Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  For O’Keefe, this was his peak, at age twenty-eight. He was sure of it. Even the birth of his first child would not rival the moment Jerry Seinfeld doubled over during his pitch.

  Steve Koren once pitched a long list of ideas to Seinfeld and the other writers, really selling them. Seinfeld laughed and laughed. At the end, he chuckled some more. “Boy, I really appreciate that pitch,” Seinfeld said. “You put a lot into it.” Koren thanked him. “Unfortunately,” Seinfeld continued, “I’m not going to use any of these stories. But, God, I have to tell you, I appreciate the effort.” Everyone, even Koren, laughed even harder. Then one of his fellow writers said to Koren: “The Serenity Now thing. Tell Jerry that one.” He did, and, finally, he had a winner.

  AS SEINFELD TOOK OVER SOLE control of the show, it moved away from its everyday-life, observational, “show about nothing” bent and toward a more absurd, cartoonish approach. It lost David’s complexity and darkness and gained more of Seinfeld’s lightheartedness. Seinfeld had always loved the simple slapstick of Abbott and Costello, a predilection that showed in the newer episodes. Seinfeld also took a turn toward the sensibilities of its young writers, many of whom were in their twenties. Some of Jason Alexander’s anxieties were realized: “It felt like it shifted from a show where George was the most compelling character to a show where Kramer was the most compelling character,” he said. “He had a youthfulness, an innocence, that writing staff knew how to write. And Michael was so easy to write for. ‘Kramer comes in.’ You’re done.”

  Other parts of the production changed as well. Because the music wasn’t one fixed, melodic theme, it began to morph with the show’s mood, becoming, as Wolff described it, “more aggressive, a little more annoying.” The vocal portion grew more nasal, the bass edgier, the entire composition calling more attention to itself. It had gone from music that said, “I hope it’s okay that we have this weird music on this quirky show,” to music that said, “We are the top show on television with the coolest music. What’s it to you?”

  New director Andy Ackerman added his own new twist to the show’s distinctive look. In the eighth-season episode “The Pothole,” for instance, he obsessed over one simple scene in which Jerry accidentally knocks a girlfriend’s toothbrush into the toilet. Ackerman could shoot it the normal way: a profile of Jerry looking down at the toilet. But he thought: What if we could see that from the toilet’s point of view? Cherones had long ago set Seinfeld ’s look as more cinematic than the average sitcom. The toilet POV made sense in this world.

  Ackerman mounted the camera on a short tripod, underneath a toilet with a glass bottom. It took a few takes to get the brush to fall in just the right spot, but the results were true visual humor: The toothbrush drops, then Jerry’s horrified face appears overhead. The crew spent about four hours total on what could have taken a few minutes, if shot conventionally on an average sitcom. For other episodes, Ackerman used cranes and Steadicams, far beyond the equipment any other stage-bound sitcom at the time would dream of. That’s what being the No. 1 show on television was all about.

  Ackerman’s no-holds-barred visual comedy heightened what was becoming a manic, wacky version of Seinfeld. Instead of the five-page scenes of traditional comedies, or the four-page scenes of early Seinfeld, now the scripts—which sometimes ran fifty or sixty pages—contained one- to three-page scenes, tops. In other words, the cuts were even quicker, to go along with the fast-paced, cartoonish plotlines the new, young staff spun: Elaine meets the “Bizarros”; Elaine’s new boyfriend won’t let her talk during the song “Desperado”; Jerry and Kramer switch personalities when they switch apartments. A story line revolved around Kramer getting a new showerhead, so Richards could do elaborate physical bits, miming hurricane-force water pressure. One ninth-season episode, “The Betrayal,” ran in reverse.

  Everyone on set felt Larry David’s absence; they were a little bit lost without his clear vision and guidance. But in some ways, his departure freed up new energy. The writers took on more responsibility for their own episodes and for the production, since Seinfeld had to split his time between writing and performing. Mom and Dad were gone and the kids had the run of the house, as Ackerman once described it.

  A new writing and producing system emerged. The show had never had a traditional writers’ room like other sitcoms, where all the staffers would gather every day to brainstorm jokes and story ideas, then send one writer off to assemble it all into a script. The Seinfeld writers had always operated independently, pitching to David and Seinfeld alone, writing alone. Now, with David gone, Seinfeld developed a new procedure with, essentially, multiple writers’ rooms. There was an idea room, where plotlines were pitched, accepted, and rejected in a group setting. There was an outline room, where the group would brainstorm the steps of an entire episode. After that, the script’s writer or writers would go off to compose. When they turned the script in, it would go to a rewrite room, where the writer and a few colleagues of his or her choice would work out revisions. At every step of the way, at least two or three writers were doing the job that one Larry David used to do.

  Robin enjoyed the rewrite sessions with Seinfeld, a process the writers hadn’t previously experienced when David was around. That was where the real comedy happened, and Seinfeld seemed to like the idea of combining different “flavors” of writers in each session, based on their strengths: “I think we need a bit of Koren in this script,” or, “Let’s get Robin in here.” They got to spend hours in a room watching Jerry Seinfeld at work.

  IT WAS NOT EASY, THOUGH. Seinfeld and the writers worked what somehow felt like more than twenty-four hours a day, more than seven days a week, to make the transition from the time of Larry David to the time without him, beginning with the show’s eighth season, work. They did not recognize weekends. They had nothing in their lives besides the show. All they did was scour their lives—their past lives, the ones where they did things other than write television—for ideas. The time Koren spent worrying about losing the record of his high score on the local Frogger arcade-game machine when the machine was carted off. (George would buy the machine to prevent it from happening.) Or the conversation Koren had with Mehlman about Mehlman’s hatred for The English Patient. (Elaine would inherit that.) Once they found them, they hoarded them until they had enough for an entire episode.

  They would work for something like fifty-six days in a row without a break. That was what it took to replace Larry David. They’d take a day off, then do another forty-four days in a row. If the Super Bowl was on, they’d work all morning, take a break to watch the game, then go back to work.

  No one, however, complained about the long hours, least of all Seinfeld, who would cheerfully show up for an 8:45 A.M. rewrite session on a Sunday. Of course, Seinfeld constantly working meant that his writing staff was constantly working. No one wanted to be the person who wasn’t around, so they were all around, always. Crittenden often sat in her office for hours, thinking of script ideas, something she could have just as easily done at home. But she wasn’t about to look like the slacker, even if that meant less time at home with her husband. Robin, the only other married writer, often went home to have dinner with his wife, then came back to the set. No one had kids.

  The new Seinfeld writing system did not operate perfectly. With all the writers helping Seinfeld to run the show, competition was fierce to be among those helping the most. Factions formed: There was a Berg-Schaffer-Mandel alliance, and a Kavet-Robin-Feresten contingent. The other writers felt they had to pick sides.

  Sometimes they chose by accident. Mandel often helped Crittenden make her story lines converge at the end of her scripts; he also contributed material to them: the idea that David Puddy could be a recovering germophobe; and the idea that George wanted an apology from James Spader’s character, who is going through Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve steps; and the idea that Elaine’s doctors were conspiring against her by noting how “difficult” she was on her charts. Crittenden couldn’t deny th
e boost these story lines gave her scripts, and she couldn’t help but drift toward Mandel’s side of the office as a result.

  But the choosing just added one more layer of stress to the writers’ overwhelming work lives.

  ALL OF THIS STRESS, PLUS his recent Emmy snub, plus his irritation at being surrounded by twentysomethings all day prompted Peter Mehlman to at last put an end to his time at Seinfeld. He left at the end of the eighth season.

  He’d come back to write one more episode with Mandel, “The Betrayal”—the episode that ran in reverse, revealing that the gang ended up on a disastrous trip to India because Elaine wanted to spite her nemesis, Sue Ellen Mischke, by actually showing up at Sue Ellen’s overseas wedding. Elaine was convinced Sue Ellen had invited her only because she figured Elaine would never go to the trouble to attend. Mehlman liked the episode because, despite its high concept, it started with the kind of small impetus he loved on Seinfeld. That is, spite.

  When Mehlman went out into the “real world” beyond Seinfeld’s office walls, he found that everyone in television wanted “the next Seinfeld,” but they didn’t want to take any of the chances necessary to make such a thing. They wanted Seinfeld money, but they seemed to resent Seinfeld itself for breaking the rules of television. He would go in to pitch ideas to executives and hear, over and over, “That character’s not really likable.” He’d thought Seinfeld had done away with likability.

  Seinfeld had even ruined his mother for all other sitcoms. Whenever she watched anything else, she said, “How does anybody think this is good?”

  DESPITE LARRY DAVID’S DEPARTURE, SEINFELD’S ratings rose in the first several episodes of the eighth season. The show had more pop culture juice than ever, landing Yankee Derek Jeter, game show host Alex Trebek, and talk show host David Letterman to guest star in the same November 1996 episode, “The Abstinence.”

  Seinfeld agreed to a ninth season in January 1997, but only if his castmates also signed on. That was a much bigger “if” than it had been in previous years. The cast said they’d come back for the right pay, and they were in a position to demand almost anything. Their contracts were expiring and the show was still printing money for NBC. The network now made $550,000 per thirty-second ad spot on the show, the highest rate in prime time. That meant more than $200 million in earnings that season after ad agency commissions. Even after paying production company Castle Rock its licensing fee, the network made $150 million per year on Seinfeld. And the series was worth even more than that to NBC: It could launch other shows that aired near it or were promoted during it.

  Seinfeld had agreed to a salary of $1 million per episode for his dual roles as star and executive producer. He made an additional $40 million the previous year from syndication of the show, and the cast didn’t get a cut of that—a major sticking point for their negotiations. Alexander, Louis-Dreyfus, and Richards had made $125,000 per episode the previous season; NBC now reportedly offered the costars $500,000 per episode.

  They strategized as a team. They had researched the numbers and knew the stakes. They had asked for a cut of syndication profits and hadn’t gotten it. It was getting harder for the three supporting players to hope the show would last much longer, Alexander later said, at least from a business standpoint. They had played their characters so well that they’d inevitably have some trouble transitioning to the next phase of their careers. That was an excellent problem to have, but they wanted their fair share of the millions being made. As Alexander later described his feelings: “I want to leave the most successful television show in history knowing that I never have to work again.”

  Given all of this, when they broke down how much the network profited on the show and figured in how much of that was due to them—as part of an equation that included Seinfeld, David, the writers, the guest stars, and the crew—they came up with a counteroffer: $1 million per episode.

  NBC executives refused to even discuss it. In fact, the high-stakes negotiations dragged on for four months in the middle of production of the eighth season. The network stonewalled, according to Alexander, ignoring the actors and their representatives from December 1996 to April 1997. While the cast remained cordial with everyone on set and continued to laugh together nearly every day, a sense of tension lurked in the atmosphere. Seinfeld was both their costar and their boss, a fact they were suddenly reminded of because of his awkward position. He tried to stay out of the discussion. The crew knew only what they heard around town and read in Variety, which was that the three cast members seemed to be jeopardizing the show’s future for an obscene amount of money. This didn’t make anything easier on set.

  Finally, according to Alexander, with just a few weeks left before NBC had to finalize its fall lineup, Seinfeld stepped in and demanded NBC strike a deal with his costars. The network offered what Alexander described as his rock-bottom price: $600,000 per episode and a cut of future DVD sales. The cast signed on for a ninth season. But negotiating seasons beyond the ninth would only become more difficult as time went on.

  WHEN SEINFELD RETURNED FOR A ninth season, most of the cast and crew felt the show’s days were numbered. The writers were working most of their waking hours and jostling for power; Seinfeld was writing, producing, and starring; and the main cast members just barely got what they felt they deserved to be paid. Now was the time to push the show’s limits, to try every story that seemed funny, no matter how crazy.

  The writers went as meta as possible with story lines like hack comic Kenny Bania becoming a “time-slot hit” at the club just because his act follows Seinfeld’s—a dig at the parade of lesser shows that became hits because they aired in the spaces between Friends, Seinfeld, and ER. (That fall: Union Square and Veronica’s Closet.) The episode “The Voice” came directly from an office joke in which Feresten used a silly voice meant to imitate the sounds his girlfriend’s stomach made.

  Berg, Schaffer, and Mandel wrote “The Voice” together when they were most pressed for time and story ideas. Usually Berg and Schaffer wrote as a team and Mandel wrote alone, but then they realized that they could pool their story lines if they worked together. “The Voice” was one of Mandel’s favorite episodes among his scripts, but it divided fans. Critics were watching the show closer than ever for chinks in its armor, and many picked up on this second episode of the ninth season as indicative of a downward trend in quality. Mandel thought maybe they were just reacting to the episode’s extra “silly” factor.

  Ratings were up at Seinfeld, but four episodes into the ninth season, the New York Post ran a poll asking readers whether Seinfeld was as good as it used to be, and more than half said it wasn’t. Seinfeld called the paper to promise that the sixth episode would have the series back on track. (That would be “The Merv Griffin Show,” in which Kramer would reconstruct the classic talk show’s set in his apartment after he finds its furniture in a Dumpster, then play host to his own version.)

  Variety’s Phil Gallo, however, was not impressed: “Having raised the bar to stratospheric heights—is there another show that has added new phrases to the American lexicon year after year?—it feels like a dog’s age since the last multiplot show clicked on every cylinder. . . . In its quest to be about nothing, Seinfeld writers have stretched the tangents too far. The conversations don’t have the logical randomness that defined the show in its earlier days when Kramer was the curious interruption to the neuroses of George and Jerry, two characters who have drifted into a meandering void.” He concluded: “If Seinfeld ends this year, it might well be on a whimper, no longer fodder for the water cooler and described thus by its longtime fans: ‘It was a great show that poked fun at all things urban and yuppie and then yadda, yadda, yadda, it was off the air.’ ”

  The writers, however, were proud of their work. Most of them were too busy with the show to hear about the backlash.

  At the show’s Christmas party that December, Seinfeld and Louis-Dreyfus shared some tequila, and then climbed into the rafters above the set. The vanta
ge point afforded them a different perspective on Jerry’s living room—Seinfeld felt, at this point, that this was his living room far more than that place where he lived in real life. Instead of seeing the room the way they usually did, from the back, with the audience before them, they could see everything at once: the sofa, the table, the bookcases, the kitchen, and the key area between the couch and the counter where most of the action happened, which the cast variously called the Canyon of Heroes, the Wheelhouse, and Power Alley. From here, though, they could also see all the lights, pulleys, and cranes above it. The cast had recently met in secret to discuss the idea of ending the show. As the two of them looked down on their lives for the past nine years, they realized it might be time.

  Each year around Halloween, network president Warren Littlefield would visit Seinfeld’s office and officially ask him back for another season of Seinfeld. Seinfeld would think it over for a few months, and talk to his castmates, and around Christmas, a deal would get done.

  This time, in December 1997, in the middle of the ninth season, a deal was still not done. And for good reason.

  11

  The End

  BY DECEMBER 1997, AFTER MORE than eight years starring in and running Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld was spent. He wanted to stop making the biggest comedy of the ’90s, which was within his rights, though it wouldn’t be easy. He was not just the figurehead of that product of his and Larry David’s imagination, Seinfeldia. In the real world, where millions of dollars meant something, he was also the linchpin in the most profitable network lineup in TV history.