First of all, yeah, come at me. “Seinfeld” is only kinda-sorta funny, at best. Seinfeld himself is really not funny at all. His act is perpetually stuck between the oldschool, early 1950s-style, cigar-waving “hyuk-hyuk, get a load of all my jokes about women drivers” comedians and the post-Lenny Bruce era, where everything just boils down to telling boring “slice of life” stories with mildly clever exaggerations.
Seinfeld manages to pick and choose all the worst elements of both those eras and smush them together into a tremendously boring, un-funny standup act.
Annnnd that’s what gets translated to the show. Boring, egotistical, overly-New-York-focused, pretentious nonsense.
Like I said, come at me about that. I know people disagree. I truly do not care what you want to say to me, about it. You’re simply wrong. If you like his comedy or his show, you just have bad taste. I can’t fix that. I can’t change your mind. You can’t change mine, either. But I’m objectively correct that he and his comedy material both suck.
But the whole “show about nothing” thing is what really boils my ass. You can argue that the show wasn’t “about nothing,” in the first place. And that’s, like, whatever. There are valid arguments, there. In fact, I’d like to accept those arguments, then proceed under the assumption that the “show about nothing” concept really is a “show about nothing, and therefore about everything.”
This is the important point: the thing I disagree with is this wretched and insulting notion that “Seinfeld” was somehow a PIONEERING television show, in this context of being about nothing and/or everything.
That’s my problem. The claim that “Seinfeld” did any of that shit first. The implication is that all prior television, especially all prior comedies, were somehow locked into a “this is a show about a particular topic” mentality. And, like, “nobody had the GENIUS and the GUTS to make a freewheeling show about just, like, whatever topics came to the minds of the genius writers, and their groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness comedy process.”
That’s fucking horseshit. Horseshit of the highest fucking caliber.
I suppose these turd-brained fucksticks believe that “I Love Lucy” was about a Cuban guy who had a job as a bandleader and his wife, who sometimes tried to get into showbusiness. And “The Honeymooners” would be about a guy who has a job as a bus driver. And “Taxi” was a show about cab drivers, driving their cabs.
Of course, that’s not what those shows were ACTUALLY ABOUT. They were basically shows about nothing, just as much as “Seinfeld” was. They were often about relatable problems in domestic life, they were sometimes about people trying zany get-rich-quick schemes, they were sometimes about the fears and perils and hopes that surround pregnancy and childbirth, they were often about the uncertainty and passion and sacrifice that people put themselves through, for their budding careers, or their workaday jobs. And they were about a million other things that all fit the “show about nothing” mold BETTER than “Seinfeld” ever did.
I say they did it better, because they weren’t exclusively about sad, angry, borderline-psychopathic reprobates, who seem to have no goals or aspirations, beyond smirking and talking shit about people behind their backs, swilling coffee, and occasionally trying to get laid. They were shitty people, with shitty attitudes. I know that’s part of the joke…but it wears thin very quickly, and my point is that other shows did a similar “it’s a show about nothing…but really everything” theme, but their casts of characters WEREN’T entirely populated by malignant, fundamentally worthless narcissists.
Basically, I implore people to stop worshipping that fucking show, as if it was some kind of groundbreaking, high art. There were way better classic comedy shows than that piece of shit, from its own era and the TV eras before it.
Oh, and before you point out that I accused Seinfeld of being overly New York focused, but also used three other shows set in New York as counterexamples, I realized that just now.
And I don’t give a shit. I can keep going. “Green Acres” wasn’t really about farming. “The Bob Newhart Show” wasn’t really about psychiatry, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” wasn’t really about TV production, and “WKRP in Cincinnati” wasn’t really about radio production.
The shows about nothing and everything are THE MAJORITY of all the shows. Certainly, all the good ones. It’s harder for me to think of reversed examples, where the show is just what it was supposed to be “about.”
Like, yeah, “Flipper” really was about a fucking dolphin, and “The Flying Nun” really was about a flying fucking nun. And those shows fucking sucked.
I think I can consider my point thoroughly made.
Now, all you assholes can start typing abuse at me, for daring to dislike your idol. I won’t be reading that shit. Not sorry.
Congratulations on the unpopular opinion. What mostly sets Seinfeld apart from other sitcoms that came before and what earned it “show about nothing” is that it didn’t have any “teachable moments”. The characters are shitty people doing shitty things who never grow, they never change or learn a moral lesson, they just stay as crappy people throughout the show’s run.
Of course in today’s environment with IASIP it’s just commonplace (IASIP is a spiritual descendent of Seinfeld), but when Seinfeld came out, no matter what kind of zany/grumpy/snide/mean characters were on a show, everyone came together at the end and learned a lesson about X. Other shows that were out the same year as Seinfeld were Family Matters, Saved by the Bell, and Coach, that’s the environment it existed in. Today it’s expected more than anything, but at the time we were coming out of 80s tv and it’s shitty moralizing attitude about everything. If somebody did something wrong, they were going see the error of their ways and try to be a better person, by golly (awwwww sound effect).
Granted, Married with Children came out in 1987 and was doing something similar, but it was a bit raunchier/low-brow and the storylines weren’t as “clever” or off-the-wall, so probably didn’t have the same sort of appeal. MwC was more in the vein of All in the Family, if anything.
First of all, you’ve made a whole two paragraphs of really excellent points. I respect your point of view, for the most part. However, I draw your attention to this opinion:
Might I assume that you fall somewhere squarely in the Gen-X age bracket? To the perpetually cynical minds of Gen-X-ers, happy endings and morality tales are like salt to a slug. They burn you. I get that.
I was born in 1980, so I fall into either the youngest cohort of the X-ers or the eldest cohort of the Millenials. Therefore, I saw all those shows, but I had a different perspective.
My teenage cynicism had not fully kicked in, when all those classic family sitcoms were on the air. I mean, mainly because I was 9 or 10 when most of these shows were premiering. My sarcastic and cynical phase was coming along, little by little, as that era progressed…but it didn’t fully land until later, and therefore it didn’t slam down on those shows, and make me disgusted by them.
I don’t consider shows that have happy endings to be the opposite of high quality. I don’t think formulaic sitcoms where everyone comes together at the end of the episode are automatically bad. And I certainly don’t consider the opposite to be automatically good.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not some kind of moralizing crusader or bible thumper, or whatever. I don’t think a show needs to be happy or uplifting or moralistic, either. I basically don’t have ANY of those biases, as a general rule. At least, not the way that Gen-X-ers seem to have them.
Also, I could be wrong, and you might be a Gen-Z person who has gone back and watched all this stuff after the fact, and simply disagrees with me. If that’s the case, I’ll commend you for going back and watching stuff in 4:3 standard definition. It’s usually like pulling teeth to get the young people to watch anything made before the HD era, even if it’s remastered in perfect HD.
It’s the aspect ratio that throws them off, which I particularly resent, on the grounds that Gen-Z has happily accepted VERTICAL VIDEO, in the form of Tik-Tok and YouTube Shorts, and that shit is abominable.