by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment
I said, “If you don’t push as hard in your way as I’m pushing in my way, then I’ll have to back down, and that won’t help you.”
Jerry said, “That’s good. That’s good.”
That became the Seinfeld way with all of us. What apparently was unique among us was when we started rehearsing an episode, we didn’t leave the stage. We all watched each other work, and we’d all throw ideas to each other. I think that’s what built that ensemble so quickly.
Jerry Seinfeld: I wasn’t comfortable as an actor in the pilot, but after that I relaxed pretty quickly. I got better as it went along until eventually it was like a warm bath.
My main job, as I saw it, was executive producer. The acting was down my priority list. I’m here to make sure this scene works. People would say, “It looks like you’re watching the scene.” I’d say, “I am. Who cares if I’m a good actor. We pay these people to act. You want to see good acting, watch them.”
Jason Alexander: Initially, Jerry wasn’t comfortable playing any kind of real anger, and he wasn’t comfortable playing any kind of real sexuality. Well, that’s the bulk of a sitcom. I think after I’d kissed Marisa Tomei, he thought, “I could kiss Marisa Tomei!”
Warren: Once the pilot was completed, we handed it over to NBC’s research department for testing. In typical fashion the episode was shown to test audiences, and the respondents were in four different locations across the country with a sample audience size of about six hundred people. It was also screened by a test audience of about a hundred people locally in Los Angeles, and then they participated in a lengthy discussion about the program’s pros and cons. All of these responses were compiled in a research document. The test report that came back on the Seinfeld Chronicles pilot was, in a word, disastrous.
SEINFELD TEST REPORT: 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. Jerry’s “loser” friend, George, who was not a particularly forceful character, actually appeared somewhat more in charge, and viewers found it annoying that Jerry needed things to be explained to him.
None of the supports were particularly liked, and viewers felt that Jerry needed a better backup ensemble. George was negatively viewed as a “wimp” who was only mildly amusing. Kessler [Kramer] had low scores but was the best of the supports—he mildly amused some twelve- to thirty-four-year-old males and reminded some of their own weird neighbors.
PILOT PERFORMANCE: WEAK.
Glenn Padnick: I’ve had that happen to me too many times. A few years before, I’d done a show with Morris Day for NBC. It had a time slot and everything, and then the testing came in, and they hated Morris. The same thing seemed to happen with Seinfeld.
Jerry Seinfeld: I made this cartoon movie a few years ago for DreamWorks, and I went through a brutalizing process of testing for that movie. I think in the end it was valuable. I test jokes every night. The Marx Brothers tested all of their movies. They performed the scripts in theaters before they shot.
Paul Reiser: The Seinfeld testing should put an end to all conversations about testing, ever. Please don’t tell me my show is going to come down to twenty people in Sherman Oaks. Why not let those people create a show. I’ve never been to any testing that’s any good. It’s like waking up and seeing my liver sitting in a chair.
Jason Alexander: I remember after the pilot, Jerry asked me, “What do you think?”
I said, “There’s no way.”
“You don’t think it’s good?”
“I think it’s really good. The problem is the audience for this show is me, and I don’t watch TV. It’s guys, not girls. Eighteen to thirty-two at the outmost. Every guy I know in that age group is either working or out trying to get laid. They’re not watching TV, so this isn’t going to play for anybody else.” I guess initially I was right.
Warren: We screened The Seinfeld Chronicles along with all of our pilots for that year in the third-floor conference room at NBC in Burbank. In attendance were program executives from the West Coast, New York and Burbank members of the sales department, executives from the promo department, high-level management from New York, and the research department.
There were about sixty people in the room, and the overall reaction was positive. They laughed. They got it. My birthday is May 11, and usually that was right about the time in the May screening and scheduling process that the research department would deliver most of their results of the pilot season testing. The truth is most pilots don’t test well. Television is not a science, and audiences do not respond well to things that are new or different or have had no previous promotional marketing. It was not a happy birthday. The research report killed Seinfeld’s hope for a fall pickup. The pressure to perform was tremendous, and we went with two other shows that had better test results. We picked up The Nutt House, with Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman. It was on the air for two entire months. Sister Kate, starring Stephanie Beacham, was about a nun caring for orphan kids. One of these kids was Jason Priestley, but that show only lasted one season. In the summer of 1989, with minimal promotional push, the Seinfeld pilot aired.
Warren: We loved Seinfeld at the network, the research report notwithstanding, and when we were in danger of losing our rights to the show because of the actors’ contracts expiring, I got creative in an attempt to get Seinfeld on the air. I went to one of our budget and finance guys, Rick Lacher, to see if we could find some money—any money—to help us keep the show.
Since Seinfeld was Rick Ludwin’s baby, and Rick was in our variety and specials department, Lacher suggested we take the money from Ludwin’s budget, which was the only place that still had some available funds. In what would be a brilliant “rob Peter to pay Paul” finance move, he also suggested we make one less two-hour Bob Hope special and use the savings to pay for four episodes of Seinfeld.
And that’s exactly what we did. I let Rick Ludwin break the news to Bob Hope, and I distinctly remember calling Jerry Seinfeld to tell him about the four-episode order. There was a long silence on the line. Jerry finally asked me, “Has any show, in the history of television, ever succeeded with four episodes?” I didn’t know, and that’s exactly what I told him.
Glenn Padnick: I was very surprised when Rick Ludwin called me to say he was ordering four episodes of the show. They’d burned off the pilot during the summer—fiasco theater. I thought that was it.
Jason Alexander: They ordered four episodes. The whopping four. The confidence four.
George Shapiro: They were four half-hour specials, and they had to go through the variety department. It was so much more fun to do the show without all of the notes from the comedy department. When we got the order for four shows, Larry David said, “That’s all I got in me anyway.” He ended up doing 137 episodes, I think.
Jerry Seinfeld: I was always pretty confident. I thought four episodes was fine. I thought, “If they let us make four of these, they’ll get it by then.”
Warren: At the network, I only had one note for Jerry: get a girl.
Glenn Padnick: Women especially hated the show, and the typical response is to add a person from the group who like the show least.
George Shapiro: Jerry, Jason, and Michael Richards were the only three regulars under contract for the pilot. Then we got a note that we needed a young lady. Rosie O’Donnell read. A whole lot of people read before Julia came in.
Lori Openden: I planted the seed for Julia Louis-Dreyfus with Seinfeld’s casting director so they wouldn’t think the idea came from us.
Warren: Lee Garlington, a terrific actress who never stops working in both comedy and drama, was featured in the diner and could have easily been added to the series, but I thought that as the waitress she’d never really be one of the gang. She’d be relegated to pouring coffee, catching up. So I insisted they create a female character that they wanted to spend time with. I knew Julia from SNL, and she’d been the most memorable part of a not so mem
orable Gary David Goldberg comedy we’d done called Day by Day.
Glenn Padnick: Julia had a holding deal at Warner Bros. that was about to expire. Larry thought she was terrific, and she came in and read with us. I remember Larry chasing her out of the room and begging her to be on the show. She wasn’t sure—the third lead, the money, only four episodes. Not the most promising start you could have.
Megan Mullally: I auditioned for Elaine. I was testing with two other girls, and then I got a call that day that they’d cast Julia, who I went to college with. My first boyfriend broke up with me to go out with her, and then they got married, and they’re still together. Extremely happily married for thirty-some-odd years, with two sons, and the whole thing. So anyway, I knew Julia. I heard she had a development deal that was expiring that week with the network, and they thought, “Oh, wait a minute, we already have somebody.”
Jerry Seinfeld: I knew when I met Julia that she was the girl. I don’t think I could possibly have realized how perfect the chemistry would be.
Glenn Padnick: Much of the show came from Larry’s life rather than Jerry’s life. Larry had had a relationship with a woman named Monica Yates, Richard Yates’s daughter. After they stopped dating, they remained friends, and Larry used that relationship as the model for what Jerry and Elaine’s relationship would be.
Jason Alexander: Jerry told me, “There’s going to be a girl on the show, but she’s not my girlfriend.”
“All right. Who is she?”
“She’s like my best friend.”
I said, “I thought George was your best friend.”
I actually had a wary eye on Julia. I knew you didn’t do a show with three guys and one girl. You did a show with two guys and one girl. In those first four shows, they made one that George and Kramer weren’t in. That’s when I famously went to Larry and said, “If you do that again, you’ll have to do it permanently.”
Glenn Padnick: I got a phone call from Brandon offering me Sophie’s choice. He said he could either put us on in the spring on Wednesday nights after Dear John. Or he said he could hold off until the summer following Cheers, though we wouldn’t be on the fall schedule. I accepted the latter proposal immediately, without calling anybody.
It was an easy decision. “Life is better than death” is one of the rules I operate by. And “life” in this instance was following Cheers. It was a no-brainer.
We went on the air on May 31, 1990.
Warren: Larry David thought NBC would never air the episodes. He tells a story where he envisioned a dinner party hosted by himself and Jerry. They invite all their friends over to eat and watch the episodes NBC never put on the air. They made those first episodes to make their friends laugh. But we did put it on.
The show did well enough with the benefit of a Cheers lead-in—even with Cheers in reruns—but Brandon was convinced Seinfeld was too Jewish to be widely successful. I called up our scheduling guru, Preston Beckman, and told him I needed the Jew/not-Jew numbers for the show.
Each morning at 6:00, I would get a fax of the overnight ratings from the research department in New York. Preston had worked there, and he’d routinely be my first call of the day. As we stared at the numbers, I’d ask, “What did we learn last night?” Preston would usually reply with a useful illustration of who’d been smart and who’d been dumb. If it were the middle of winter, for instance, and CBS had aired a movie set on a Caribbean island with lots of tanned flesh on display, that was a point for them. They’d done well.
In my new job I knew I would need Preston’s insight and wisdom, so I had asked him—a hard-core New Yorker—to move with his wife and young kids to Los Angeles to be in charge of scheduling and strategic planning.
Preston Beckman: Interesting result with Seinfeld. Whether it was New York, Chicago, Seattle—it didn’t matter. There was the same retention of the Cheers audience. I wrote a memo to say Seinfeld didn’t skew to any part of the country. It was not about the Jews.
Warren: Those first four episodes of Seinfeld in the summer of 1990 were originals against repeat competition, and they didn’t suck. Didn’t go up, went down a bit from Cheers. But just a bit. The interesting thing was of those two million plus viewers (Nielsen Media Research) it was the young adult men, for whom Cheers was an anthem, who said, “Hey, I kind of get this show. These guys are as fucked-up as I am.”
Better still, Brandon Tartikoff had been kicked upstairs, promoted to chairman of the NBC Entertainment Group, and I had been given Brandon’s job. Now many of the programming decisions were mine to make, and I was nearly as confident in the potential of Seinfeld as Jerry himself was.
Jason Alexander: As Jerry tells it, he was supremely confident in the show from the get-go. As dubious as Larry and Julia and I were, Jerry could step back as an experienced comic and say, “I don’t know if this is good storytelling, but it’s funny. I’ve run enough funny material through myself to know this will make people laugh.” He had the confidence to know if you put twenty-two minutes of television on the screen and say it’s a comedy and people were laughing, that should work.
Steve Levitan: Seinfeld pulled off just being funny. That’s a high-wire act, a very hard thing to do.
Jerry Seinfeld: I personally believe that what Larry and I brought to the sitcom format—a twenty-two-minute format—was a stand-up comedian’s structural sensibility. We didn’t really have time to tell what the characters were all about, because we had jokes to do. We weren’t really storytellers—we became that—but only through that lens.
George Shapiro: Jerry would give the best lines to Jason or Julia. I called him the Magic Johnson of comedy because he would pass off so frequently. Comedy was the god, and I saw him so many times give lines to Jason and Michael and Julia when he could have gotten the laughs.
Glenn Padnick: Jerry was always writing himself out of the show. I said, “You’re the star. It’s called Seinfeld. Shouldn’t you have a part in the show?” He so admired his co-stars that as a writer, he kept throwing stuff to them.
Jerry Seinfeld: We wrote the damn thing. There was no issue as to whose show it was, not just on the screen, but in the deal. It didn’t matter to me. I just wanted the scene to be good. When someone plays a scene you’ve written, it’s a very enchanting experience. You watch it come to life.
Jason Alexander: I thought the scripts were—as Hammerstein said to Sondheim—talented but terrible. You could see everything that was yummy about them. It was a new way of telling these kinds of stories that I didn’t truly understand. I didn’t quite know why the show was working, but I could see it was working.
Warren: We’d bought the pitch for Seinfeld in 1988. The pilot had aired—almost surreptitiously—in July 1989, and the first four episodes had finally made the schedule a full year later. Now we had to decide—I had to decide—if we were going to pick up the show with some sort of proper commitment and put an end to our long, tortured courtship.
Perry Simon: It was the deadline for renewing the option after the first four shows. We had to do it by the end of the day, so we all went in a conference room and watched a couple of episodes to decide if we’d renew. We said, “It’s too Jewish. Too New York. They don’t tell stories, but the fucking thing is funny. Let’s just try it.” There was still great uncertainty about the show at that stage. It was right down to the wire.
Warren: My response after the screening was to walk up to the scheduling board and grab the magnetic card that said Seinfeld. I took it off the fringes of the board, where we had our backup shows, and put it right smack in the center. This is our future! Rick Ludwin smiled.
Preston Beckman: We screened a couple of episodes of Seinfeld, and Bob Wright was there, and he said, “Why hasn’t this show been on the schedule?”
Warren: Brandon left NBC in April 1991 to become chairman of Paramount Pictures. With Brandon gone, there was no reason anymore.
Naturally, because it was Seinfeld, we ordered just thirteen episodes—half a season—and schedule
d the show as a mid-season replacement in January 1991.
When Jerry told Larry the good news, Larry said to turn the order down. He said he was out of ideas.
Glenn Padnick: Warren called and ordered thirteen episodes for mid-season—two years after we shot the pilot.
Rick Ludwin: After a few episodes, we thought we had a nice little show on our hands, but that’s about it.
Perry Simon: After we’d picked up the show for thirteen more episodes, we got Jerry and Larry in. They came into my office with Rick Ludwin. I tried to wing typical network notes—maybe we needed a little more story, little more of this, of that. They were incredibly gracious. “Let us work on this, and we’ll come back to you.” Then they walked out the door, and I knew they were like, “Fuck that.” And now I think, “Thank God.” Whatever they were doing, they were doing it right. It’s a good thing they didn’t listen to me.
George Shapiro: Larry and Jerry were ready to walk away after the four episodes—creatively. The network wanted Jerry and Julia to be married or dating. We had a meeting with Rob Reiner and Glenn Padnick and Jerry and Larry out in the parking lot. Jerry and Larry felt strongly that Jerry and Julia shouldn’t have a relationship. They were ready to walk away.