Soon every tiny incident in his life became story fodder. He left the show office to buy candy at a nearby convenience store, and as he surveyed the offerings, a beautiful woman approached him, saying, “Mike! Mike!” She walked right up to a befuddled Steve Koren until she was about two feet away. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “You’re not my boyfriend.”
When Koren returned to the office, he told the story to the other guys. “I can’t believe that a guy who looks like me somehow managed to get that girl,” he said. Boom: George story.
DAN O’KEEFE JOINED THE TEAM around this time as well. He was a freelancer and didn’t have to come on site, but he hung around the offices anyway and eventually wrote the 150th episode, “The Pothole.” In his late twenties, he couldn’t believe his luck, getting hired onto the best show in television. He’d watched the show since he graduated from college, in 1990. After that, he’d gotten a job as an editor of the National Lampoon, but when the entire staff got fired, he thought better of his print media plans. Though he hadn’t been allowed to watch television growing up, he knew people at the Letterman show who did pretty well, so he looked for TV jobs in Los Angeles.
Once transplanted from the East Coast, he worked for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Married with Children. His girlfriend had stayed back in New York for a while, but decided to join O’Keefe in L.A. A week after they moved in together, Married got a new showrunner, which meant the staff was cleaned out so she could bring in her own writers. He was out of a job. He tried to get another TV gig, but came up empty-handed. He thought, Maybe law school? He was reluctantly looking into taking the GREs when he managed to beg his way, through friends, into a chance to send some story ideas in to Seinfeld. He spent six months going to Kinko’s daily, faxing in his ten pages of ideas, five ideas per page. Soon he was allowed to at least hang out at the offices, if not write his own entire episode yet.
He would pitch to no less than Jerry Seinfeld, who scared the shit out of him. Seinfeld was friendly, but he was the gold standard of comedy. Seinfeld pitched his own jokes to the writers’ room in addition to presiding over it. If O’Keefe managed to get Seinfeld to laugh at something he’d said that day, he’d go home and tell his girlfriend about it.
He didn’t have a steady paycheck just yet, but he was living on laughs from Jerry Seinfeld.
PETER MEHLMAN WAS INCHING CLOSE to the end of his rope on Seinfeld after working there for four years. At this point, only Seinfeld himself had logged more time in the writers’ office than Mehlman had. He’d outlasted wave after wave of new writers while he turned in some of the show’s most distinctive scripts. Now he was surrounded by a bunch of Harvard boys in their twenties. At forty, he felt ancient.
Around this time, he wrote a whole script about how people who went to Harvard always manage to drop that fact into conversation within five minutes of meeting you. He liked the boys, he really did. He thought Dave Mandel, in particular, was brilliant. The script had nothing to do with them personally. But Seinfeld didn’t get it, so it didn’t matter anyway. It never got made.
He did write an episode called “The Yada Yada,” though, and suddenly everyone was saying “yada yada.” He hadn’t invented the phrase “yada yada”—an editor had said it to him once at a meeting—but he did invent a term in the episode, “anti-dentite,” which described Jerry’s feelings toward his dentist, Tim Whatley, whom he suspected had converted to Judaism just so he could do Jewish jokes. Mehlman thought “anti-dentite” should have caught on as much as “yada yada,” but it didn’t.
He did still love Seinfeld’s instant ability to affect culture. One day you were writing something that just made you laugh, and the next day the nation was saying it over and over. That never got old.
“The Yada Yada” got Mehlman an Emmy nomination. That was good news. He was tired of the show not winning Emmys. He was tired of not winning Emmys.
Everyone, including his “Yada Yada” cowriter Jill Franklyn, told him that Ellen’s “Puppy Episode,” in which that show’s main character comes out of the closet to represent its star, Ellen DeGeneres, also coming out of the closet, would be tough competition, given its newsworthy implications. Even before the nominations were announced, Franklyn and Mehlman fretted over the threat of “The Puppy Episode.” Mehlman theorized that “The Puppy Episode” would be in a different category, because it was an hour long. He was wrong.
Mehlman was so set on winning an Emmy, he couldn’t help but talk about it as Emmy night approached, he later told me. He confessed to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as they chatted over the food on the craft services table, how much he wanted to win. “Of course,” she said. “If you didn’t, you’d be an idiot.” Louis-Dreyfus knew; she had only just won her first Emmy the previous year on her fifth nomination.
On the way to the 1997 Emmy ceremony, Mehlman’s limo got lost, speeding fifteen miles in the opposite direction from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium before it turned around. When he arrived, he realized he’d forgotten his Emmy tickets. He talked his way in anyway, and rushed to take his seat next to Franklyn, who sat next to Martha Stewart, who was reading a book and eating a plum.
Early in the evening, Franklyn and Mehlman’s category was announced to the television audience of 18.8 million people. They lost to Ellen’s “Puppy Episode.” Mehlman slumped in his seat as he imagined his friends at his funeral saying, “He was never the same after losing that Emmy.”
Other things annoyed him, too. Like the fact that Seinfeld, after it won an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy in 1993, kept losing to Frasier. When did Frasier ever have an episode worth remembering, worth talking about even the very next day? By 1997, when “The Yada Yada” lost, Mehlman had had enough. “It’s like we lost to Ellen coming out of the closet,” he cracked to a reporter, “and we lost to Frasier never coming out of the closet.” What was the point of being on a show like Seinfeld if you didn’t say stuff that was completely offensive?
IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, Carol Leifer had left Seinfeld to create and star in her own show on the WB, nearly a decade before Tina Fey would usher in a wave of female creator-stars in sitcoms. Leifer was a pioneer, and she felt the weight of it. Jerry Seinfeld came to her pilot taping to show his support. As she neared a nervous meltdown while preparing to shoot, imagining dire consequences to her career should this project fail, her old friend visited her backstage. “Carol,” he said, “there’s not just one thing.”
She took a breath. He was right. Having your own show seemed like the big break, the only thing that mattered. But that was only in the moment. If it didn’t work, other things would come along. Both of them knew that the heights of creativity and total enjoyment didn’t always come together, especially once agents and networks were involved.
Seinfeld was one of what she called her “go-to Yodas,” along with Jay Leno. He was sage. He was right. There was not just one thing. And if anyone knew about fluke second, third, and fourth chances, it was the man who cocreated Seinfeld.
Many people who would go on to bigger fame had also passed through the guest-star revolving door at Seinfeld, no small number of them as Jerry’s endless parade of beautiful girlfriends. Teri Hatcher, of “they’re real, and they’re spectacular,” was now a full-fledged geek-boy crush as the female half of Lois & Clark. (Surely, Superman fan Jerry would be among her admirers.) Bryan Cranston—aka Jerry’s dentist, Dr. Tim Whatley—had appeared in Saving Private Ryan. Jon Favreau, who played a clown who argued with George at a party, had starred in Swingers, Very Bad Things, and Deep Impact. Jerry’s “loser” girlfriend, Christine Taylor, appeared in The Wedding Singer and on Friends. Courteney Cox—another Jerry paramour, the one who pretended to be his wife for a dry-cleaning discount—was now famous as one of the Friends. Seinfeld had become a star maker.
The next generation of writers flowing into the Seinfeld offices were hoping for similarly big breaks, too.
JENNIFER CRITTENDEN ARRIVED IN 1996, at the beginning of Seinfeld’s eighth season, fro
m two years at The Simpsons, to take up where Carol Leifer had left off in the female-writer role. The twenty-seven-year-old wasn’t fazed by being so outnumbered by guys—that was the norm in comedy rooms, including at The Simpsons and at Letterman, where she had her first job. She didn’t feel like she was treated differently by the other writers, and they didn’t expect her to write only for Elaine. By now, she felt at home among the supersmart, funny Harvard types who populated such shows’ writing offices.
She did feel a little self-conscious of her gender when, after every episode taping, the writers would all go back to Seinfeld’s office to smoke cigars before heading out to Jerry’s Famous Deli together. The smell of cigars made her sick. She tried to smoke once but couldn’t stand it. Skipping out on a smoke was the kind of thing a guy could get away with without a second thought, whereas she worried it made her look a little “girly.” The guys also sometimes asked her to write their brainstorming notes on the whiteboard because she had the nicest handwriting.
What really amazed her, though, was how fast things moved at Seinfeld in comparison with The Simpsons. Because The Simpsons was animated, and animated shows had much longer production cycles than sitcoms, the staff there could go over and over the scripts, comb through details, do endless rewrites. At Seinfeld, she kept thinking, “When are we going to go over this?” The next thing she knew, a show had gone from the whiteboard in the office to the air. It made her nervous, even though everyone seemed on top of things. Even Seinfeld seemed calm, despite his total responsibility.
SPIKE FERESTEN CAME TO SEINFELD in this later wave of writers, fresh off five years at Letterman. He’d left the New York–based talk show because he wanted to be in Los Angeles, where most TV action took place. He hadn’t watched much Seinfeld because he worked late on Thursdays. But he had a chance to pitch Seinfeld, so he bought a paperback of Seinfeld’s book, SeinLanguage, to get the comedy rhythms down, then pitched to Larry David in 1995, during the show’s seventh season, at David’s house.
When Feresten got the job and got to the lot, he was shocked to see how small the operation was: The writers’ offices were just a tiny cottage among the studio buildings. Letterman had fourteen stories on Broadway.
Though the size didn’t impress him, Feresten was intimidated because of his lack of experience writing half-hour comedies. When Seinfeld asked him, “Why do you want to work on this show?” he was astonished that the question could be asked with such earnestness.
“You guys don’t know what you are to the world yet?” Feresten said. “This show is a revelation!” Like Ackerman, Feresten felt like David and Seinfeld didn’t realize what a phenomenon their creation had become.
Feresten was relieved to learn that what Seinfeld needed most from its writers was real-life experiences that would make good story lines. They should pitch odd little things that had happened to them, and let the characters perform what they had wanted to do in the situation, but, most likely, hadn’t. Feresten loved to go out, walk around, experience things, and write them in his notebook.
He had plenty of experiences stored up from his New York life as well, which was a hot commodity at Seinfeld because many of the writers had been away from the city for years at this point. He’d lived with a girlfriend who had asked if her friend, the wig master from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, could stay with them. There was an episode. (If you don’t see the humor inherent in that situation, you haven’t lived in a cramped New York apartment with the wig master from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.) Feresten had parked his Jeep in a cheap Upper West Side garage and found used condoms in the backseat when he went to pick it up. Episode. He found out that Holocaust survivors got priority when it came to securing tennis court time. Episode, with some changes: Survivors of the shipwrecked Andrea Doria would get dibs on apartments. Seinfeld wasn’t quite ready to poke fun at Holocaust survivors.
To get those fresh New York stories without spending years working for Letterman, the writers took two field trips east during the show’s final two seasons to stay at the Four Seasons in Manhattan for a week or so and walk around the city for a few hours each day, taking notes.
FERESTEN FAMOUSLY WROTE THE EPISODE “The Soup Nazi,” but he also wrote the memorable episode “The Muffin Tops.” For the week the episode was shooting, he had originally written a script based on the fact that back in New York, he used to have a police scanner in his apartment; tuned to the right frequency, he could hear his neighbors’ conversations on their cordless phones. He and his friends would kick back with margaritas and listen. It seemed an obvious story line for Kramer. But on Tuesday, the night before the table read for that script, Frasier did the same story line. The writers came in Wednesday morning in a panic: They had to think of a new idea.
As everyone pitched, Feresten remembered that he once had a girlfriend who would only eat the tops of muffins—that became Elaine’s story, and eventual attempt at a business. (“Top o’ the muffin to you!”)
One of the writers also mentioned the bus tours of New York City now being led by Kenny Kramer, Larry David’s old neighbor. If Kenny was going to profit from Kramer’s Reality Tour, Seinfeld could certainly use that as a Kramer story to weave into the “Muffin Tops” episode. They began with the raw material they mined from Kenny Kramer’s tour and passed it through their Bizarro transformer: “That was one of the certain joys of that show,” writer Alec Berg said. “When the show started interacting with the world, we’d start interacting with that interaction.”
Berg and his partner, Jeff Schaffer, had also heard about a comedian buying a friend’s story to tell as if it were an anecdote from his own life when he was going on a talk show. The resulting Seinfeld plot: Elaine’s eccentric catalog-magnate boss, J. Peterman, had been outed in a recent episode as quite a bit more boring than his persona would imply. He purchased stories from Kramer to use as his own in his autobiography. In “The Muffin Tops,” when the book came out, Kramer would capitalize on this by offering his own (ultimately doomed) “Peterman Reality Tour” of sites from his own stories, as co-opted by Peterman. In the end, though, he’d have to use the tour bus to transport muffin stumps to the dump for Elaine.
Stealing from real life had made Seinfeld magic again.
FORMER SEINFELD WRITER ANDY ROBIN—still recovering from his disappointment over “The Junior Mint” script—now wrote for The Martin Short Show, a Seinfeld/Larry Sanders Show hybrid in which Martin Short played a talk show host named Marty Short. But Robin still wasn’t happy. He considered applying to med school and making a clean break from this career altogether. But then he started thinking: Maybe he had gone about this TV writing thing all wrong.
First, he noticed that many comedy writers had partners, which seemed to make the process a lot more fun. So he got in touch with his college friend Gregg Kavet, who worked at a consulting firm in Boston.
The two had written together a lot at the Harvard Lampoon, though Kavet had abandoned writing for a quieter office life while Robin went off to New York for Saturday Night Live. Kavet didn’t think he could handle the pressure of having to be funny all the time. But Robin called to talk his old college dorm-mate back into comedy: “We wrote together really well in college, and it seems that teams work better than an individual out here. I’ve got all these great contacts, and before I leave and they’re gone, we should try to pitch something.”
Seinfeld was, as it happened, the only show Kavet watched regularly. He couldn’t pass this opportunity up. He agreed to help his old friend remotely. They’d work on ideas over the phone; Robin would pitch them to David and Seinfeld; and Kavet would fly out for casting and shooting their scripts.
Robin also realized he had rejected his own ideas too quickly when he last worked on Seinfeld. Maybe if he brainstormed them out a little bit more with Kavet, he could give them some shape and gain some confidence before they pitched them.
Robin called Seinfeld and asked if he could come back to pitch. The
Martin Short Show was on the same lot anyway. Soon he was back at Seinfeld for good, this time with Kavet along. Kavet came in handy for Seinfeld, not just because he was funny—but also because he’d been working in an office until very recently, which gave him story ideas for George’s and Elaine’s work lives. George’s desire to nap under his desk, for instance, came from one of Kavet’s former coworkers.
Kavet and Robin’s first episode together was one of Robin’s favorites, “The Jimmy,” in which Elaine agrees to go on a date with a guy who talks about himself in the third person; she thinks he’s setting her up with someone else.
Perhaps it was because Robin had matured a few years and found his groove with TV writing, but he found that working for just Jerry, with no Larry David around, was less scary. When David was there, Robin never knew how much his script would be changed during the rewrite. On one hand, he hoped David and Seinfeld would like his work and not change a thing, but on the other hand, he hoped they would fix his mistakes.
Seinfeld, however, was harder to pitch to. With David, all you had to do was catch him in a good mood and give a decent performance. Seinfeld was tougher to find in a calm enough moment for a pitch, and even harder to keep interested for very long. He was always distracted by the million parts of his job—writing, memorizing lines, producing the entire show. Once you nailed it with Seinfeld, however, the resulting script tended to be smooth sailing.
Making Seinfeld laugh became the primary goal of the young writers’ lives. They would have been thrilled to get a Seinfeld laugh at any time in their lives, but now, with him as the sole voice of authority on which scripts were made, it became crucial. Dan O’Keefe once made Seinfeld double over cracking up at one of his pitches and counted the moment among his life’s greatest achievements. He told a story about a hippie chick he’d dated who liked to burn a vanilla candle whenever they had sex, which made him hungry—this became “The Blood,” in which George tries to talk a girlfriend into letting him eat a pastrami sandwich as part of sex. But the line that got Seinfeld was George telling his girlfriend during sex that he had to go because he had a bus transfer that was good for only another hour, when, really, he wanted to go eat.
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