Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

About a week later, though, came the pilot testing phase, which garnered a much stronger reaction. This round of testing involved about four hundred households, recruited by NBC via phone, who watched new pilots on unused local cable channels. In the first week of May, Littlefield got the test results on all his pilot contenders—the results phase always came around his birthday, and usually ruined it. This proved no exception: Viewers were unimpressed with The Seinfeld Chronicles. “You can’t get too excited about going to the Laundromat,” one viewer told researchers.

  “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again,” the report concluded. “Jerry Seinfeld, who was familiar to about a quarter of the viewers, created, on balance, lukewarm reactions among adults and teens, and very low reactions among kids. . . . None of the supports were liked, and viewers felt that Jerry needed a better backup ensemble.” Then, the final blow: “Pilot performance: weak.”

  Littlefield had hoped for the best for the show, but the research report concerned him. The Seinfeld Chronicles did not make the cut for the fall schedule, which would instead feature shows starring Cloris Leachman as “the oversexed head of housekeeping at a family-owned New York City hotel,” as the press release announced, in The Nutt House; Stephanie Beacham as “a hard-edged, adventurous nun placed in charge of an unruly group of orphans who are surprised to discover that she is no pushover” in Sister Kate; and David Hasselhoff in the sexy lifeguard drama Baywatch. The network’s Thursday lineup remained its powerhouse, with The Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers, and L.A. Law.

  The Seinfeld Chronicles would air as a onetime “special” during the TV dead zone of summer. In the bit of press it got, Seinfeld described it to the Associated Press as a show full of “aimless wandering.”

  NO ONE AT NBC KNEW what to do about The Seinfeld Chronicles after it ran to tepid reviews and okay ratings. And for months afterward, they chose not to do a thing. Ludwin got nervous as the network’s rights to The Seinfeld Chronicles neared expiration at the end of 1989. He and several of his colleagues liked the show and were disappointed when the testing went so poorly. He and Littlefield hatched a plan: Since Ludwin had commissioned the series, and Ludwin was in charge of late-night and specials, why not use that department’s more fluid budget to its advantage? One axed two-hour Bob Hope special could mean four new episodes of Seinfeld’s show.

  And, in fact, the equation would play out just that way, the world never knowing of the Bob Hope special it had missed. Littlefield asked Ludwin to call Hope with the bad news while he called Seinfeld with the good news. Seinfeld, however, knew this wasn’t the greatest news. He greeted Littlefield’s “four episodes” offer with a few seconds of silence, followed by: “Has any show, in the history of television, ever succeeded with a four-episode order?”

  He took the deal anyway, and the minuscule episode order suited Larry David just fine. “That’s all I got in me anyway,” Shapiro recalled him saying.

  However, the executives had some caveats in picking up the show: First and foremost, David and Seinfeld would need to add a major female character to the core cast. Garlington’s wisecracking waitress in the first episode wasn’t enough to counteract the fact that, as Seinfeld later said, the show “lacked estrogen.” Littlefield worried the waitress character would have a hard time getting out of the coffee shop to involve herself in the guys’ adventures. The music, too, could use some help. And though only four episodes were on deck for now, David and Seinfeld would have to launch a real show operation, with directors, staffers, producers, and a set. They would air again in the summer, returning to NBC on May 30, 1990. But their battles with the network that gave them life were far from over.

  3

  The Network

  JEREMIAH BOSGANG REPORTED TO HIS new job at NBC in 1990. He was assigned to work for Rick Ludwin, who oversaw late-night and specials, which sounded cool enough to Bosgang. But soon after Bosgang got there, he got the feeling that he was in the wrong place. Comedy and drama development were the places to be, while the late-night and specials department was nothing more than paper-pushing purgatory.

  Ludwin’s division handled the least glamorous series—Unsolved Mysteries, TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes—and those running on autopilot, such as The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, both of which had been on for decades. It didn’t make new hits. Still, Bosgang knew he was lucky to get a corporate job, as he later told me. A struggling actor, he’d moved from New York to Los Angeles, telling himself if he hung out in Hollywood enough, he’d get some real work.

  Instead, he got this glorified internship at NBC at age twenty-eight. As a “program associate,” he’d help Ludwin in whatever way he could while he tried to prove over the next two years that he had what it took to become a development executive.

  But just when Bosgang thought he understood how uncool his assignment was, he heard about this sitcom pilot that was also under Ludwin’s purview. The Seinfeld Chronicles had run the previous year as a onetime special buried in the summer, but Ludwin explained to Bosgang that he’d done some fancy accounting to make room in the budget for four more episodes to give it another chance.

  Somehow, despite being stuck in specials and late-night, Bosgang found himself tasked with serving as the office’s main liaison to a cool new sitcom, one that wasn’t like any other on TV, one that he actually thought was funny. A cool new sitcom no one watched, but a cool new sitcom nonetheless. Bosgang considered himself a comedy writer and performer, or at least an aspiring one, so he couldn’t have been more thrilled.

  As the point person, he’d give Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld the network’s notes at table reads each week. He thought that was funny. What the hell did he know? It didn’t matter; he was on his way to becoming a network executive. Years later, he’d remember sitting in Ludwin’s office when entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff stopped by to tell them the show’s name was changing—at Seinfeld’s request, and to avoid confusion with ABC’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off rip-off The Marshall Chronicles. Now, it would be called simply Seinfeld.

  Ludwin, known for protecting the creative talent behind the shows he supervised, impressed upon Bosgang the importance of empowering David and Seinfeld to make the kind of show they wanted to make, even when the network didn’t understand what the producers were doing. Ludwin said their department’s job was to fight for Seinfeld at the network. While the comedy division and the higher-ups were focused on making a new sitcom called Wings a hit—because it shared producers with the huge hit Cheers—Bosgang and Ludwin should make sure Seinfeld didn’t fall through the cracks.

  The day of the first table read that Bosgang would attend on NBC’s behalf, he hopped onto the motorcycle he’d driven across the country from New York and roared over to the show’s Hollywood lot. He parked, dismounted, and took off his helmet, carrying it to the office with him. His scraggly brown hair brushed his collar. As he approached the building, the suited men standing outside eyed him suspiciously. They turned out to be some Castle Rock executives, along with Seinfeld’s managers, George Shapiro and Howard West. And here, he was supposed to be the “suit.”

  “This is what NBC thinks of us,” Bosgang remembers one of the Castle Rock executives scoffing.

  But at that moment West embraced Bosgang and rubbed his forearm. “This is for good luck,” West said.

  “That’s right,” Shapiro said. “You’re going to be our good luck charm.” Shapiro was right: Bosgang was one of several people who would become a key part of Seinfeldia’s earliest history.

  Tom Cherones was key as well. Cherones was among the few people who’d already heard good things about this Seinfeld. A fifty-year-old manly presence with a thatch of graying hair and a thick beard, and with a pipe often in his hand, he had his share of television experience, a long career that had recently turned to sitcoms. He had worked on Annie McGuire, a short-lived comedy that starred Mary Tyler Moore, and before that the grown-sibling comedy My Sister Sam and the hit family show
Growing Pains. Castle Rock offered Cherones a directing job for the first two episodes of Seinfeld, then upped the offer to a producing credit when one staffer left. Soon he was developing and producing all four episodes in this mini-season.

  That didn’t mean he got it, though. He read the scripts, like the one where Jerry’s character frets about his girlfriend seeing him with dental floss stuck to his hand, and wondered: What the fuck was this?

  He was pretty sure only Larry and Jerry knew what this thing was about. But he didn’t care much about that. He took the job for one reason: For the first time, he had creative freedom. The network had demanded the show be shot before a live audience, but he liked the idea of making it look as un-sitcom-like as possible, and no one seemed to be watching him too closely. He had worked for productions as diverse as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and National Geographic films. He wasn’t locked into the sitcom mind-set when it came to visuals, and now he had some room to play.

  He could tell that the network guys, because they were from the late-night and specials department, were unusually hands-off; they wouldn’t fuck this up like the comedy people always did. It seemed to him that Bosgang, Ludwin, and their colleagues were saying, “We don’t know what you’re doing, but go ahead and do it.”

  Seinfeld paid Cherones more than any other show he’d worked on thus far, because he got checks as both a producer and a director this time. He worked long hours, of course, with production, budgeting, staffing, and postproduction to handle. But his wife was writing novels and TV scripts, so she was busy, too, and they had sent their kids off to college already. He had the time.

  His first idea: Keep the lighting lower and more natural than the normal glare of sitcoms. Hire lighting experts who would set it up like a single-camera show. Meanwhile, let the writers write what they wanted, and shoot it the way they envisioned, whether he understood it or not.

  Jonathan Wolff got a call from his old friend George Wallace, a comedian who’d lived with Seinfeld in New York City, asking for a huge favor: Wolff was now a big shot in the TV theme song world, having written and arranged music for Who’s the Boss?, Married with Children, and others. Would Wolff write a song for Seinfeld’s new sitcom?

  Wolff and Wallace had met on the road when Wallace was touring and Wolff was a musician, and they had become close enough that Wolff couldn’t help but say yes. Wolff still looked like a lost member of Def Leppard with his long golden curls, but he ran a serious business operation now. He handled thirteen shows at the time and didn’t need the work or the hassle for some sitcom he hadn’t heard of. Still, he loved Wallace.

  Seinfeld called Wolff to chat about the project. Music, he told Wolff, would be important to the show’s aesthetic. Wolff wasn’t impressed; stars and producers always told him such things while they courted his services. But Wolff grew a bit more intrigued when Seinfeld dug into the specifics. Seinfeld had a unique sound design problem: The opening credit sequence would revolve around Jerry’s comedy monologues. And while Seinfeld wanted distinctive music, the audience had to hear him talk. For that reason, the pilot music hadn’t cut it.

  This piqued Wolff’s interest. Sometimes musical choices were obvious, and sometimes he had to find clues in everything from the show to the time slot and target audience, which made for interesting work. He watched The Seinfeld Chronicles pilot, listened to Seinfeld’s delivery. The language had a rhythm, a musical quality of its own. This inspired him. A strong bass line could work, since its pitch wouldn’t compete with Seinfeld’s voice. Wolff could build bass lines around Seinfeld’s routine, holding for punch lines or accenting gestures. He thought about New York City energy, people buzzing around all the time.

  He had a kind of crazy idea.

  NOBODY THOUGHT OF ’80S TV theme songs as art. Wolff himself felt that he’d written a lot of stupid stuff. (Lyrics from the woodwinds-heavy Who’s the Boss? theme: “There’s a path you take and a path untaken / The choice is up to you, my friend.” Never has a truism been so catchy.) He’d started out trying to be a musician because he wasn’t much good at anything else. He tried to fix cars, but it didn’t take. So in 1976, at seventeen, he moved to Los Angeles from Louisville, Kentucky, and got work as a session musician. As it happened, a lot of his gigs were playing for film and TV scores.

  Soon, the composers handed him their extra work—arranging a rhythm section, for instance. Then it occurred to him: Why didn’t he just do the whole job himself, for the whole pay? He sent a letter to a bunch of studio music departments declaring himself a composer for hire. It worked, like a switch. The same studios who’d been calling him to do their cleanup work started giving him composing assignments. Soon he ran his own company, which focused solely on half-hour television comedies. Half-hour shows meant twice as much money in an hour—with two of his theme songs playing in an hour of programming, rather than just one for an hour-long—so the choice was a no-brainer.

  Wolff would get to write something interesting only if he could find some producers—and a network—willing to break from convention. As it turned out, he’d found those people in Seinfeld: producers who wanted something unique, and a network that was barely paying attention.

  Seinfeld came to Wolff’s studio for the official music pitch. Wolff proposed the slap bass he had imagined—plus a scatting, beatboxing riff he’d produce with his very own lips, tongue, and teeth. That was it.

  Seinfeld loved it, no questions asked. He called Larry David from Wolff’s office. “This is kind of cool,” he told his partner.

  David said a quick “okay”—he was busy writing the next episodes—and that was that. Seinfeld had official music. Wolff retrofitted the music to the pilot episode so that it could rerun with the new episodes. The slap bass would become Seinfeld’s sonic brand, making Wolff, over time, the most famous slap-bass player since Bootsy Collins.

  As the growing team churned out new footage, a tape of each episode appeared in Wolff’s office, a commercial building he’d purchased when his scoring business took off in 1986. There, a copy of every half hour on three-quarter-inch video piled up, a stipulation in his contract. Unlike some of the other shows he worked on, he enjoyed watching his complimentary copies of Seinfeld.

  When the network suits heard the new music in a meeting, however, they balked. It sounded like they couldn’t afford real music or something. Was that popping noise an instrument? Some weird electronic effect? It all seemed annoying.

  Annoying? David loved that! Even when Wolff pulled David and Cherones aside and suggested they change the music so they could fight with the network on other issues, David would hear none of it. “No, no, the music stays,” Wolff remembers David saying. “Next.”

  LARRY DAVID WAS ALREADY GARNERING a bit of a reputation for resisting outside interference and unwelcome suggestions when it came to his sitcom. Some of the cast even got the idea that his sensitivity contributed to the show’s next big change: dropping Lee Garlington, who appeared as a waitress in the pilot, in favor of a major female character not hampered by serving duties. According to Alexander’s recollections in later interviews, although Garlington has no memory of this, she had a conversation with Larry David that infuriated him. David told the other cast members that Garlington said she could write something better than he had, according to this version of the story. Even though she understands that’s what he heard, it was certainly not what she thought she was saying.

  Garlington could get a little bit excited over a new role and sometimes offered suggestions: What if Claire did this? I have an idea for that! David, however, sometimes took “suggestions” personally, as a direct criticism of his writing.

  She had worked a lot, even though she wasn’t a household name; she had done stints on Roseanne, Coach, Quantum Leap, Who’s the Boss?, and many others. She’d done nine pilots in ten years. So she didn’t even realize that she’d been “fired” from Seinfeld; her contract simply wasn’t renewed.

  The network did, however, also emphatically s
uggest a stronger female presence when it ordered more episodes. The network executives wanted a woman on par with George and Kramer. The producers considered TV regulars Patricia Heaton and Megan Mullally, as well as stand-up turned actress Rosie O’Donnell, for the job. None of them quite did it for the Seinfeld producers.

  But Julia Louis-Dreyfus had a contract at Warner Brothers that was about to expire, and David had a personal connection to her from their working together on Saturday Night Live in 1982. The day after she got out of the deal, David threw her name into contention. She got the four Seinfeld scripts via her agent. She would have preferred a bigger part, but she loved the scripts’ writing.

  Louis-Dreyfus had comedy chops and a sexiness that wasn’t overbearing—tons of dark curls, huge brown eyes. Like David, she had barely survived her SNL time, though she endured three seasons to his one. And she’d had a good excuse for being eaten alive: She joined at twenty-one, the youngest female cast member in the show’s history at the time. She had struggled to hold her own against a powerhouse cast that included Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal, and Joe Piscopo. She was shocked to find a cutthroat atmosphere instead of the ensemble energy she’d experienced doing improv in college, but she endured, if only just.

  She and David had bonded in their misery at SNL. When David asked her to audition for his new Seinfeld character, she agreed partly because of her connection to him. Once she walked in, David and Seinfeld knew, for the first time, who Elaine Benes was. Louis-Dreyfus understood the New York sensibility, having been born in the city. She spent some of her childhood there, but she brought a worldly perspective as well. She’d lived in Washington, DC; Sri Lanka; Colombia; and Tunisia because of her stepfather’s medical charity work.

  Louis-Dreyfus had grown up, in fact, quite comfortably: Her father, William Louis-Dreyfus, ran a billion-dollar commodities firm called the Louis Dreyfus Group. As she traveled the world with her mother and stepfather, and her father made major financial deals, she dreamed of being Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, or Diane Keaton. She loved filmmaker Preston Sturges’s funny, sexy heroines.