Seinfeld: The Unlikeliest Success Story

Michael Richards, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Jerry Seinfeld.

In the late 1980s Jerry Seinfeld was doing extremely well for a stand-up comic. He had performed on The Tonight Show and Late Night With David Letterman dozens of times, and he was making about $2.5 million a year doing more than 300 club dates annually. But he was still far from a household name; announcers often introduced him as “Steinfeld.” Then a single meeting with NBC television network executives changed all that, paving the way for the innovative, influential, and wildly popular Seinfeld, which began its first season on May 31, 1990.

Seinfeld was no stranger to television. In addition to his late-night talk-show appearances, he had appeared on three episodes of the ABC sitcom Benson and his own HBO special. In 1988 Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock Entertainment production company offered him the lead in a sitcom to be called Past Imperfect. He accepted—and then ABC vetoed the casting he wanted.

Thanks to his quirky and popular stand-up, though, his star continued to climb. After People magazine ran a flattering profile of him, his manager, George Shapiro, wrote a letter to NBC executives. “Call me a crazy guy,” he wrote, “but I feel that Jerry Seinfeld will soon be doing a series on NBC.” In November 1988, Rick Ludwin and other NBC people met with Seinfeld to discuss what he wanted to do in television. He wasn’t sure: “I said, ‘The only thing I ever had in mind was to have a meeting like this.’”

Soon afterward he sat at the bar of the New York comedy club Catch a Rising Star with his friend Larry David. David had been a stand-up comic for many years and hadn’t made much money at it. But he was keenly admired by other comics, including Seinfeld, for his biting misanthropic wit. He’d briefly worked as a writer for NBC’s Saturday Night Live and as an actor and writer for ABC’s late-night sketch-comedy show Fridays.

Seinfeld asked David if he’d be interested in helping develop a new TV show; David, strapped for cash, couldn’t refuse. They left the club and started making jokes about some of the more exotic items they had encountered at a Korean restaurant, things like royal jelly. Suddenly David had an inspiration. This kind of loose, observational humor was funny—and was rarely seen in the typical tightly structured sitcom. (Later they would joke that the show was about nothing.) They hashed out a concept for a sitcom about a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld, who gets his material from conversations with his eccentric friends. The pilot script was called Stand Up, and then was soon changed to The Seinfeld Chronicles.

Jason Alexander, a Tony Award-winning actor in the recent musical Jerome Robbins'’ Broadway, was cast as Jerry’s neurotic friend George Costanza, and David’s fellow Fridays colleague Michael Richards as Jerry’s hyperkinetic next-door neighbor, then named Kessler. The actors loved the material, but they were hardly sure of its prospects for a wide audience.

NBC executives were also wary, especially after the pilot was shown to test audiences. The focus groups didn’t like any of the characters, particularly Jerry, who they found to be a weak leading man. In addition, the lack of typical sitcom situations left them confused: “You can’t get too excited about two guys going to the Laundromat,” one commented. As a result, the NBC executives effectively dumped the show, airing the failed pilot as a one-off special on July 5, 1989. Its ratings were dismal, and the show’s production company, Castle Rock, was so sure the program was finished at NBC that they offered it to the Fox network—which passed.

Rick Ludwin at NBC, however, believed, and managed to wangle enough money to make four more episodes—the smallest initial series order in TV history. NBC did insist on one change: The show had to have a regular female character. The creators agreed. David cast an actress he’d worked with during his Saturday Night Live stint, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Michael Richards’s character was renamed Kramer. The revamped show, now simply Seinfeld, premiered on May 31, 1990.

Its ratings were moderately better but still not exceptional. However NBC research indicated that Seinfeld’s appeal spread evenly across the country and was very strong among young adult males, a demographic much coveted by advertisers. So the network decided to stick with it, even if the plots did seem peculiar. The characters spent one entire early episode chatting while waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant.

Seinfeld gained a steadily growing cult following and then hit its stride in 1991, when it was scheduled at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday nights, after NBC’s megahit Cheers. Soon it became the anchor for the network’s prime-time lineup, and by 1994 it was the highest-rated show in the country. By 1997 it was attracting more than 20 million viewers per episode, and its actors and creators had become multimillionaires; at one point Seinfeld’s personal worth was estimated at $500 million.

It soon became not just a mere sitcom but part of the American lexicon. Many of its catchphrases—“master of my domain,” “soup Nazi,” “yada yada yada,” and “spongeworthy,” among others—remain part of the language. Its style greatly influenced later sitcoms, most notably the smash hit Friends. In 2000 David would bring a similar, if darker, sensibility to his own popular HBO sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

When Seinfeld elected to end his show’s run, in 1998—turning down a chance to continue it at $5 million an episode—it was still a ratings smash. Its demise was a national event, and everyone from The New York Times to National Review weighed in on its cultural impact. When the final episode aired, on May 14, 1998, some 79 million viewers tuned in—nearly half of all television households. Not bad for a lot of nothing.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.