What went wrong

Great premise. I have no problem with the show ending with the four characters in jail. The penultimate scene could have been a screamer-- show Jerry starting three or four conversations on trivial topics, only to have each one shot down as something that they've done before, playing up both the "No Exit" image of the four characters realizing what being trapped together for a year means, and the idea (unsubtly pounded into our head anyways) that it's time for the series to end.

Lousy execution.

The funniest episodes of Seinfled are those that have the characters being only slightly worse than the rest of us, giving into slightly exaggerated versions of impulses that everyone has, or being perceived to be worse than they really are. They commit banal offenses and get caught, or commit banal offenses which make it look like they've done something worse. But, in their determination to tell us "These characters are bad people!" David and Seinfeld overstated the case. Jerry *didn't* send Elaine into the sauna to grope Sidra. The gang was trying to do Babu good, not harm. George, of course, was not a Communist. The Contest didn't actually do anyone any harm. Are we really supposed to feel bad for the Soup Nazi because Elaine published his recipes?

Now, they have occasionally stepped over the line-- but rarely. The marble rye, and the reaction to Susan's death, went beyond bad manners, banal offenses, and misunderstandings. But those episodes, like this one, seemed to me caricatures of the characters, making them out to be uncharacteristically bad.

So the parade of witnesses and clips, besides being a tiresome way to spend the episode (and can you imagine if they had let it "go on for months," as Geraldo's reporter put it, rather than cutting lots of the flashbacks and cameos) was unfair to the characters. Much of what they were charged with by the witnesses, they were innocent of. And it strained my suspension of disbelief that a) they were constantly surprised by who the witnesses were and b) they never defended themselves against the charges. If, as some have suggested, the premise was supposed to be "The gang enter the real world and have to face the consequences of their actions"-- well, in the real world the prosecution has to disclose the identity of witnesses to the defense lawyer, a defense lawyer at least occasionally engages in cross-x, and so forth. Once Jackie lost his first objection he gave up the trial-- which made it hard for me to say, "Oh, look, now they're facing reality."

So the last half of the show failed to accurately represent what the series has been It failed either as courtroom farce (it wasn't funny enough, and the jokes were mostly five years old) or as courtroom morality play.

The importance of "No crying, no learning" was supposed to be that the show would never get treacly and sentimental, not that the characters were actually monsters. And-- cf the bizarro episode, the episode in which Jerry and George vow to change their lives, or the "I hate me!" moment of the first Janine Garafolo appearance-- the characters *are* capable of learning that there's something wrong in their lives, even if they're not capable of doing anything about it.

S&D tried to teach *us* a lesson instead of the characters, about how deficient and bankrupt their characters are. Seinfeld's interview on "Frontline" showed his irritation with the characters-- "George said the show is about nothing, because George is an idiot"-- and the finale overplayed it.

But the show has actually been funny and resonant for a reason, and it's a shame if S&D forgot what that was. The "New York Four" were just marginally too selfish, too conniving, to callous-- or just marginally not good enough at disguising it. If we felt superior to the characters, we also recognized how and why one *might* do what they did.

Not only didn't I feel that about their declining to call 911 on their cell phone last night, but the rest of the episode was dedicated to denying that we ever should have felt that way.

Jacob T. Levy

There have been millions of guesses as to how the "Show of 90's" was going to end. Everyone of them missed one crusial point: the essence of the show is self-awareness, self-loathing and indifference. David and Seinfeld have created a legacy, how could they resist the temptation of blowing it up.

The last epsiode, funny or not, was not seinfeldic. First of all, "Seinfeld" does not possess the social conscience to dissect the flaws of its own characters. Seinfeld has always been observational, never judgemental. It is too synical for that. Such self-incrimination could only distance the audience from the characters.

Second of all. Seinfeld is a show about nothing. It prides itself in stories of daily life details and little coincidences, and somehow it all comes together in the end. The last epsiode is about one big event with national media coverage. Very incharacteristic.

Finally, the most important. Seinfeld differentiates itself from clinch ploting of the sitcoms. It promised to be unique and refreshing. The last epsiode is a huge letdown. From last confessions in a near-miss airplane crash to a parade of clips from old epsiodes. These are everything any other sitcom finale would do and Seinfeld should not do.

So the only conclusion from this is: it's Larry and Jerry's way of saying: it has been great, we all enjoying it, but it really is not worthy of all your attention and affection; you shouldn't fall in love with the characters, and you should not fall in love with the show; now we can find something else to do, and you should go find something else too. Let's just forget the whole thing.

In a true Seinfeldish way!

Bravo.

MjT

Great analysis, Jacob. I understand that the show was supposed to be a
sort of reductio ad absurdum of the characters' self-absorption, but it
still didn't feel right, especially for Kramer, who is in his own world
but has never really been callous.
	I think that those who watched the show longest are least likely to be
satisfied with the ending. The finale was more in line with the
cartoonish exaggerations of later seasons rather than the human if
shallow earlier episodes.
	Another comment I haven't seen so far is that the show, far from being
about nothing or about petty, completely selfish characters, was a
critique of social dealings and mores. I always thought the one line
that captured the show best was George's exasperated cry in "The Chinese
Restaurant": "We're living in a society here!" The characters more often
than not were seen trying to negotiate the rules of society (often to
their advantage or in a shallow way, true). There is a glimpse of that
in the finale's focus on Elaine's phone call etiquette.
	I suppose it's appropriate in some way to have the finale let society
judge the characters that have been judging society for 9 years. I guess
you also have to give the finale credit for achieving the nearly
impossible: giving a near-completely unsentimental send-off to beloved
characters. Unfortunately, it just wasn't very funny because it spent
most of the time recycling material like one big in-joke rather than
finding humor in the characters' social dealings as they've done all
along.

In Digs writes:

it

world

I thought about this, too, but have come up with numerous examples of Kramer's callousness and selfishness:

1) encouraging Jerry to piss in a parking lot and then doing the same. 2) encouraging Jerry to park in a handicapped spot 3) purchasing a defective wheelchair for his girlfriend (albeit with George's encouragment), whom he claimed to actually *love.* 4) beaning a player at fantasy camp, for nothing more than crowding the plate, and then punching Micky Mantle -- an old, alcoholic man at the time -- in the face in the ensuing brawl. 5) kicking Newman (supposedly his friend) out of the mail truck in the middle of the midwest, at night, for weighing down the truck (and basically having no intention of ever picking him up again).

And I'm sure there are many more.

Matt P

Trying to get the homeless to pull a rickshaw.