Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  Howard West: That was normal, network thinking. Fortunately, we had two creators who didn’t give a shit.

  Jerry Seinfeld: All creativity should be exploratory. If we know what we’re doing completely, we’re not in the right place.

  Warren: While they clearly knew what they were doing with the scripts, Jerry and Larry had never run a sitcom before, and it showed. For all the brilliance of the episodes, the production schedule was a bit of a mess from the outset and never really improved.

  Jerry Seinfeld: Larry and I wrote everything together. Sometimes the writers would figure out a story while I was rehearsing. Then we’d work on that, and once we had the story, we’d sit at our desks and work on the dialogue.

  We used the Carl Reiner/Dick Van Dyke model. Most sitcoms would start on Monday and shoot on Friday. Carl Reiner figured out if you started on Wednesday and shot on Tuesday, you’d have the weekend to rewrite. We had no personal lives anyway, so that was okay with us. It was a lot of work—fifty- to sixty-page scripts—and Larry and I would turn them out in two days.

  Howard West: George and I would read first drafts of scripts, and they’d be quite weak. Then Larry and Jerry would get ahold of it for the rewrite, and the difference was night and day. Larry and Jerry just needed a story.

  Jason Alexander: We were a show that was shooting on Tuesday nights. That means you come in Wednesday for the table read. We’d get a call, “The ten o’clock table read is going to be at three.” Then another call. “It’ll be at ten on Thursday.” Another call. “Take Thursday off.” Eventually, it got to where we were coming in on Saturday at one. On Sunday at two.

  They would hand us a schedule for the season, and we’d have three weeks off on the schedule, but it would soon be gone. Larry would say, “Sorry.” I lost two movies that way. To that extent, I knew we were being afforded a treatment that was unusual, to say the least.

  Warren: The treatment was unusual because of the unusual genesis of the show. Seinfeld had been developed not in NBC’s comedy department but in the variety and specials department (which also reported to me) under the care and guidance of Rick Ludwin. Just as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had never run a sitcom, Rick Ludwin had never developed one.

  Rick Ludwin: Neither Jerry nor Larry had any situation comedy writing experience. It’s safe to say that the longest thing they ever wrote was a sketch. Most of the people that they hired for the writing staff were like themselves, nontraditional writers without any sitcom credentials. They mostly came from late-night television: SNL, Letterman, Conan, and The Tonight Show.

  When they would pitch a story to me, I didn’t have the background or experience to say, “You can’t do that story.” I just didn’t have enough experience in scripted television to say no. I think that was a big factor in the show’s success.

  Warren: There is no better illustration of how Seinfeld played by its own rules than the celebrated “Chinese Restaurant” episode, where the cast spends the entire show waiting for a table they never get.

  Jason Alexander: The first time I suspected the show might be a unique experience and something we could be proud of was with that episode. NBC very rightly said, “What the hell is this?” No story, just shenanigans in twenty-two minutes. We were just hanging around.

  Rick Ludwin: The only time I can recall having an unpleasant conversation with Larry David was over the “Chinese Restaurant” script. It was too early in the run and too form-breaking an episode. The audience wasn’t going to buy into it. We had a core audience, but we hadn’t gone broad yet.

  Jerry Seinfeld: I don’t know where we got the confidence. I think a lot of it came from Larry. If Larry felt good about something and I got on board with it, we were like a freight train.

  In the beginning, we were scared, but as we became confident with ourselves and with our audience, we felt like our instincts were good enough for them. We believed we could mold the clay any way we wanted.

  Rick Ludwin: After the table read I remember walking around the lot and deciding what to tell Jerry and Larry. We debated shutting it down and telling them not to film that week. But we decided that would really be a provocation, too radical. What we said to them was “If you feel passionate about this—which you obviously do—go do it, and we’ll hope for the best.”

  Then Larry David wanted to walk around the lot with me. He was very upset that we didn’t like the episode. He felt it was in keeping with the style of the show, and he was very angry that we didn’t agree with him.

  Jason Alexander: The network could have said, “We don’t get this. You can’t do this.” Instead, they said, “Do what you want to do.” That, I think, is what made the show the show. There was no way Jerry and Larry were going to conform to what everybody else was doing. That turned out to be a really funny episode of television.

  Rick Ludwin: That was one of the landmark episodes of the show. Viewers did embrace it. I still felt we had to express our opinion, but it turned out to be okay. I’m glad they stuck to their guns and glad we weren’t stupid enough to try to start a war and shut the show down.

  Warren: This is a critical difference between how we ran things at NBC and what some networks are like today. We took a risk, a leap with the creator and the show runner even when our instincts said, “This will not work.” More often than not, taking that kind of chance served to strengthen our relationships in the creative community.

  Glenn Padnick: Larry loved doing that stuff. Could he command a half hour with no plot or minimal plot? “The Chinese Restaurant” and “The Parking Garage” are two examples of that. He also liked having several stories converge. You think they’re separate, and then they ping-pong against each other at the end. He does that all the time on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  Jerry Seinfeld: “The Chinese Restaurant” was one step, but with “The Boyfriend,” when we took a movie and made fun of it successfully, I thought we were really in their house now.

  Glenn Padnick: We filmed “The Boyfriend” before a single audience in one night. It was an hour show. It was a takeoff on Oliver Stone’s JFK. The magical loogie. The second spitter. You could hear the laughter build as the audience began to appreciate what was going on. Suddenly we weren’t just doing little things.

  Warren: It signaled to us that they were in a new stratosphere of comedy. The show was satirical, sophisticated, complex, and brilliantly hilarious.

  Jerry Seinfeld: “The Junior Mint” was transitional for me and Larry. The hinge was that me and Kramer go to watch an operation, get in a fight in the gallery, and a Junior Mint falls into the cavity of the patient. It was a completely preposterous situation. We’d never done anything that implausible.

  We’d started out thinking we would be plausible, that the show would be about how life really is. That silliness. When we got to that story line and nobody questioned it, the horses were out of the barn. Then Kramer was hitting golf balls into a whale’s blowhole, and we were just having fun.

  Jason Alexander: We kept hearing about the masturbation show. “The what?” Larry had put me in some pretty precarious positions, so I thought, “The masturbation show. This is going to be a George story line.” Then the script showed up, and it had all those euphemisms and the audacity of having a female character involved in the contest. It was brilliant. I knew it was going to be a great episode.

  Rick Ludwin: We had the table read, and the word “masturbation” was never used. The script was so funny and so clever. Who would have thought they could deal with a topic like that in a way that was so funny?

  Jason Alexander: That episode was the first time I was aware how much impact we were having. The next morning I was driving to work, and we were on the radio, every station.

  Warren: It was another script that confirmed the extent to which the show was in a league all its own.

  I had a memorable conversation about that episode, called “The Contest,” with Dr. Roz Weinman, who was head of broadcast standards and worked at 30 Rock in New York.
Based on the day-to-day negotiating that we were required to do with broadcast standards—you can’t use the Lord’s name in vain, you can’t say “penis,” priests don’t do that to kids on our network, et cetera—I was worried that they might shut down the production of the episode. I knew we didn’t have a backup script lying around, and Larry (of course) had never gotten the story approved.

  But the response from the “censor” was thoughtful and surprising. I was told that Seinfeld was an adult show, that it had established a kind of pact with its audience, and that it was possible the episode didn’t violate that pact. “We’re going to keep our eyes wide open,” I heard, “but this may well be okay.”

  Our sales department was a little less understanding. At first.

  Mike Mandelker: I thought we had an episode that was worthless. But not a single advertiser objected to “The Contest.” I think we might even have raised the rates. Different rules for Seinfeld.

  Warren: A few objected but, trust me, we raised the rates. We ended up making leather-bound copies of the script and gave them to advertisers who supported the show. Collector’s item.

  Jason Alexander: I’ve been on other shows where the cast believed the magic of the show was them. On Seinfeld, we believed the magic of the show was what was on the page. They kept throwing us these gems that we’d be hard-pressed to screw up.

  Jerry Seinfeld: My biggest regret is that I didn’t try to enjoy the show because I felt like I’d have time afterward to enjoy it. I was obsessively working and focusing on the show. It wasn’t easy. Larry and I either wrote or rewrote every script. We never shot a draft handed to us by our writers. Good as they were, theirs wasn’t our sensibility exactly.

  Paul Reiser: I think people miss what Seinfeld did in terms of production on TV. Shorter scenes. Smaller sets. Scenes that don’t have to play out beginning, middle, and end. That it’s not all proscenium. You’ve since seen people imitate it badly, but Seinfeld really led the way.

  Jerry Seinfeld: To my knowledge, people didn’t seem to realize that we took the sitcom apart. They never talked about that. We oftentimes did more than twenty scenes in a twenty-two-minute show. Twenty locations. It was necessary to tell the stories and bend all those narratives. We liked getting the narratives to dovetail. Once we started doing that, we liked doing it. You always needed other locations to get people to bump into each other.

  Glenn Padnick: I grew up with and worked on the classic Norman Lear structure—two acts, seven scenes. I tried to wheedle Larry and Jerry into having a plot at the beginning, and then it got to how much plot can the show possibly hold? I’m not sure Larry and Jerry knew they were throwing traditional comedy structure out the window. They were just writing stories.

  Jerry Seinfeld: We were also very good at casting. When somebody came in who was good, he did not slip through the net. Since Larry and I were comedians, our tuning forks were pretty good. When John O’Hurley came in, Wayne Knight, Jerry Stiller—we knew it. We’d say, “Him.”

  Jason Alexander: The show was theater. There were four pesky cameras between us and the audience, but that show was more theater than what I think of as television performance. It spoiled me. My kids were little, and it was like a nine-to-five job. And they were paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do very little actual work.

  The thing you love as a theater actor is the ability to work on the material over and over, but it’s also the thing that kills you. Six months into Hamlet, and you’re saying, “Who wrote this shit?” You get tired of it. Here was an opportunity to work on this character, but the material changed every week. It was a dream job.

  Jerry Seinfeld: Once the standard got set and the audience was expecting something every week, we couldn’t let up. Then it was Little Shop of Horrors. You feed it, and it keeps growing.

  Glenn Padnick: Larry worked his ass off on that show. Once the production began and Jerry was no longer by his side co-writing the scripts, Larry did it all in terms of the writing function of the show. Jerry was not only acting on the show but also going to clubs and trying out material. So he was working day and night and didn’t have time to write.

  So many scripts with other people’s names on them I know the final draft was rewritten by Larry. One of the great episodes was “We’re not gay! Not that there’s anything wrong with that” [“The Outing”]. Larry Charles has the credit on that script and had written the first draft. The table reading was a disaster. It was awful.

  I came calling on Jerry and Larry that afternoon and proposed that we drop the script altogether. I told them it wasn’t very good and the audience already knows Jerry and George aren’t gay. We’ve certified them as heterosexuals through several seasons, and they’re howling about something we all know—the audience included—isn’t true.

  They responded by rewriting the script and adding “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as if they were saying, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, Glenn.”

  Jason Alexander: I don’t believe the four of us ever truly appreciated the iconic impact the show was having while we were doing it. Jerry made this great observation in an interview once. He said, “We think of ourselves as the world’s most successful garage band. We’re just four idiots banging away in the garage, and the neighbors are saying, ‘You know, these guys aren’t bad.’ ”

  Warren: At the network, we finally demonstrated the smarts—I think it was in the third season—to accept Larry David as the official show runner, though he’d been doing the job from the beginning. Once Ted Danson had announced he was leaving Cheers and 1993 would be the show’s last season, we knew we didn’t have a lot of time to find the replacement for Cheers and the new tent pole of Thursday night. At the time, Seinfeld’s following was enthusiastic and loyal but not terribly large. Home Improvement was opposite us on Wednesday nights at 9:00, and they were averaging a 28 share while we were hovering at about a 17 (Nielsen Media Research). The future was Seinfeld, and I announced the plan to move it to Thursday nights at 9:30 following Cheers.

  Preston Beckman: The great thing about Seinfeld was that nobody had seen the first twenty episodes. We’d repeat them, and they got big ratings because they played like new.

  George Shapiro: I saw Ted Danson about three weeks after we’d learned that Ted had quit and we were replacing Wings after Cheers. I hugged Ted and said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Quitting.”

  Warren: Richard Zoglin at Time magazine made this assessment of where we stood at the time: “NBC, the onetime kingpin of prime time, has seen its fortunes turn sour almost overnight. Its biggest hit of the ’80s, The Cosby Show, took early retirement last spring, while several other veterans—The Golden Girls, Matlock, and In the Heat of the Night—were given their unconditional release. (All were later picked up by rivals.) The network’s last remaining Top 10 hit, Cheers, will call it quits at the end of this season; highly regarded younger shows like Seinfeld have not lived up to ratings expectations … The network is desperately in need of a miracle.”

  George Shapiro: When we moved to Thursday night, Larry said, “I don’t want those people.” That’s why we love Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry puts all of his human defects right on the screen.

  Glenn Padnick: I once told Larry that when I first met him, he was a lifelong bachelor, never married, a failed stand-up. Today—married [now divorced] with two lovely daughters, rich beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and one of the most respected writers in television, and as unhappy as the day I met him. But he was a sensational show runner.

  Warren: Early on story was something that didn’t seem all that important to them, but the more episodes they made, the more complex their stories became. As Larry and Jerry gained more experience at the helm of Seinfeld, they began to look ahead, just as the Charles brothers had done with Cheers. They started thinking of seasons not just as a string of episodes but as a potential narrative arc.

  Jason Alexander: Larry called me over the
summer and said, “We’ve got a great arc for George. He’s going to get engaged.”

  “To what character?”

  “Susan.”

  “Who’s playing Susan?”

  “Heidi.”

  “Who’s playing George?”

  I love Heidi Swedberg [who played Susan], but I could never figure out how to play off her. Her instincts and my instincts were diametrically opposed. If I thought something had to move, she’d go slow. If I went slow, she’d go fast. If I paused, she’d jump in too early. Loved her. Hated Susan.

  Larry said to me, “Don’t you understand how perfect she is for you? You’ve driven her to lesbianism. You burned her father’s shack down. You’ve practically shit on her, and nobody feels bad for her. They’re all on your side. She’s the greatest foil for you.”

  But every week, it was the same thing. I didn’t know how to play off her. I didn’t know what I was doing. Larry had no idea how this was going to end, and finally I realized I was the only guy on the show working with her.

  Seven or eight episodes in, they write an episode where Jerry and Elaine spend a lot of time with Susan. After the taping, we were all at Jerry’s Deli in Studio City. And Jerry said, “You know it’s hard to figure out where to go with what she gives you.”

  I said, “Don’t even talk to me. I don’t want to hear your bullshit.”

  Julia said, “I just want to kill her.”

  And Larry said, “Wait a minute.”

  It was at that moment that the notion of killing Susan got into Larry’s head.

  It is the single coldest moment in the history of television when the doctor comes out to say Susan has died. George’s reaction was “Huh.” Like, “How about that.”