If you’ve ever seen South Park’s ‘City On The Edge Of Forever’ episode, it’s just like that. A subversion of the old clip-show montage, the episode actually sees the gang incorrectly remembering events that happened in their past, and making up new memories in the process. This week saw the premiere of the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode, ‘The Gang Does A Clip Show’. Famously given the tagline ‘ Seinfeld on crack‘, the show tends to touch upon many of the same issues and storylines that Seinfeld did, just with a lot more irreverence, political incorrectness, and yelling.
Famously, the show never actually mentioned the word ‘masturbation’, instead giving us iconic euphemisms such as ‘master of my domain’.įast-forward 13 years, and US television show It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia made its debut on television. Put simply, Seinfeld may have claimed to be a show about nothing - but in the end, it changed everything.For those who aren’t aware, ‘The Contest’ sees Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine entering a wager to see who can abstain from masturbation for the longest. It showed that they could keep track of a kaleidoscope of bit-part characters and multistranded storylines, and that an entire nation could relate to the day-to-day annoyances of big city life.Įven during its fumbling first episodes in 1989, Seinfeld was like nothing that had ever aired on U.S television - but 25 years later, its influence can be found in just about every sitcom on television. From the tongue-in-cheek product placements to the "show within a show" storyline from the sitcom's fourth season - a wonderfully warped funhouse mirror in which life imitated art imitating life as George and Jerry pitched NBC their own "show about nothing " - Seinfeld brought meta into the mainstream.Īll of those things are central to Seinfeld's greatest legacy: It showed network executives that audiences were sophisticated enough to understand sitcoms that broke the mold - and hungry enough to want more of them.
#SEINFELD EPISODES MASTER OF MY DOMAIN SERIES#
Likewise, long before the likes of critically beloved series like 30 Rock and Community were praised as postmodern sitcoms, it was Seinfeld that blazed the trail.
The serialized, self-referential nature of modern behemoths like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and The Big Bang Theory are some of the most notable examples of Seinfeld's influence on the modern sitcom (and then there's Arrested Development, which is almost incomprehensible out of sequence). But Seinfeld's obsessive self-references earned it the loyal audience that was key to its success, and its rivals noticed. The conventional wisdom was that sitcoms should hit the reset button every week, so as not to confuse or alienate nonregular viewers. began dropping regular references to Art Vandelay or Bob Sacamano, the idea of season-spanning storylines - let alone call-back jokes - was unthinkable. That "callous indifference" and "utter disregard" helped to normalize the tone for many popular sitcoms that followed in Seinfeld's wake, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia to The Office to Larry David's own Curb Your Enthusiasm.īut Seinfeld's influence goes beyond characterization.
Seinfeld gave us a different group: The hypercritical titular comedian, the eternally shallow Elaine, the slacker supreme Kramer, and George Costanza, who was such a loser that it practically defied superlatives. Contemporaries like Married…With Children, The Cosby Show, and even Cheers all followed a familiar format, with their (relatively) likable characters doing (relatively) wholesome things. Pre- Seinfeld, the sitcom was a genre renowned for mollycoddling its audiences. That made it unique among all sitcoms of its era. The comedy wasn't in the situation - it was in the characters' reaction to it. Significant time was spent on magnifying everything, from waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant to the importance of shirt button placement to the best kind of babka. Seinfeld's genius, of course, was turning "nothing" into comedy gold. Not bad for a series which was famously described by its creators as "a show about nothing." Even in syndication, Seinfeld remains master of its domain though it hasn't produced a new episode since 1998, the series has earned $3.1 billion from reruns alone and still lords over the writers' rooms of dozens of sitcoms looking to replicate its success. From those inauspicious origins came Seinfeld, the sitcom juggernaut that served as appointment viewing for more than 76 million Americans at its peak.
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