That’s All, Folks: Seinfeld’s Series Finale Finally Turned Nothing into Something

Most scripted television shows end in cancellation, so there’s something special about the ones that get the chance to go out on their own terms. This year, Ken Lowe is revisiting some of the most influential TV shows that made it to an officially planned final episode. That’s All, Folks is a look back at television’s most unforgettable series finales.

It is my own fault that, when I started That’s All, Folks!, I described the premise as being television’s most unforgettable series finales, rather than the finales from television’s best shows, or my favorite ones personally. No, I held myself to a standard of historical relevance when laying out this monthly column, and integrity demands that I follow through on it. We had to get to the ’90s at some point. At some point, we had to get to Seinfeld, a TV show dreamed up in a lab by Larry David to specifically put me through sensory torture.

Seinfeld is one of two shows (the other was obviously Friends) which I did not just dislike while they were airing, but actively loathed with the intensity Mark Twain had for Jane Austen and James Fenimore Cooper. It is true that there are far, far worse shows on TV now and there were things that were truly ghastlier back then. By way of trying to soften my assessment of Seinfeld, a friend pointed out that its imitators—stuff like Veronica’s Closet, Caroline in the City, and Suddenly Susan—were absolute hot garbage by comparison. And they were! But usually when something is successful enough to spawn poor imitators, it’s, you know, good.

I promise I will lay all that aside, though. People liked this show for reasons, and one of the reasons it (stubbornly) persisted in syndication for what felt like five times longer than it was ever on the air is because it was one that was easy to pick up at any point. It remains a mainstay on streaming services to this day, a font from which memes flow with the same intensity as they do from the Star Wars prequels. A show that is about nothing, as the creators themselves called it, is really a show about its characters. And that the characters of Seinfeld are such fastidious and unbearable people is the whole source of the show’s comedy: You can hear Jerry and George do their shout-the-same-dialogue-at-each-other schtick, or can imagine what Elaine or Kramer would say or do were they in your shoes at the moment you had today where somebody was being obnoxious, unyielding, unhelpful, or just plain dumb toward you.

The Tao Te Ching tells us that to do nothing is to leave nothing undone. And so a show that is about nothing also has nothing it particularly needs to finish. That cannot be said about any of the shows of the ’00s and beyond, when we started to refer to television with terms like “prestige” and “peak,” and the plots of the highest-rated and most critically acclaimed shows began to become altogether more serialized than episodic. Seinfeld isn’t the last sitcom, but it is the most sitcom. Not only did it never budge on its status quo, but its status quo was so minimalist to begin with that nothing got in the way of the gags.

The Show

You know the premise: four friends in New York negotiate life’s sundry awkwardnesses and embarrassments with maximum neuroses. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are always exactly where they were the last time you ran into them. There are no “special episodes” of Seinfeld, and very few running subplots. The one that sticks out in everybody’s mind, the death of George’s fiancee Susan in Season 7, is surprisingly mean even for this show. After breaking up with her in Season 4 and getting back together with her in Season 7, George proposes to her due to a pact with Jerry, but then regrets it. So he, uh, gets rid of her.

Most of the time, it’s the same rotating cast with one other guest star—a significant other of the moment, some poor service worker the cast plays off of, the Soup Nazi—as the source of Jerry or his friends’ torment. Some guest stars and recurring cast members are particularly of note, including George’s parents (Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris), Newman the evil postman (Wayne Knight), Elaine’s boss Peterman (Jon O’Hurley), and of course, Elaine’s constant on-again-off-again boyfriend David (Patrick Warburton).

I could talk about any particular episode of Seinfeld, or I could talk about none of them. The cleverness was always in the individual setups and payoffs of each episode, and how they made these characters the butt of the joke by the time the credits rolled, always due to their own peevish natures. For the vast majority of TV-watching Americans, it was comedy gold.

Sorry I hate it. But for all I dislike it, for all the dialogue that is just George and Jerry screaming the same things at each other, for the total nine-season-long aversion to anything at all interesting happening, for the weird-mouth-noises-and-bass-slap sting that sounded like a parody of itself the first time it ever aired, Seinfeld’s finale is—I can’t stand this—actually genius.

The Finale: “The Finale” Parts I and II

There is a persistent attitude among the media illiterate right now that you can see on social media, one where people believe that just because a work shows someone engaging in a certain behavior that it is endorsing that behavior as good. Breaking Bad is one of my favorite shows ever, and it is a show that is also about bad people doing bad things. And while you do root for those people, you know that the show is not saying that Walter White or Gus Fring are good people, or that we would want them to win in real life. It is tragedy.

Seinfeld’s characters are the pettiest, most vapid people alive, and the show knows this. It is comedy. The point of every episode is to laugh at their pettiness and watch it get the better of them every time—it’s very good at doing this, even if it’s not my cup of tea! But apparently nobody at home got the memo, because it seems like a ton of people of a certain age used Seinfeld as a blueprint for how to be a kind of boorish jackass in their interpersonal relationships. “The Finale” is about finally hammering home this point to some of these viewers while also saying that no, ya jerks, Jerry and Elaine are not going to get together! It is just short of being a full-blown clip show, which on its own would be a cardinal sin of lazy finale writing (do you notice any clip shows among my previous entries?), but they manage the feat of making the memories actually diegetic.

Jerry finally seems to hit it big: NBC is picking up his pilot. He’s going to make Jerry, the show that is transparently the show you are watching right now. NBC gives him the use of one of their private jets, and he grabs up his usual crew of friends to go on one last trip together before he moves out to California to go into show business. When Kramer pratfalls into the cockpit and causes the plane to undergo a forced landing, they find themselves in a small town in Massachusetts. There, they witness a man being carjacked: Kramer films it while all four of them make fun of the guy.

For once, though, there are consequences to their douchebaggery. A cop arrests them for violating the town’s Good Samaritan law. They learn that they may be facing prison time and an $85,000 fine in 1998 money, and retain the services once more of Johnny Cochran-parody character Jackie Chiles (Phil Morris).

(Johnny Cochran was the lawyer in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which was a thing that happened in the United States between the years of 1995 and 1996, and the only other thing in this episode that more unmistakably pegs the show to that time period is one flashback in which Jerry is wearing a puffy teal Land’s End jacket. Sadly, Geraldo Rivera’s guest spot does not.)

The prosecution didn’t come to play either, though, and they dredge up character witnesses from the entire history of the show. Bubble Boy comes back, the girlfriend Jerry dated who he pressured Elaine into accidentally feeling up so that he could determine if her breasts were real (they are, Chiles assures him with a wink later in the episode), a woman Jerry mugged for her sandwich, a man they got deported due to their carelessness and negligence, Susie’s parents, and of course the Soup Nazi (“You guys have a pet name for everybody!” Chiles says.)

It’s a whirlwind tour of all the individual outrageous and farcical moments that made the show memorable, all in the context of witheringly condemning the characters by, finally, subjecting them to the judgment of well-adjusted people. I don’t like the show, and I have to hand it to this episode for sticking the landing.

The jury convicts them, and they get a year in prison. The last scene before the credits stinger (Jerry does stand-up in jail, and they should’ve just cut it) is the four of them sitting in a holding cell. Without the stimulus of the outside world to direct their contempt at, they suddenly find they have run out of things to say, and they lapse into an uncomfortable and sad silence before the fade to credits.

There are a lot of shows with terrible, tragic ends for their characters: Game of Thrones, the aforementioned Breaking Bad, and any of the other serious dramas love to kill people off. Seinfeld’s ending managed to be truly mean to its principal characters in a way that honored the show and all the quirky supporting cast who so ably put up with their bullshit from episode to episode. There are plenty of great shows that I feel were ruined by their finale. But you know guys, maybe Seinfeld is the one show I don’t like that was actually redeemed by it.

Tune in next month as That’s All, Folks! gets animated with the epic final battle of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses and read more at his blog.

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