"Kramer is dead."

Richards' stance toward the show and his character today is peculiar in light of the past.

If you believe the major trade papers like Variety or Broadcasting and Cable, in 1998 Richards was the one and only member of the main cast who had wanted to do one more season in 1998-99 when Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David decided to pull the plug. And he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jerry and Larry to permit a spinoff series featuring the Cosmo Kramer character for the fall of 1999. (The only spinoff Seinfeld would permit was one featuring lawyer character Jackie Chiles, played by Phil Morris; that project, as far as I know, never yielded a pilot.)

Richards is a fine actor and a gifted comic performer, although some of the projects he's chosen to do post-Seinfeld don't seem to have advanced his career. But it looks like the reason he's turned sour on Kramer has more to do with the fact that he wasn't allowed to get more mileage out of it (and the fact that it might have limited some casting directors' perceptions of his range) than anything else.

A lot of TV stars who've thought they got typecast by their best character have had this kind of reaction, but later came to terms with the characters that gave them fame. Leonard Nimoy once wrote a book, back in the mid-1970s, called "I Am Not Spock." Then came a half dozen highly successful Trek films which hadn't been in Paramount's original plans (they were originally planning to launch UPN years earlier, with Star Trek: The Next Generation as its key show featuring a new cast years before it actually happened), and a chance to direct other successful projects. His autobiography, which came out in the 1990s, was titled, "I Am Spock."

Richards will eventually change his mind and mellow out. There may never be a reunion show or theatrical film (Jerry has never ruled it out but he grows cooler toward it with every passing year) although there certainly could be and probably should be. But there probably will be retrospectives, either on cable or (if times get tougher for the network) on NBC, some time maybe a few more years down the road. He'll be there for them.

. Bob Smith, afternoons WXXI-AM 1370, Rochester NY