Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  The cast and crew were supposed to have the script on Tuesday to start work on Wednesday. But more often than not, they’d get it on Friday, come in on Saturday to rehearse and shoot the show on Tuesday, only to start all over again the very next day. Production designer Tom Azzari and director Tom Cherones would show up in David and Seinfeld’s office on Fridays to say, “We start Monday, boys, and we don’t have a set. Can you tell us what we might have so we can build it?” David and Seinfeld would make their best guesses, the crew would build over the weekend, and sometimes it would get used, sometimes it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, it would go in the warehouse where they kept all of their extra set pieces, never knowing what weirdness might pop up on this show next.

  THINGS BEGAN TO CHANGE ON the Seinfeld set. The change started with the departure of director Tom Cherones in the sixth season. Seinfeld wanted to switch things up in the director’s chair just as they did yearly with the writing staff. In fact, Cherones was surprised he’d lasted so long.

  Thanks to Seinfeld’s success, he had no trouble finding work. He went on to direct a season of Ellen, several episodes of Caroline in the City, and four seasons of NewsRadio.

  Larry David had met Andy Ackerman while helping out with a Fox pilot called Sammy and Friends that David’s wife, Laurie, produced. The pilot production took a lot of work—recasting, rewriting. Even down to the last night of the shoot, Ackerman and David were rewriting while filming until 3:00 A.M. Ackerman was a huge fan of Larry David and Seinfeld, and as they parted ways that early morning, Ackerman figured it couldn’t hurt to throw out what he saw as a joking offer: “If you ever need any help on that other little show of yours, give me a call.”

  Three weeks later, Ackerman got a call at home from David. “You sound like you’re interested in doing the show,” David said. “I want you to meet Jerry and talk about this.”

  Ackerman scheduled the meeting, then hung up and screamed to his wife, Betsy, “You won’t believe who just called!”

  Ackerman met David and Seinfeld at a diner for breakfast. Finally, Ackerman asked, “What are you saying? Is this real?”

  “Yeah,” Seinfeld said, “we’d like you to do the show.”

  Ackerman took over directing for the eighty-sixth episode of Seinfeld, in which Kramer mentors a beauty-pageant contestant. On his first day, Ackerman sat down to conduct the table read, opened the script, and felt a shock of panic. He managed to look calm, maybe even bored, from the outside. But he realized what an important moment it was in his career.

  Soon the cast started reading, and because they required little direction by now, he calmed down. He saw how professional everyone was on Seinfeld, unlike shows he’d worked on in the past, like Cheers and Wings, where everyone always goofed around. At Seinfeld, he never had to wait for anyone to get their head in the game, or to get to the set on time. He was in heaven, working with actors who wanted to rehearse. He didn’t have to grab people away from the foosball table and summon them to where they were supposed to be, like he had on other shows.

  Ackerman had worried about fitting in, but he found his comfort zone. The actors welcomed him. David challenged him. When Ackerman fell into “sitcommy” staging, he said, David would say, “I feel like I’ve seen that before.” Ackerman appreciated the fresh perspective David and Seinfeld brought to sitcoms.

  He felt like David and Seinfeld had no idea of the effect they now had on culture; they were too focused on just getting through each week. He told them how great the show was, and they said, with seeming sincerity, “Really?”

  THEN THINGS REALLY CHANGED WHEN Larry David decided to leave the show in 1996, before the eighth season began.

  David had worried since 1990 that the show had no more stories left in it. Every year, around the thirteenth or fourteenth episode of the season, halfway through, David told Seinfeld he wasn’t sure he wanted to return for another year. Every year, Seinfeld talked David into staying. This year, however, David was ready to do something, anything, else. And he didn’t need the show, financially. He hoped that everyone else who worked on the show would feel the same way, but it turned out he was the only one. He remained friendly with Seinfeld and the cast and crew, however, even as he announced his departure.

  David’s final episode reflected his sensibility like few others: His last script was the one in which he killed George’s fiancée, Susan, with no remorse. His final scene has the four main characters stifling their relief in reaction to the doctor’s sad news. Andy Ackerman and Jason Alexander would have to figure out how to inject the episode with just enough pathos to sell it to America—and return the following fall to make more comedy. They tried several takes to get it just right. Alexander struggled. He huddled with Ackerman and David to talk it through.

  Finally, Alexander just put in take after take to play every level possible. One fell in the right spot, with enough feeling to go over in America’s living rooms but not violate David’s sacred edict against hugging and learning. Not every viewer would love the episode, but most of America would continue watching the show.

  LARRY DAVID HAD DONE 134 episodes. Seinfeld was sure that on some level, David hadn’t wanted to do any more than the pilot. Seinfeld announced to the writers, cast, and crew that David wouldn’t return, but the show would. The actors worried about continuing without David’s guidance, Alexander in particular, since his character was based on David. But they also had faith in Seinfeld, and knew he wouldn’t continue if he didn’t think the show could maintain quality.

  David had taught Seinfeld, through example, how to run a show, and he had taught the writers everything they needed to know. When a writer’s name was on a script, he or she got to participate in casting, shooting, editing, and sound mixing, a unique experience for sitcom writers. (On other shows, they just wrote, period.) Now that experience would be put to good use.

  David planned to write a film script now that he was free of Seinfeld. He sat in his office on the Castle Rock lot, trying to write, alone, and panicked: He had done the wrong thing. He missed his friends. He thought about everyone at Seinfeld getting ready to do the first episode of the new season. What had he done? Why wasn’t he with his friends? Why was he such an idiot? How could he have left the biggest show in the country to write this stupid script? What was he, nuts?

  He grew depressed. They were filming now, he knew it. They were doing it without him. How could they do that? How dare they do that?

  Eventually, he got through it.

  But he did return several times that year to voice Steinbrenner. Even so, he didn’t feel like he belonged there anymore. For the first time, David did Steinbrenner lines that he hadn’t written. Driving through the gate to the studio, he’d have to give his name to the guards, and they’d have to call out to the office to ask if he was allowed on the set. Don’t you understand? he thought. See that show? I created that thing! Years later, when writer-producer Aaron Sorkin left the show he created, The West Wing, David advised him never to watch his own show after leaving. “Either it’s going to be wonderful and you’ll be miserable,” David told him, “or it won’t be wonderful and you’ll still be miserable.” Sorkin took his advice.

  With the start of the eighth season, Seinfeld became head writer and executive producer, the double title previously held by David. Seinfeld was the only one who could take over David’s roles. For the next season, he would have even more control than he had before: He would be a lead actor, executive producer, and the head of the writing staff. Seinfeld was now an autocracy—an autocracy Seinfeld needed a lot of help to run, though, and the writers would have to step up like never before . . . or run the show they loved into the ground.

  10

  The Larry David–Shaped Hole

  THE TV WRITING TEAM OF Alec Berg and Jeff Schaffer had paid a fair amount of dues. They had worked on a failed sitcom starring Tobey Maguire called Great Scott!, a comedy version of Hard Copy called Exposé, and a sitcom starring Jeff Garlin called My Kind of Town
that its producers sold as “Seinfeld with a gun.”

  Luckily, their bosses at Great Scott! were now on staff at the real Seinfeld. Tom Gammill and Max Pross encouraged them to submit some ideas during Seinfeld’s seventh season—when David was still there—but the exercise felt “like sending a letter to Santa,” Schaffer said. “You don’t think anything’s going to happen.” Just as they were about to move to New York to work on Conan O’Brien’s new late-night show, they got a call from Gammill and Pross asking them to come in and pitch in person. They canceled their moving van, which had been scheduled for that very day, and went to the meeting.

  They found Gammill and Pross on the lot around the corner from the Seinfeld office, sitting on the front porch of the thirtysomething house. It was a three-story, Craftsman-style home set where the show had shot its exterior scenes. To its left was another house set from thirtysomething. Nearby were a tower from Falcon Crest and a graveyard from several John Wayne films. They sat on the porch smoking cigars, as they often did when they were brainstorming. Between puffs, Gammill and Pross told Berg and Schaffer to go meet with David and Seinfeld in their office.

  In the meeting, Berg and Schaffer found themselves inadvertently spending a lot of time complaining about working for My Kind of Town. How could those guys even think that dumb show was anything like Seinfeld? It was embarrassing! They realized how horrible it was to spend an interview complaining about their jobs, but they couldn’t stop themselves. And David had his own version of this, which was to complain that he had no idea how to run such meetings, even though he’d now been in charge of a major television show for some time. They made a good match.

  Berg and Schaffer were hired. They took a pay cut compared with their O’Brien deal, but they felt it was worth it. In fact, during their first season at Seinfeld, when they turned a script around extra-fast on a tight deadline, David and Seinfeld handed them a check, a bonus for stepping up. They would become part of a second wave of writers hired near the end of David’s time on the show who would find themselves pitching in way more than they’d initially expected—essentially, helping Seinfeld to fill the void now left where the Wizard of Seinfeldia once pulled all those levers behind the curtain.

  Seinfeld couldn’t have been more different from Berg and Schaffer’s previous experience with traditional sitcoms. At Seinfeld, they learned that what they thought was the whole script for an episode was only the first act. David and Seinfeld kept compressing their ideas down, over and over, to pack ever more into their twenty-two minutes. And then once they turned their scripts in, they’d watch the pages go into David and Seinfeld’s office, behind closed doors. Five or so at a time, over minutes or hours, the pages came out with David’s changes and notes scrawled on them, handed to the writers’ assistants, who were sitting just outside the office waiting to retype the pages.

  Berg and Schaffer, or whichever writers were responsible for the script that week, paced outside to glimpse the pages of notes. If they saw few changes, few enough to go to the table read with basically what they’d written, they knew they’d nailed it. For Berg and Schaffer, their first score was “The Label Maker,” a 1995 episode in which dentist Tim Whatley regifts to Jerry a label maker Elaine gave him. They believed, for the first time, that they might survive at Seinfeld when Jason Alexander said to them, “I heard you guys really hit it out of the park.” Then, a few minutes later, they started panicking about their next episode. Would they ever be as good again?

  When David left, their lives changed drastically. David had been the guy who’d step in to fill a void if an episode fell through. David had worked all hours, all days, while the writers at least had their weekends. With David gone, there was simply a large black hole where he’d been, sucking everything into its orbit.

  Everyone would have to deliver now, all the time.

  THE COMIC BOOK CHARACTER BIZARRO first appeared as a “supervillain,” a mirror image of Superman who is pure evil, in 1958. He meant the opposite of everything he said and had powers opposite of Superman’s (freeze vision instead of heat vision, flame breath instead of freeze breath). The comic strip’s author, Alvin Schwartz, said: “I was certainly inspired to some degree by C. G. Jung’s archetype of ‘the shadow’—and Bizarro reflected that.” By 1961, the character proved popular enough to get his own fifteen-issue comic-book run, Bizarro World; he would appear in other Superman-related comics, in various forms, in the following decades.

  “Bizarro World,” or Htrae—“Earth” spelled backward—was a cube-shaped planet that served as home to Bizarro and his posse. There was a Bizarro Lois Lane, with whom Bizarro had Bizarro children. The Bizarro Code commanded: “Us do opposite of all earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” (The Bizarros tended to speak like Frankenstein.) A Bizarro bond trader did well with this pitch: “Guaranteed to lose money for you.”

  When twenty-five-year-old Dave Mandel joined the Seinfeld staff in 1995, overlapping for one year with David, he got to use his comic-book fanaticism for good, delving into the Bizarro concept from Superman for one of his most memorable scripts. In “The Bizarro Jerry,” Elaine befriends three guys who are “the opposite” of Jerry, George, and Kramer. They are polite, cultured, and considerate. Though the show had dabbled in self-reference before, this plotline relied completely on the audience’s knowledge of the main characters; it directly commented on the show, even pointing out the characters’ worst qualities. Mandel liked the idea of seeing Seinfeld’s characters from the outside via their Bizarro doubles’ perspective: What would other New Yorkers think of them? The answer: They would not think highly of our “heroes.” It was the first time the show acknowledged the massive flaws of its main characters.

  Once Mandel had written the episode, it seemed remarkable that this concept hadn’t come up earlier in Seinfeld’s run. Seinfeld loved Superman, and the show had a knack for creating alternate versions of real-life people—Kramer, Joe Davola, the Soup Nazi, J. Peterman. One could see these as exaggerated—and in several cases, evil—versions of their earthly counterparts. Seinfeldia, the place where Seinfeld’s reality and fiction mix and mingle and allow its fans to interact with it, is Seinfeld’s Bizarro World, Seinfeld’s Htrae.

  If nothing else, the Bizarro plotline on Seinfeld proved Mandel had found the show where he truly belonged.

  WHEN MANDEL FIRST GOT AN offer to join Seinfeld’s writing staff in its seventh season, he didn’t have a place to live in Los Angeles, and he didn’t know how to drive, having spent most of his life in New York City. Coming west meant leaving a job as head writer at Saturday Night Live—where he had worked his way up the ranks for the previous three years—and Becky, the woman who had been the love of his life since he met her seven years before. A chance to join Seinfeld, however, was worth all of this to him.

  He found a Los Angeles driving school to give him lessons on his way to the Seinfeld lot and a house from which he could drive to and from work without ever getting on the freeway. And then he dug into his new role.

  When he got to write the “Bizarro Jerry” episode, it all paid off. He got to incorporate his love of comic books into a script. He got to write Becky into the episode. Becky had grown up on a farm in Maine and always hated her hands. In the episode, Jerry dates a woman who has “man hands.” This was a Seinfeld writer’s version of a love poem, a grand gesture. In 2007, Dave and Becky were married.

  THE NEW WAVE OF WRITERS stepping up as David exited in season seven also included Saturday Night Live veteran Steve Koren, a friend of Mandel’s. Koren’s New York sensibility would be a huge help on the show, Mandel told him, suggesting he submit some story ideas from New York City while still at Saturday Night Live. Koren loved Seinfeld’s approach to making the smallest things funny. Next thing Koren knew, he got an offer to join the staff of the No. 1 comedy in the country, just after being promoted to head writer at Saturday Night Live. He was coming off the best year of his career
so far, getting several sketches onto SNL in any given week. His last show, with guest host Jim Carrey, had contained three of his pieces, a huge deal for a writer who started out doing one-line jokes for the fake news segment, “Weekend Update.” What the hell was he going to do? It was difficult, but obvious: He could keep doing what he was doing, or he could learn something new. Of course he would join Seinfeld, and start from the bottom.

  Over the summer, Koren moved to Los Angeles—something he’d always said he’d do only for Seinfeld or The Larry Sanders Show—and studied up on Seinfeld. He’d watched, of course, but he hadn’t caught every episode because he was so busy with SNL. Seinfeld put him up in a temporary apartment, and the show staff sent over tapes of every episode so far in the seven seasons on air. He knew they liked his story ideas—that was how he’d gotten the job—but he needed to learn how to execute them, how to weave them into the complicated structure that Seinfeld had invented.

  Once he met the team, he felt more at ease. Veteran Peter Mehlman helped him learn the ropes, as did Schaffer and Berg and, of course, his old friend Dave Mandel. If he pitched what sounded like a good idea, often they’d say, “Oh, here’s what you can do with this.” Even so, Koren was terrified: As a man of modest means, with no family money or savings to fall back on, he’d been in a state of panic since he began his career as a television writer. His panic was acute now that he was away from New York and in TV’s most intense sink-or-swim environment. He knew that in comedy writing, the elation of getting a job is quickly replaced by a sinking feeling: I’m going to lose this job if I can’t deliver.

  The difference between Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld became clear to Koren: SNL was a hundred-yard dash, and Seinfeld was a marathon. A marathon every week. At SNL, about a quarter of the sketches pitched might get onto a show; but at Seinfeld, as Koren learned, “If it ain’t working, your episode is not going to happen.”