, upon receipt of an episode script: "I would read it and I would say 'who cares? What are they talking about? Who cares what lining somebody has in a jacket? Who cares if they use real turkey for a sandwich? Why are they so picky?"

He wasn't alone. NBC executive Warren Littlefield remembers receiving the script for the now-acclaimed "The Chinese Restaurant," which saw the central trio become increasingly frustrated waiting for a table for 23 minutes. "I read that script and I thought, 'nothing happens. Am I missing pages? Are they trying to save money?" NBC hated the concept and pushed against it at every step of the way, eventually holding back the episode until the end of a run. "I remember fighting that episode," says Littlefield, thinking "Jerry, Larry, doesn't something have to happen in this show?"

Tom Cherones knows why. Who cares? What are they talking about? Why are they so picky? None of that mattered because "when the actors would read it, it would be funny. " Comedy was 's golden principle; if it was funny, it was in. Forget poignant, forget stirring, forget social taboos (the show repeatedly sailed close to the wind with plots about masturbation, orgasms, cunnilingus, bodily functions, disability, religion, and more), even forget story to some extent... Funny ruled, and that's what gave the show longevity.

"This, that, and the other"

Not that NBC didn't try to mold into something more generic. The network that had seen go from the 27 th most watched show on its first outing to ten seasons that America took to its bosom and continued to adore in repeats for decades afterwards, thought it knew what needed: a Sam and Diane.
This story originally ran in November 2014. It's being repromoted in honor of the first episode of the revamped "Seinfeld" on May 31, 1990.
One good note NBC had given the pilot, and one of the few readily accepted by the team, was that The Seinfeld Chronicles needed a woman. Before Julia Louis-Dreyfus became indivisible from the character of Elaine, hordes of actors were seen for her role, from Will And Grace and 's Megan Mullally, to Everybody Loves Raymond's Patricia Heaton, and Rosie O'Donnell. Larry David had worked briefly with Louis-Dreyfus during his SNL stint, and she duly became the fourth key member of the group, which numbered Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards.

David remembers being "strenuously" asked by NBC to bring exes Jerry and Elaine back together, and assenting, in his own way. The result was season two episode "The Deal," in which the pair cynically negotiate guidelines for adding sex to their friendship without becoming a couple. It's a deeply funny episode, but - just as David planned - leaves the heartstrings utterly untouched. Seinfeld stuck its course, and its intransigence saw it through.

"...Cheers' little brother"

After the initial season run of four episodes was commissioned ("the confidence four" as Jason Alexander wryly refers to it), the team was given a choice: air the quartet now on a Wednesday night and maybe have a chance at being picked up for the autumn season, or miss that opportunity but air on NBC's famous Thursday comedy night after the rerun. It was a no-brainer. Cheers provided the piggy-back dearly needed in its early days, much to Larry David's chagrin. "If they weren't watching on Wednesday night, I don't want them watching on Thursday night", he remembers saying, repeatedly airing the view that he didn't want "to be ' little brother."

David's pride wouldn't get them anywhere. When Seinfeld was moved to Wednesday nights, its audience dropped significantly. Only back in that Thursday night slot (the line-up went, The Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers, Seinfeld) did the show start to amass the enormous following that led to over 76 million sitting down to its 1998 finale.

From a Korean grocery conversation then, to Time Magazine covers, obscene wealth and a critically respected legacy any sitcom would give its back nine for, via the canonisation of low-talkers, close-talkers, high-talkers, sidlers and soup Nazis. Seinfeld's inexperience, obduracy, and fixation on just being funny took it from flop to crossover hit. Pretenders to its throne have come and gone, but the show's legacy continues, and long may it continue to do so.

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That was the research report verdict on the 1989 pilot of new NBC sitcom Stand Up , written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. The episode had excited "lukewarm reactions among adults and teens and very low reactions among kids."

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's 1992 episode "The Contest," in which Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine have a competition to see who can last the longest without masturbating, is one of the most iconic episodes of one of television's most iconic shows. Co-creator Larry David wrote "The Contest," basing it on a contest in which he'd participated in real life (he won "handily," he says), and earned an Emmy for his troubles. So it stands to reason that David was prepared to walk right off the set, never to return, if the bigwigs at NBC had looked askance at his creation.

David recalled the episode's table read in an oral history of "The Contest" published by Vulture:

I remember being nervous because the NBC executives were there. I really had this thing going on in my head where, well, if they don't like it, I'm just going to quit the show. I really had this built up in my head where, there's no way they're going to do it and I'm just going to quit if they don't do it.

"Larry was going to put his whole job on the line," Michael Richards recalled. "I've known Larry since we did Fridays together, and that's Larry David. If he believes in something, he's just going to fight for it." Of course, we know this well from David's absurdly stubborn Curb Your Enthusiasm character, who does not believe in free samples, to name just one example.

Fortunately for David and us all, the NBC brass loved "The Contest." Former NBC president Warren Littlefield was able to successfully lobby the network's standards and practices unit to clear the episode, mostly by virtue of the fact that the word "masturbation" was never actually uttered in it-a clever work-around that David credits Seinfeld himself for.

As a result, David was able to get his baby to air with minimal changes. "There may have been a couple of things [I had to cut out]," he said. "But nothing I couldn't live with." The rest is history: "The Contest" is a stone-cold classic, and David got to continue making one of TV's best-ever comedies. "I'm grateful to NBC for airing the show when I never thought they would," said David to conclude Vulture 's oral history. "That was the most surprising thing about it."

Read Paste's "The Contest" retrospective right here, find out where the episode falls on our ranking of 's 10 best episodes here, and watch a couple of clips from the episode below.

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larry david says he was prepared to quit seinfeld if nbc had refused to air "the contest"

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Larry David Says He Was Prepared to Quit Seinfeld If NBC Had Refused to Air "The Contest"

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's 1992 episode "The Contest," in which Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine have a competition to see who can last the longest without masturbating, is one of the most iconic episodes of one of television's most iconic shows.

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Looking for a great gift idea for the holidays?
Check out our complete Seinfeld Gift Guide right now! Including T-Shirts, DVDs, and more!
Written by: Larry David

Directed by: Tom Cherones

Broadcasted: November 18, 1992 for the first time.

Stars: Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Richards,

Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Estelle Harris (as Mrs. Costanza),

and Jane Leeves (as Marla).

[Setting: Monk's Coffee shop]

(Jerry and Kramer are sitting opposite Elaine at a booth, eating lunch)

JERRY: (To Elaine) Let me ask you a question.

ELAINE: Mm-hm.

JERRY: You're a hostage, captured by terrorists-

ELAINE: (Smiling, chewing) Who, me?

JERRY: You, anybody - whatever. You're in the little room, you're chained to the floor, you're there for a long time.. do you think they would ever consider doing

the laundry?

ELAINE: (Matter-of-factly) They have to, it's in the Geneva Convention.

KRAMER: (Imitating a Turkish terrorist) You! Take off your socks, your pants, your underwear. We're doing the wash. C'mon! Take it off, take it off!

(Jerry and Elaine both laugh at Kramer's impression as George slowly enters. He's in a melancholy state)

KRAMER: Hey, Georgie.

JERRY AND ELAINE: Hi.

(George sits down next to Elaine - opposite Kramer)

JERRY: (To George) What's the matter?

GEORGE: (Slowly shakes his head) My mother caught me.

JERRY: "Caught" you? Doing what?

GEORGE: You know. (All three give him blank stares) I was alone..

ELAINE: (Making a face of surprise) You mean..?!

GEORGE: (Nods) Uh-huh.

KRAMER: (Laughing) She caught you?

(Elaine laughs with Kramer)

JERRY: Where?

GEORGE: (Not really wanting to embellish) ..I stopped by the house to drop the car off, and I went inside for a few minutes.. Nobody was there - they're supposed

to be working. (Jerry and Elaine look at each other - enjoying the story) My mother had a Glamour magazine, I started leafing through it..

JERRY: "Glamour"?

(Kramer and Elaine laugh slightly)

GEORGE: ..So, one thing lead to another..

JERRY: So, what did she do?

GEORGE: First she screams, "George, what are you doing?! My God!" And it looked like she was gonna faint - she started clutching the wall, trying to hang onto it.

KRMAER: (Reflecting on the story so far) Man..

GEORGE: I didn't know whether to try and keep her from falling, or zip up.

JERRY: What did you do?

GEORGE: I zipped up!

ELAINE: (Wide-eyed) So, she fell?

GEORGE: Yeah. (Noticing this makes him out to be the bad kid, he gets defensive) Well, I couldn't run over there the way I was!

ELAINE: No, I guess you couldn't have..

JERRY: (In the middle of Elaine's sentence, smiling) No, I wouldn't think so.

ELAINE: (Finishing it off) ..done that.

GEORGE: So, she fell, and then she started screaming, "My back! My back!" So, I picked her up and took her to the hospital.

ELAINE: (Between chuckles) How is she?

GEORGE: (Somewhat angered) She's in traction.

ELAINE: (Still laughing) Ok, I'm sorry.

GEORGE: It's not funny, Elaine.

ELAINE: (Stifling her laughter) I know. I'm sorry. I'm serious.

GEORGE: Her back went out. She's gotta be there for a couple of days. All she said on the way over in the car was, "Why, George, why?!".. I said, "Because it's

there!"

(Kramer laughs, sipping his drink)

JERRY: "Glamour"?

(Elaine laughs)

GEORGE: (Vowing) Well, I'll tell you this, though - I am never doing.. that , again.

ELAINE: What, you mean, in your mother's house, or all together?

GEORGE: (Definite) All together.

(The next three lines are said at the exact same time)

ELAINE: Oh, gimme a break..

JERRY: (Skeptical) Ohhh yeah.. right.

KRAMER: Oh, like you're gonna stop?

JERRY AND ELAINE: C'mon..

GEORGE: You don't think I can?

JERRY: No chance.

GEORGE: (Daring) You think you could?

JERRY: Well, I know I could hold out longer than you.

GEORGE: Care to make it interesting?

JERRY: Sure, how much?

GEORGE: A hundred dollars.

JERRY: (Pointing) You're on.

KRAMER: (Butting in) Wait a second, wait a second. Count me in on this. (Clicks his tongue)

JERRY: You?

KRAMER: Yeah.

JERRY: You'll be out before we get the check.

ELAINE: (Smiling) I want to be in on this, too.

GEORGE AND JERRY: (Rejecting) Ohh, no. No, no, no..

ELAINE: Why?

JERRY: (Showing difference) It's apples and oranges..

ELAINE: What? Why? (More 'no, no, no's from Jerry and George. Persistent) Why?

JERRY: Because you're a woman!

ELAINE: So what?

JERRY: It's easier for a woman not to do it than a man.

ELAINE: (Sarcastic) Oh.

JERRY: We have to do it. It's part of our lifestyle. It's like, uh.. shaving.

ELAINE: Oh, that is such bologna. I shave my legs.

KRAMER: (Making a point) Not everyday.

GEORGE: Alright, look, you want to be in?

ELAINE: Yeah!

GEORGE: You gotta give us odds. At least two to one - you gotta put up two-hundred dollars.

KRAMER: No, a thousand!

ELAINE: No, I'll - I'll put up one-fifty.

GEORGE: Alright, you're in for one-fifty.

JERRY: (Nodding) Okay, one-fifty.

GEORGE: Alright, now, how are we gonna monitor this thing?

JERRY: Well, obviously, we all know each other very well, (Elaine slightly laughs) I'm sure that we'll all feel comfortable within the confines of the honor system.

KRAMER: Alright. (Holds out his pinkie at the center of the table)

(Jerry, Elaine, and George all hook their pinkies onto his, in a 'pinkie promise', they all pull their hand away, yelling out "Yeah!")

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's apartment]

(Jerry's sitting on the couch, eating cereal while George is on the phone with his mother)

GEORGE: (Stern) No, ma, I'm not gonna see a psychiatrist. N- I don't care if you do pay for it! No! Discussion over. Yeah, alright, I'll see you later. Yes, of course

I'm gonna come by. Alright. (Hangs up, slamming it down on the coffee table. He sits down next to Jerry) My mother wants me to see a psychiatrist now. Why?!

Because she caught me? (Scoffs, shaking his head) You know, if everyone who did that had to go see a psychiatrist.. (Laughing, he snorts)

JERRY: (Waits for the rest of the sentence) ..Yeah?

GEORGE: (Defensively) Whatever.

(Intercom buzzes, Jerry gets up to answer it)

JERRY: How is she?

GEORGE: (Shrugging it off) She'll be fine. I gotta go to the hospital to see her tonight.

JERRY: (Answering to the intercom) Yeah?

ELAINE: It's me.

JERRY: Come on up. (Lets her in by unlocking the front door)

GEORGE: Hey, what are you doing tonight?

JERRY: (Opens his door slightly for Elaine) Dating Marla.

GEORGE: Oh, the virgin?

JERRY: Yeah.

GEORGE: Any, uh.. progress, there? What's the latest?

JERRY: Well, I got my troops amassed along the border - I'm just waiting for someone to give me the go-ahead.

(Kramer enters, heading for Jerry's window)

KRAMER: Hey, look at this, c'mere. There's a naked woman across the street.

(George and Jerry quickly join him at the window)

JERRY: Where?

KRAMER: Second floor from the top. (Pointing) See the window on the left?

GEORGE: (In awe) Wow!

JERRY: (Also amazed) Who walks around the house like that?!

(All eyes are glued to the woman)

GEORGE: (Suggesting) Maybe she's a nudist. You know, those nudist colony people..

KRAMER: ..Yeah.. (Pause) yeah.. (Slowly stands up, and walks out Jerry's apartment - leaving Jerry and George with the view, he shuts the door behind him)

JERRY: Hey, let me ask you a question. In these nudist colonies, do they eat naked in the dining room?

GEORGE: I would imagine it's all naked.

JERRY: What about the chamber maids? Are they naked, too?

GEORGE: (Still focused on the nudist) They're naked, the gardeners naked.. the bellhops. (Jerry makes a noise of astonishment) One big nude-a-rama.

(Elaine enters)

ELAINE: Hey.

JERRY AND GEORGE: (Only turning back for a second) Hey.

ELAINE: Well, (Smiling) where's my money? Who caved?

JERRY: (Over his shoulder) Not me.

GEORGE: (Also, over his shoulder) Not me.

ELAINE: What're you looking at?

JERRY: There's a naked woman across the street.

ELAINE: (Smiling, chuckling) This is gonna be the easiest money I've ever made in my life. (Moving on to a new topic) So, my fried, Joyce, is teaching an aerobics

class. I'm gonna go tonight.

JERRY: (Commenting) Yeah.. the - the waitress should've taken it back.

ELAINE: (Realizes Jerry and George aren't paying attention) So then, I got a call this morning. You know, I was, uh, chosen to go on the space shuttle. We're goin'

to Mars.

JERRY: (Still staring at the woman) Uh-huh.

GEORGE: Have a good time.

(Kramer casually enters, takes a few step toward the kitchen, and slaps a wad of bills onto the counter)

KRAMER: (Declaring) I'm out!

(Kramer now has the attention of everyone in the room. Jerry's mouth is open in shock. A moment passes)

ELAINE: What?!

KRAMER: Yeah, I'm out - I'm out of the contest.

GEORGE: You're out?!

KRAMER: Yeah, yeah.. (Notes their reactions) what?

ELAINE: Well, that was fast!

JERRY: Well, it was that woman across the street. (To Jerry) You know, you better be careful, buddy. She's gonna get you next. (Walks out, shutting the door

behind him)

(Jerry, Elaine, and George all look at each other, reflecting)

ELAINE: ..And then there were three.

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Hospital room]

(Estelle is on a hospital bed. George, sitting back in a chair, is visiting her)

ELAINE: I don't understand you. I really don't. You have nothing better to do at three o' clock in the afternoon? I go out for a quart of milk, I come home, and find

my son treating his body like it was an amusement park!

GEORGE: (Stern, trying to shut her up) Ma.

ESTELLE: Don't give me "Ma". It's a good thing I didn't hit the table. I could of cracked my head open.

GEORGE: Ma, people can hear you.

ESTELLE: (Heavy in sarcasm) Too bad you can't do that for a living. You'd be very successful at it. You could sell out Madison Square Garden. Thousands of

people could watch you! You could be a big star!

GEORGE: (Getting up) Alright, Ma, that's enough!

ESTELLE: I want you to go see a psychiatrist.

GEORGE: No! I am not going to see a psychiatrist!

ESTELLE: Why? Why not?! Why won't you go?

GEORGE: (Like a kid) Because I don't want to.

ESTELLE: I want you to go see somebody.

GEORGE: Well, I am not going.

ESTELLE: It's a good thing your father's in Chicago.

(George's cousin, Shelly, enters)

SHELLY: Hello, Aunt Estelle. Look at you - how did this happen?

GEORGE: (Snapping) Is that important, really? What is this, a police investigation? The woman's been through enough. She has to relive the experience now?!

(On the other side of a curtain divider, the silhouette of a shapely nurse can be seen entering)

NURSE: Hi, Denise. Six-thirty, time for your sponge bath.

(The shadow of a patient awakening can be seen)

DENISE: Mmm.. is it six-thirty already? I fell asleep.

(The two women go about preparing the sponge bath. George is visibly affected - breathing heavily, and staring at them through the curtain)

SHELLY: (Seems not to notice what's going on beyond the divider) So, George, what are you doing now? I hear you got some kinda television, writing - thing?

GEORGE: (Slowly backing away, he's not at all committed to the conversation) Yeah.. television.

(The patient, Denise, is trying to get her gown off)

NURSE: Let me help you out with that. Here, just slip it over your head..

DENISE: Oh.. thank you.

SHELLY: (Nodding) Well, it's about time. We thought you were gonna wind up on the street. (As the bath is going on, George is now completely mesmerized)

What is it you're doing, exactly?

(A moment passes. George seems not to have heard his cousin)

ESTELLE: George, you're cousin, Shelly, is talking to you!

(Scene ends)

[Setting: New York Health Club]

(Elaine, dressed for a work-out, is signing forms while talking with her friend, Joyce)

JOYCE: So, when was the last time you took a class?

ELAINE: Oh, it's been a while.

JOYCE: (Overly excited) Are you psyched?

ELAINE: (Fake excitement) Yeah. yeah, I'm really.. psyched.

JOYCE: Well, you're gonna thank me for getting you in here.

ELAINE: Why is that?

JOYCE: (Pointing, she directs Elaine's attention off-camera) See the guy with the dark hair and the red shorts?

(Elaine looks over, and her jaw drops to the floor. Breathless, she turns back to her friend)

ELAINE: (Between breaths) Oh, my God. (Joyce nods) John F. Kennedy Junior's here!

JOYCE: He's gonna be in your class today.

ELAINE: (Still unable to speak right) In my class? John Kennedy's gonna be in my class?!

JOYCE: I can get you a spot right behind him. He has got a great butt.

ELAINE: Yeah. Butt. Butt. Great butt. John-John's butt.

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's car]

(Stationary, Jerry's girlfriend, Marla, and him are making out. After some deep kissing, Marla breaks away)

MARLA: Let's slow it down a little.

JERRY: "Slow it down"?

MARLA: Well, (Reminding him of her virginity) You know..

JERRY: Ah, yeah.. I know.

MARLA: You're okay with that, right?

JERRY: Yeah, yeah.. of course. What, do you think I care about the sex? What kind of person do you think I am? That doesn't mean anything to me. (Faint) I don't

care about that.

MARLA: So, I'll see you Saturday night, then?

JERRY: (Smiling, nodding) Sure, Saturday night.

MARLA: Alright, then. Good night.

JERRY: Goodnight. (She gets out. Jerry leans forward, adding) Not just a good night - a great night. (She shuts the door, he waves)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's bedroom]

(Jerry, in the middle of the night, is moving around - unable to get to sleep, he's restless. Scene cuts to George. He's wide awake, and staring at the ceiling. Cut to

Elaine. She's settling into bed, unable to get to sleep. The scene takes a final cut to Kramer. He's sound asleep)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's apartment]

(Jerry's in a grouchy mood. Kramer enters)

KRAMER: (Singing) Goood Moorrrnninng!

JERRY: (Out of it) Yeah, good morning.

KRAMER: Ha, ha! Nothing like some good solid sack time. (Turns toward Jerry's window)

JERRY: She's not there. She's doin' her wash.

KRAMER: (Turning back to Jerry) Oh. So, did you make it through the night?

JERRY: (Over the top) Yes, I'm proud to say I did!

KRAMER: So, you're still master of your domain.

JERRY: (Nodding) Yes. Yes I am. (Kramer chuckles) Master of my domain. But I will tell you this: I am going over to (Gestures to the nudist) her apartment, and

I'm tellin' her to put those shades down!

KRAMER: Woah, woah, woah. What-what did you just say?

JERRY: I can't take it anymore! She's driving me crazy! I can't sleep, I can't leave the house, and I' here, I'm climbin' the walls. Meanwhile, I'm dating a virgin, I'm in

this contest - something's gotta give!

KRAMER: Do you hear what you're saying?! Can you hear it?! (Jerry puts on his coat) This is a beautiful woman walking around naked, and you want to tell her to

stop?! That's the dumbest thing I ever heard! I mean, think comprehens- I'm not gonna let you do it.

JERRY: (Persistent) Well, I'm doin' it, get out of my way.

KRAMER: (Stopping him) No, no, no, no. You can't! You can't! This is something that comes about once in a lifetime! When we were boys, looking through our

bedroom windows, we would think: "Why can't there be a woman out there, taking her clothes off?" And now that wish's come true, and you want to (Makes a

noise) throw it away?!

JERRY: Look, I'm sorry-

KRAMER: No, I'm not gonna let you do it, Jerry.

JERRY: Kramer, (Trying to pass him) get outta my way!

KRAMER: (Frantic) No, no, no. Don't do it. Don't do it! For my sake! God knows I don't ask you for much! (Pleading) Now, come on. Please, Jerry. Please! I'm

beggin' ya! Please! (Claps hands) Come on! Please!

(A pause as Jerry thinks it over)

JERRY: Alright.. (Takes his coat off)

KRAMER: Yes!

JERRY: ..Alright.

KRAMER: (Moving to the window) Thank you, thank you, thank you. (Sits in Jerry's chair, looking out the window)

JERRY: She's not there!

KRAMER: Oh, I can wait..

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Monk's Coffee shop]

(Jerry and George are sitting opposite each other in a booth)

JERRY: So the nurse was giving her a sponge bath?

GEORGE: Every night at six-thirty. The nurse was gorgeous.. then I got a look at the patient.. (Laughs, then snorts) I was going nuts.

JERRY: Oh, man. Well, I guess you'll be going back to that hospital.

GEORGE: (Fake sympathy) Well, my mother, Jerry..

(Jerry nods)

JERRY: (Pointing) But are you still master of your domain?

GEORGE: (Arms out) I am king of the county. You?

JERRY: Lord of the manor.

(Elaine enters and sits next to Jerry)

ELAINE: John F. Kennedy Jun-ya!

JERRY: What?

ELAINE: (Smiling) He was in my aerobics class.

JERRY: Really? Did you talk to him?

ELAINE: No, you don't understand - he was working out right in front of me. So, listen, after the class was over, I timed my walk to the door so we'd get there at

the exact same moment, and he says to me, (Thinking the world of what he said) "Quite a workout."

GEORGE: "Quite a workout"? What did you say?

ELAINE: (Smiling, proud) I said, "yeah."

JERRY: (Adding, fake praise) Good one.

ELAINE: So then, listen, listen. So then, I showered and I dressed, and I saw him again, on the way out. (Giddy and nearly out of breath) So we're walkin' and

talkin', and he asked me my name - and I think I said Elaine - but, I mean, who the hell knows.. And so then, he says to me: "Do you wanna split a cab uptown?"

And I said, "Sure" - even though I was going downtown. So, we get in the cab, and I mean, I have no idea where I'm goin', right? But this is John F. Kennedy Junior

we're talkin' about! (Deep breath) So, then, he says to me, "Where do you live?" And I - and I - and I was close to your block, so I said your building. So he

dropped me off in front, (Laughs) and I had to take a cab all the way back downtown to my house.. (Picks up a glass of cold water and presses it up to her

forehead to cool her off) Oh, God..

JERRY: But the question is, are you still master of your domain?

ELAINE: (Sets the glass down) I'm queen of the castle. (Pops a piece of food into her mouth)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Estelle's hospital room]

(George quickly runs in, turning around - he checks both his watch and the wall clock. He smiles to himself)

ESTELLE: You're back.

GEORGE: Of course I'm back. Why wouldn't I be back? My mother's in the hospital, I'm going to pay her a visit.

ESTELLE: I know, but two days in a row? You didn't have to do this.

GEORGE: You're my mother! What wouldn't I do for you?

ESTELLE: You know what you could do? I haven't eaten lunch or dinner. I can't eat this hospital food. Maybe you could run down to the deli and get me a

sandwich..

GEORGE: (Smiling) You got it, Ma. (She smiles back, nodding) A little later. (George sits back in a nearby chair, looking at the divider in anticipation)

ESTELLE: (Let down) Could you go now, George? I'm very hungry. I'm weak.

GEORGE: Well, wait a little while, Ma. What's the difference?

ESTELLE: I don't understand why you can't do this for me!

GEORGE: (Standing up) I just got here, Ma! I'd like to spend a little time with you.

ESTELLE: But if you wait, they won't let you back in! Visiting hours are almost over!

GEORGE: Ten minutes! Here, here, (Fishes a box of Tic-Tacs out of his coat pocket and tosses them to her) Have some Tic-Tacs.

ESTELLE: Get the hell outta here. (Angrily sets them aside) I'm sorry you came.

(Nurse enters)

NURSE: (To patient) Six-thirty. Time for your sponge bath.

(George eagerly takes his seat, looking up at their shadows on the divider)

ESTELLE: George.. I'm huuunnnggry!

GEORGE: (Muttering, slow) Hang on, Ma.. hang on..

(Scene ends)

[Setting: New York Health Club]

(Elaine, dressed to impress, walks up to the counter. She's obviously looking around for JFK Jr.)

JOYCE: Hi!

ELAINE: Hi.

JOYCE: Did you get your hair done today?

ELAINE: No, I just, uh, fixed it.. a little bit. (Still looking around, she quickly checks her breath)

JOYCE: You know who - isn't here. He was in the early class today. (Elaine looses her composure) But I think you made quite an impression on him yesterday.

ELAINE: (Regarding herself) What? What? Who? Me-me-me? I made an impression? What impression?

JOYCE: Let me just put this back. (Turns to put a stack of shorts away)

(Elaine violently grabs her jacket, pulling Joyce back in her direction)

ELAINE: No! No! Now! Tell me now! What did he say?!

JOYCE: (Uneasy) He asked about you.

ELAINE: (Ecstatic) He asked about me? John Kennedy asked about me?! (Hangs off the side of the counter, both feet in the air) What did he say?

JOYCE: He wanted to know your situation.

ELAINE: (Quick) What situation? I have a situation?

JOYCE: I-I told him you were single.

ELAINE: That was good. That was very good.

JOYCE: He said you were just his type.

ELAINE: (Frank) Okay, you tryin' to hurt me? Are you tryin' to hurt - you're tryin' to injure me, right? You're trying to hurt me.

JOYCE: He also told me to tell you that he'll be in your neighborhood tomorrow around nine o' clock - so he's gonna stop in front of your building if you want to

come down and say hello.

(Breathless, Elaine almost collapses)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's apartment]

(Kramer's at the window while Jerry's on the phone with his mother, watching TV)

JERRY: Alright, Ma, I'll talk to you later.. Nothing, I'm, I'm watching, uh, Tiny Toons here, on Nickelodeon.. It's, I-I like kid shows. They have a very innocent,

wholesome quality. Okay, alright, I'll talk to you later. Bye. (Hangs up)

KRAMER: (Obviously watching the nudist across the street) Oh, that's good. That's good. That's very, very good. Oh, it's hot in there.. (Jerry looks back at

Kramer in envy) It's hot in there. So, just walk around a little bit. Don't be ashamed, don't be ashamed.. that's good, that's good.. yes, yes, yes..

JERRY: (Trying to block out Kramer, he starts to sing along with the TV) The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The

wheels on the bus..

(Kramer joins in with Jerry, only, he has a different version)

KRAMER: The woman across the street has nothing on, nothing on, nothing on..

(Both Kramer and Jerry continue to sing the two different versions, trying to over ride the other)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: George's room]

(George is wide awake, staring at the ceiling. Scene cuts to Jerry. Once again, he's restless and flings the covers off him. Scene cuts to Kramer - he's out like a light.

The scene takes a final cut to Elaine. Foreshadowing the next scene, she's sound asleep too)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's apartment]

(Jerry and George. They're bickering at each other due to the lack of sex)

GEORGE: All you got is instant coffee? Why don't you get some real coffee?

JERRY: I don't keep real coffee in here, I get my coffee on the outside! (Intercom buzzes. He answers it) Yeah?!

ELAINE: (Through intercom) It's Elaine.

JERRY: (Shouting) Come on up! (Opens his door for Elaine)

GEORGE: Where did you get those socks?

JERRY: I don't know.

GEORGE: I think those are my socks!

JERRY: How are these your socks?!

GEORGE: I don't know, but those are my socks! I had a pair just like that with the blue stripe, and now I don't have them anymore!

JERRY: (Sarcastic) Oh, yeah, that's right, well, you fell asleep one day on the sofa and I took them off your stinkin' feet. They looked so good to me, I just had to

have them!

GEORGE: Yeah, well, they're my socks!

JERRY: They're my socks!

(A brief moment passes as they look at each other)

GEORGE: Oh boy..

JERRY: What are we doing here..

GEORGE: ..Oh boy.

JERRY: This is ridiculous.

GEORGE: Do you believe this? We're fighting. We're fighting.

JERRY: I haven't been myself lately. I've been snapping at everybody.

GEORGE: Me too. I've been yelling at strangers on the street.

(Elaine slowly enters, shutting the door behind her)

ELAINE: Hello.. (Pulls a wad of bills out of her purse, and starts to count it up)

GEORGE: (Shocked) You caved?!

JERRY: It's over?

GEORGE: You're out?

JERRY: Ohh-my-God. The Queen is dead.

(Elaine sets the bills down on the counter)

GEORGE: I figured you'd cruise. At least through the Spring.

JERRY: What happened?

ELAINE: It was..uh.. John-John.

JERRY AND GEORGE: Ohhhhh.. John-John.

JERRY: But you made it through the day before.

ELAINE: Yeah, but yesterday, he told Joyce, the aerobics teacher, that he wants to meet me outside here at nine o' clock tonight.

JERRY: Why outside here?

ELAINE: Because he think I live here. Remember when we shared a cab, and he dropped me off out in front? He's picking me up.

(George picks up the money, counting it)

JERRY: Alright, Costanza - it's just you and me.

GEORGE: And then, (Smacks the money) there were two.

ELAINE: (Slowly) Elaine Benes Kennedy Junior..

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's apartment]

(Jerry and Marla are making out on the couch)

MARLA: Let's go in the bedroom.

JERRY: Really?

MARLA: Yes.

JERRY: You sure?

MARLA: Yes.

JERRY: You really want to?

MARLA: I do. I'm ready.

JERRY: Okay..

MARLA: I know how difficult this must have been for you.

JERRY: (Chuckles) You don't know the half of it.

(They both laugh slightly)

MARLA: What do you mean?

JERRY: Well, it's kinda silly, but..

(Scene cuts to Elaine on the sidewalk waiting for JFK Jr. She checks her watch. Scene cuts back to Jerry's apartment. Marla, obviously upset, is putting her coat

on)

MARLA: Contest?! A contest! This is what you do with your friends?

JERRY: No, it was just a bet. I mean, it actually started with George and his mother-

MARLA: I don't want to hear another word. And to think how close I came to you being the one! I must have been out of my mind.

(She leaves, slamming the door. Jerry hangs his head, then directs his attention to his window. Eagerly walking over, he sits in his chair, staring at the woman)

(Scene cuts to Elaine. Marla walks out in front of her, trying to hail a taxi)

ELAINE: Marla? Hi, oh, I'm glad I ran into you-

MARLA: I don't want to have anything to do with you or your perverted friends. (Confused, Elaine moves closer) Ooohh, get away from me! You're horrible.

Horrible! All of you!

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Jerry's apartment]

ELAINE: What happened?

JERRY: I told her about the contest.

ELAINE: Ohh. Boy, she's a whack-o.

(George enters)

GEORGE: (To Elaine) Hey, what happened?

ELAINE: What?

GEORGE: I thought you were meeting Kennedy.

ELAINE: (Let down) He didn't show.

GEORGE: Yeah, he did.

ELAINE: What? He's - He's out there? Oh, my God. I-I gotta go, I gotta go..

GEORGE: No, no, no. He just left.

ELAINE: What?

GEORGE: Yeah, he was talking to Marla.

JERRY: Marla?

GEORGE: Yeah, I think, you know, she was, like, crying, and he was consoling her, and then, she, uh, just got into his car, and they just drove away.

ELAINE: (Angered) He left with Marla, the virgin?

GEORGE: Yeah.

ELAINE: They drove away?

GEORGE: Yeah, drove away.. You know, I said 'Hello' to him. You know, he's - he's-

JERRY: (Moving to the window, shocked) Oh my God in heaven!

(All three crowd around the window)

ELAINE: (Makes a sound of surprise) Is that..?

GEORGE: Kramer?!

(A brief pause)

ELAINE: He's waving..

(All three wave back)

(Scene ends)

[Setting: Elaine's bedroom]

(Elaine's sound asleep. Scene cuts to George, then Jerry. They too, are sleeping. Scene takes a cut to Kramer and the nudist - both asleep; then a final cut to Marla's

bedroom. She's sleeping with JFK Jr)

MARLA: Ohh, John. That was wonderful..

(Scene ends)

END OF SHOW.

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Looking for a great gift idea for the holidays? Check out our complete Seinfeld Gift Guide right now! Including T-Shirts, DVDs, and more! Written by: Larry David Directed by: Tom Cherones Broadcasted: November 18, 1992 for the first time. Stars: Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Richards, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Estelle Harris (as Mrs.

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Masturbating! By 2017's standards it seems almost adorable-so tame and normal. It's something our president would probably talk about on the phone to a war widow at this point and no one would bat an eye. But in 1992, when aired the episode "The Contest," masturbating was still a pretty taboo thing to talk about on TV. That wouldn't stop Seinfeld though. Rather, the show could take unexplored territory-Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine making a bet on who could go the longest without masturbating-and turn it into one of the most iconic TV episodes of all time.

And the story behind this bold and crazy idea is just as bold and crazy as the episode itself-complete with shocked network executives, secrecy, and plenty of people doubting creator and writer Larry David.

In a new oral history of the episode in New York Magazine, David reveals the true story behind the episode's origins and who was part of the actual contest. As he tells New York:

I can't believe I have to discuss this at my ripe age. I would say there was only one other person involved [in the actual contest]. Should I mention his name? I don't even know-my friend Frank Piazza. I don't remember what the bet was. There must have been some money involved. I think it was a small amount. [The contest lasted] two days. Maybe three. I just remember it didn't last very long. I was surprised at how quickly it ended. I won handily, yes.

His friend, Kenny Kramer (the real Kramer) added: "I wasn't in [the contest] because I knew I would never win it." It was an idea, David said, he'd had for a long time, but never actually followed through with it because he didn't think the network would allow it. But once they finally went through with it, they got some of their biggest laughs ever on a Seinfeld episode -specifically during the moment when Kramer comes in after losing the contest.

"That got a roar. That was a huge moment when Kramer came in," David said. "That was one of the biggest laughs we ever got, I think."

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Larry David Reveals the True Story that Inspired 'Seinfeld's' 'The Contest'

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Masturbating! By 2017's standards it seems almost adorable-so tame and normal. It's something our president would probably talk about on the phone to a war widow at this point and no one would bat an eye. But in 1992, when aired the episode "The Contest," masturbating was still a pretty taboo thing to talk about on TV.

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In this essay, Seinfeld and its episode "The Contest" are examined through the lens of postmodernism based on its story, organization, context, and involvement of its audience.