Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  He got a glimpse of how smart his new bosses could be when he saw them discuss Elaine and Jerry’s relationship. One of the season’s episodes, “The Deal,” had the characters committing to a romantic relationship after first trying to sleep together with no strings attached. But David made a quick, critical decision for the show’s direction and longevity: They’d back out of this thing while they still could, and never go back to that easy plot-generator, romantic tension between major characters. They were not to become another Cheers, with its antics between barkeep Sam and waitress Diane.

  NBC executive Warren Littlefield loved the Elaine-Jerry dynamic and pushed for them to have a real relationship that the audience could invest in. David and Seinfeld agreed to the “happy” ending to “The Deal” because they thought it might be their series’ final season. When they returned for another unexpected season, they dropped the romantic relationship, never acknowledging it on-screen.

  Mehlman had a knack for dating stories, so he was relieved that all four main characters would remain available for such plotlines. He believed in the show more than ever, even though he wasn’t so sure about himself. He had never written even a word of fiction, aside from this one episode he had somehow faked his way through. He had no idea what he was doing.

  DAVID FACED THE PRESSURE TO produce a season three times as long as the last, four-episode run, by mining his own life for plotlines—it seemed easier than making stuff up. This turned the show, at times, into an almost documentary-style reenactment of incidents from his past. Some of the most memorable episodes during this season came from his experiences, all of them noted in his piles of yellow, lined notepads, waiting to be excavated for scripts.

  “The Jacket,” which ran in February, was the pinnacle of this phenomenon, almost pure autobiography for David. It featured the imposing Lawrence Tierney as Elaine’s father, novelist Alton Benes, modeled on Revolutionary Road author Richard Yates—that is, the father of Monica Yates, David’s ex. When Monica and Larry first met, she told him her father was “one of the greatest American writers.” Larry read the book, then reported back, astonished: “Oh my God, you’re actually right.” David’s comedian friends, including Richard Lewis, all took up reading Yates at David’s urging.

  David once suffered a harrowing meeting with Richard Yates in 1985 when he agreed to a dinner with father and daughter at the Algonquin Hotel, just like Jerry and George do in the episode. And Monica had arrived late, leaving David alone with her gruff, alcoholic father, just like Elaine had left Jerry and George hanging. Even the jacket story line—about a new suede coat with a flamboyantly patterned lining, its pristine condition threatened with falling snow—was straight from David’s life.

  Monica was living in L.A. at the time the episode was shot, so she attended the taping. (“I think you can hear my laugh on the laugh track,” she told me.) Her father was living and teaching in Alabama, nearly broke, without a television. Monica thought he would enjoy the cheeky send-up, so she encouraged him to find a grad student whose TV he could watch. He did, and several students planned a little get-together to view Richard Yates’s television “debut” with him. But Monica had gotten the airdate wrong, so after quite a bit of fanfare, the group turned the TV on only to find an episode all about Jerry offending an old woman by saying he hated people who grew up owning ponies; not a hint of anyone Yatesean. Suddenly it looked like Richard had possibly imagined the whole thing: Sure, your daughter’s friend wrote this television show all about you.

  But a slightly smaller group gathered with slightly less fanfare the following week, and there it was: “The Jacket,” airing on February 6, 1991, three days after Richard Yates’s sixty-fifth birthday. In it, Tierney—known for playing gangsters—grimaces when Jerry and George order nonalcoholic drinks while waiting in his hotel bar with him for Elaine to arrive. He tells “funny guy” Jerry, “We had a funny guy with us in Korea. Tail gunner. They blew his brains out all over the Pacific.”

  Richard Yates watched the scenes play out, stone-faced, as his students tried not to laugh. It went on.

  When George and Jerry escape Alton’s withering stare for the restroom, George wonders: “How could she leave us alone with this lunatic?” Elaine finally appears, and as the four head outside to dinner, Jerry panics. It’s snowing, which will ruin his pricey new suede jacket. He turns it inside out to reveal the candy cane–striped lining. “You’re not walking down the street with me and my daughter dressed like that. That’s for damn sure,” Tierney snarls. Jerry ruins his jacket to placate the terrifying tyrant.

  As the grad students later recalled the evening to Yates’s biographer, Blake Bailey, the credits rolled and Yates watched, silence descending. Finally, one of Yates’s friends said, “Well, it was kind of funny, Dick.”

  Yates’s response: “I’d like to kill that son of a bitch!” With that, he left the room.

  Monica believed the story was apocryphal, embellished, or at least a demonstration of her father performing for an audience more than an honest reaction to the episode. (“These kids clearly didn’t get him,” she said of the students.) Richard did later enumerate to his daughter all the particulars David had gotten “wrong” in his script. Yates would never wear a fedora like Alton Benes did. He served in World War II, not Korea. And, he insisted, “I’m not that scary.” But Monica suspected it pleased him more than he let on. She loved the episode for what David had left out of the character—her father, at the time of the original incident, was frail and shriveled, prone to runny noses, a constant cough, and heavy drinking. But Alton Benes embodied only Yates’s powerful, old-fashioned masculinity, coming across as an intimidating intellectual presence.

  Tierney, for his part, really turned out to be scary, at least to the cast and crew of Seinfeld. David had conceived Alton Benes as a possibly recurring character and loved Tierney’s performance, but noticed something odd during the filming: a butcher knife from Jerry’s apartment set was missing. Seinfeld tried to lightheartedly confront Tierney about it: “Hey, Lawrence, what do you got there in your jacket?”

  Tierney “joked” that he thought it would be funny and mimed the Psycho stabbing scene with the knife pointed in Seinfeld’s direction. Tierney was not invited back, but David liked to threaten director Tom Cherones in the years to come with writing another Tierney script if Cherones’s work wasn’t up to par.

  Monica Yates was disappointed; she had hoped to see “her father” show up again on Seinfeld.

  RIGHT AROUND THIS TIME, JASON ALEXANDER finally unlocked his character. After one table read, he questioned George Costanza’s motivation in the script. He went to David with his concerns. “Larry, please help me. No one would react like this.”

  “What are you talking about? This happened to me, and this is exactly what I did.”

  Ah, so George wasn’t Woody Allen. He was Larry David. Alexander began to study the executive producer more closely. Larry, he determined, was constantly trying to decide whether others’ actions were an attack on him and, if so, whether to respond in kind. Whenever David did this, he put his tongue against his bottom teeth, opened his mouth and tilted his head as he figured out whether to say something or let the moment pass. It was, as Alexander described it, David’s way of saying, “I see what you did. You just took a shot at me.”

  David was, Alexander noted, also constantly balancing his sense of utter worthlessness with an inflated ego. David attacked one minute, then apologized for being an idiot the next. Over time, Alexander started to tip George’s balance toward the worthlessness, though he maintained plenty of simmering rage as well. Monica Yates saw shades of David in both the George and Jerry characters. “Larry is cooler than George,” she said, “and he always was.”

  George did take on his own unique characteristics: a bumbling Inspector Clouseau, but with no cases to solve; an entitled Gordon Gekko, but without the money, power, or sex appeal. He slipped ever farther away from any semblance of integrity. He always chose to lie to
protect himself. But he possessed a self-awareness that made him charming, and an underlying humanity courtesy of the much more functional human playing him. George knew he was a mess, so we could forgive many of his foibles.

  JEREMIAH BOSGANG AND HIS BOSS, Rick Ludwin, found themselves in a real bind after the table read for an episode late in Seinfeld ’s midseason run in 1991. The script they’d just heard—for the eleventh episode of the season’s twelve, called “The Chinese Restaurant”—had Elaine, George, and Jerry doing nothing in the script except waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. (It was the only episode that didn’t include Kramer, because David, at the time, was still sticking with the idea that Kramer was a shut-in.) The waiting would happen in real time. No scene changes, no progress, no action beyond a pay phone call and an attempt to bribe the maître d’. Bosgang and Ludwin had championed many of the show’s stranger moments, but now they were considering shutting down production.

  They’d been worried about the script from the first time they’d read it. A half hour after receiving it, Bosgang came into Ludwin’s office and exchanged worried looks with him. Was this thing missing pages or something? There was no story! What would the other NBC executives say if Ludwin and Bosgang allowed this to move forward?

  To Bosgang, it confirmed the network’s worst fears about David and Seinfeld—that they couldn’t hack it making a sitcom long-term. Ludwin and Bosgang liked the show and wanted it to succeed, for their own sakes as well as David’s and Seinfeld’s. But they didn’t think they could sell their NBC colleagues on a show concept this flimsy.

  They’d decided to go to the table read in hopes of seeing some progress. But there’d been no substantial change. Now Ludwin and Bosgang sat together in Bosgang’s car, a used, white Mercedes-Benz 190E he’d recently bought from Seinfeld director Tom Cherones to replace his motorcycle. Both executives agreed that telling producers to kill a script was a provocative action. Larry David, in particular, would not receive this sort of directive lightly.

  But the two also knew how precarious Seinfeld’s future was at the network, what a critical time it was for the series. They had a responsibility to say something. “This is really their show,” Bosgang recalls Ludwin telling him. “We should explain to them that we, personally, Rick and Jeremiah, feel we should not go forward with this show, but we will ultimately support them.”

  Indeed, David balked even when Ludwin said—gingerly, but still getting his trepidation across—“If you feel passionate about this, which you obviously do, go do it, and we’ll hope for the best.”

  Ludwin took David for a walk around the lot and allowed him to vent his frustrations. David wanted Ludwin to understand that this episode was in the spirit of the show. It was a funny half hour of television about life’s little frustrations. It was Seinfeld. If the network executives didn’t like this, they didn’t like the show.

  In fact, the script baffled even the man who played the Chinese restaurant host. Actor James Hong expressed his confusion. Cherones understood it as similar to his own feelings in his early days with the show. “That doesn’t matter,” he told Hong. “Just go with it.”

  The episode did not go over well with Ludwin and Bosgang’s colleagues, but no one stopped it from airing.

  And when it ran on May 23, critics understood what NBC did not. “Like real life, but with better dialogue,” wrote Kit Boss in the Seattle Times. “Seinfeld doesn’t feel like sitcom television,” New York magazine’s Chris Smith said. “It feels more like a conversation with your funniest friends.” Over time, the episode would stand as a turning point for the series and a groundbreaking bit of television; NBC executives would gain a reputation for supporting creativity instead of foisting their own opinions on their talent.

  In summary, everyone won: The producers made the show they wanted, and the network looked good for airing it. In fact, the episode showed that a sitcom could take on more highfalutin qualities than the form had previously attempted: In this case, modernism, a TV take on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

  “The Chinese Restaurant” hinted at where Seinfeld was headed after two uneven seasons. The question remained, however, whether that was a direction NBC wanted to bet on again.

  And Seinfeld still had one last little stylistic flourish to invent for the final episode of this season—possibly its final episode ever, yet again. In “The Busboy,” George accidentally gets a busboy fired, then makes matters worse by allowing the busboy’s cat to run away when he tracks him down at home to apologize. Eventually, the busboy thanks George for saving his life: A few days after he’d been fired, there had been an explosion at the restaurant that could have killed him; plus, he found a new job while out looking for his cat. Meanwhile, in an unrelated plot, Elaine desperately tries to dump her boyfriend.

  As David struggled to end the script, he saw an opportunity in the coincidence that the busboy and the boyfriend show up at Jerry’s apartment around the same time. Wouldn’t it be funny if they got into a fight in the hallway on the way to the apartment? And wouldn’t it be even funnier if it had catastrophic results for both plotlines? In the end, because of the hallway altercation, the busboy loses his new job and Elaine’s boyfriend is bedridden in her apartment for several weeks.

  From then on, David decreed: All plotlines on Seinfeld, should the show continue, would dovetail into one explosive ending. Writing it would be even harder that way, but that’s the way David preferred things.

  THE NETWORK WAS NOW MONITORING Seinfeld’s every move, every success and failure, like a parent trying to get a kid into a good college. Bosgang filed reports to Ludwin that assessed every script’s quality. “The Ex-Girlfriend” (in which Jerry wants to date George’s ex), “The Jacket,” and “The Revenge” were among those deemed “above average.” “The Busboy” was “average, . . . although it tested poorly.”

  David and Seinfeld took the scrutiny the same way they took every hardship: with pride and humor. They knew they were regularly losing to Jake and the Fatman and Doogie Howser, M.D. They simply didn’t plan to do much about it. They displayed their own monitoring system, tacking the weekly ratings charts on a wall near their office with an additional column labeled EXCUSE: BASEBALL PLAYOFFS. COUNTRY MUSIC. DOOGIE GETS LAID. Even though they knew their status as outliers in TV comedy made big ratings less likely, they stuck to their vision. David told the writers they must adhere to one rule in their scripts: “No hugging, no learning.” They even had jackets made up with this credo imprinted upon them.

  The NBC executives once again pored over the reports and the ratings numbers, as well as audience and critical reaction, and decided: Seinfeld would get a spot, at last, on the network’s fall schedule.

  Perhaps the first indicator that they’d chosen correctly—that Seinfeld’s hip factor was growing—came when Bosgang was hired away to be a full-fledged executive at Fox, where he’d report to the head of comedy development: the job he’d wanted at NBC from the beginning.

  As a memento of his time with the show, Seinfeld’s prop department gave Bosgang one of the several copies of the tiny, plaster woman they’d made for the title art in the episode “The Statue.” He took it with him to his new office at Fox, a nod to Seinfeld’s unexpected halo effect on his career. The industry was starting to take serious notice of this weird little show. As CBS Entertainment president Jeff Sagansky said that year, “All hits are flukes.” Seinfeld was becoming one of those flukes.

  SEINFELD AND DAVID PUSHED THEIR matching, facing desks together in their shared office and went to work on their third season—their first full-length, twenty-two-episode, regular-season run. They had run up a deficit of possibly $10 million at Castle Rock—the difference between what NBC had paid for the show and what it cost to make—that they had yet to make back, but this was their chance to try. They spent their days debating with Cherones about, say, where to put a Pez dispenser for maximum comic effect, and their evenings and weekends rewriting scripts. Occasionally, Seinfeld w
ould speed off in his Porsche down Melrose Avenue to the Improv, do a little stand-up, then come back. Seinfeld got anxious if he went too long without doing a live stand-up set.

  Now the question became whether this fluke—impressive for its mere survival up until this point—could really become a hit. Getting onto the fall schedule signified that it had arrived, but the show now faced a much tougher road, competing with the onslaught of new series on both network television and the growing cable channels. Standards for hits loomed much higher in the fall. Anything without sufficient numbers could die an unceremonious death. Experimental shows, such as the previous fall’s musical disaster Cop Rock, could become instant industry punch lines. And NBC was losing its grip on the top spot; while it finished the 1990–91 season still in first place, less than half a ratings point separated the Big Three networks overall. Seinfeld was entering treacherous territory.

  AT LEAST LARRY DAVID NOW had a backup team to help him feed the idea-eating monster that would be this third, twenty-two-episode season.

  Peter Mehlman had officially joined the writing staff for Seinfeld, along with a handful of other staffers, most of them sometime stand-ups. As Mehlman sat at lunch with them, along with David and Seinfeld, he noticed that they were all fighting to talk, fighting to tell the joke that would get a laugh from the table—from David and Seinfeld, especially. He had no idea how to compete with them. He wrote a note to himself: “Just shut up and learn.” The next year would not prove easy.

  The workload had doubled yet again. The writers worked at the office with David and Seinfeld constantly, every day, weekends, too. Scriptwriting on Seinfeld remained an exercise in both freedom and terror—the writers worked as individuals, not in a room full of staffers pitching jokes, the way other sitcoms worked.