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Larry David came back after a two-year hiatus to write the final episode, which ended with — spoiler alert — the four main characters sentenced to a year in jail for violating the “Good Samaritan Law” in a small Massachusetts town. The send-off got mixed reviews from critics and fans alike. Newsday called it “a terrible letdown.”
“Finales are hard, right?” Jeff Schaffer, the show’s executive producer that year, said in a recent interview. “Because it’s sort of a betrayal to the audience. You’re breaking up with them. They’re going, ‘You’re leaving me. Why are you leaving me? All I’ve done is love you.’ So you’re already operating in this potential atmosphere of resentment and sadness, because it’s gone, you’re gone.”
Or, as Post television critic Tom Shales wrote at the time, “According to just about every magazine on every newsstand in the country, we are a nation united in inconsolable grief over the impending demise of ‘Seinfeld,’ the NBC sitcom that ends its nine-year network run May 14.”
Twenty-five years after that 56-minute finale, “Seinfeld” has not slackened its hold on American culture, from the concept of “double-dipping” to phrases like “yada yada yada.” But it was no sure success.
Larry David had co-created “Seinfeld” with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who plays a version of himself, his stand-up acts woven into the episodes. The show, originally called “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” struggled to get traction before becoming hugely popular in 1993. Set on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it was often dubbed a show about nothing, but it was actually a show about everything: life’s daily ups and downs, irritations and challenges, albeit taken to absurd extremes, told through a quartet of self-absorbed 30-something friends.
Spike Feresten, a writer and supervising producer, recalled in an interview the guidance that David and Seinfeld gave the writers in one of his first meetings.
“‘We don’t want you guys to make up stories. We would prefer you guys tell us stories about what is going on in your life, specifically in New York,’” Feresten recounted. “‘Things that happened to you that haven’t left your mind, a moment that made you angry on a date and something you wanted to say, but didn’t have the courage to say.’”
The Soup Nazi and the absurd
One example was the 1996 episode “The Calzone,” in which George (Jason Alexander) makes inroads with his boss, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner (voiced by David), by bringing him a calzone for lunch every day from a local pizzeria. Schaffer, who co-wrote the episode with Alec Berg, said the plot line came right out of personal experience — to a point.
Writers had gone to “this little little Italian place, like a block away from the studio,” and “I order a sub, I pay the guy and as I’m about to put the money in the tip jar, he turns away,” said Schaffer, now an executive producer and director on David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “I’m like, I want to pull this back out and do it again. Well, I’m not going to do that, but George is going to do that.”
And so George did. And it backfired spectacularly.
Feresten’s “Soup Nazi” episode came about, he said, during a stalled story-ideas meeting with David and Seinfeld. David had a suggestion: “You just came from New York, right? Just tell us what’s happening in New York.”
“Well, you know, there’s this guy we call the Soup Nazi,” Feresten replied, and David immediately started laughing.
“What do you mean the Soup Nazi?” he asked.
“Everybody calls him the Soup Nazi because he has this very specific way of how he wants people to order soup,” Feresten said, explaining how customers would have to step aside after ordering.
“Or you don’t get your soup. He takes the soup away and gives you your money back.”
“There you go,” David told him, laughing. “Do that as an episode.”
In the 1995 end result, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) ultimately obtains the Soup Nazi’s recipes to get her revenge. Returning to his shop, she taunts him, parroting his own lines: “You’re through, Soup Nazi. Pack it up. No more soup for you. NEXT!”
Feresten doesn’t figure he could get away with the Soup Nazi name today. “It was a time in America when there were no real Nazis around. So it didn’t really feel like that bad of a joke,” he said. “But I think about it all the time.”
And he still hears about it, too. Just that day, he said, someone had sent him a photo from the Writers Guild of America strike with a sign that said, “NO SCRIPTS FOR YOU.”
Other “Seinfeld” lines that have made it into the American lexicon include “regifting,” “low talker” and “anti-dentite,” a term for someone prejudiced against dentists. George’s hapless comeback in “The Comeback” also lives on: “Well, the jerk store called. They’re running out of you!”
“Seinfeld” racked up dozens of Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and proved to be a ratings juggernaut. One reason for the show’s enduring impact, Feresten said, is that David and Seinfeld rejected well-worn dialogue.
“A hallmark of being in that writers room was, the character would say, ‘Oh my god’ here, but we don’t. We’re not going to use that cliche; let’s come up with something new,” Feresten said. “And Jeff Schaffer says, ‘Sweet Fancy Moses.’ And we all laugh and we go, okay, there you go.”
A controversial courtroom finale
That magic formula had tens of millions of Americans on May 14, 1998, watching the “Seinfeld” finale, whose 41.3 rating nearly matched that year’s Super Bowl. In that final episode, Jerry and George land a sitcom deal with NBC, Elaine and Kramer (Michael Richards) join them on a trip to Paris, and it all goes wrong when the plane is forced to land in fictional Latham, Mass.
The foursome go into town and witness an obese man getting carjacked at gunpoint. They crack mean jokes about him — “Well, there goes the money for the lipo,” Jerry says — and are arrested for violating Latham’s “Good Samaritan Law,” which requires people to assist anyone in danger if it’s reasonable to do so.
David uses the ensuing criminal trial as a vehicle to bring back a host of characters — now character witnesses — who had roles throughout the show’s nine seasons, calling and flashing back to remind viewers of the main characters’ offensive behavior. The first witness, an elderly woman, testifies about Jerry stealing her marble rye after she buys the last one at a bakery. Viewers at home see a clip from that earlier show, where she yells for help as he wrestles the rye from her and shouts, “Shut up, you old bag!”
The judge’s name is Arthur Vandelay, matching the name of the company George once made up, Vandelay Industries, in an ill-fated attempt to fool the unemployment office. The courtroom is packed with spectators such as Jerry’s nemesis, Newman (Wayne Knight), who eats popcorn during the trial; Elaine’s former boss, J. Peterman (John O’Hurley); and former baseball star Keith Hernandez, who briefly dated Elaine and befriended Jerry.
There is one returning character who is on the defendants’ side: their fast-talking defense lawyer Jackie Chiles, played by Phil Morris. “I am shocked and chagrined, mortified and stupefied,” he says in his opening statement, spoofing Johnny Cochran. But the prosecution paints the behavior of Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer as stupefyingly immoral.
Library Cop Joe Bookman, played by Philip Baker Hall, tells the jury about Jerry having a book that was 25 years overdue. “We don’t call them delinquent after that long,” he said.
“What do you call them?” the prosecutor asks.
“Criminals,” Bookman answers matter-of-factly.
Marla Penny (Jane Leeves) — “the virgin” — testifies about the defendants’ contest to see who could go the longest without “gratifying themselves,” sparking a loud commotion in the courtroom. Steinbrenner uses his testimony to accuse George of being a communist, “thick as they come, like a big, juicy steak.”
And, of course, the Soup Nazi makes a return, complaining that Elaine published his recipes. “I had to close the store, move to Argentina,” he said, a reference to the post-World War II migration of thousands of actual Nazis. “She ruined my business!”
After the jury finds the four friends guilty, the judge says their “callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent has rocked the very foundation upon which our society is built.” Then he issues a one-year sentence. The series ends with Jerry doing a stand-up routine in front of fellow inmates, wearing an orange prison uniform.
Blowback followed. Seinfeld himself has had second thoughts about it all since.
“I sometimes think we really shouldn’t have even done” the finale, he said in 2017. “There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy.”
Louis-Dreyfus might have seen it the same way. “Thanks for letting me take part in another hugely disappointing series finale,” she joked on David Letterman’s last “Late Show,” in 2015.
Feresten, for his part, said he loved the “Seinfeld” finale. But he acknowledged it’s hard for a show to say goodbye.
“Your audience is going to be emotional when they realize there’s no more of these people we’ve grown to love, even though this show is famous for no hugging and no learning,” he said. “I don’t know if there was a way to win and make everybody happy. And perhaps that’s why it was just written to be another episode of the show, but also a way to kind of let you have one last visit with your favorite characters.”
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