He wanted to go out on top, he said. And he was there: Seinfeld had helped make its network, NBC, No. 1 for three years running. The show had helped NBC reach $1 billion in profits the previous year, with $200 million of that from Seinfeld. The show had become the ’90s equivalent of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners, All in the Family or The Cosby Show. And though The Honeymooners remained the gold standard for Seinfeld—he wasn’t sure yet whether his show would hold up for decades the way The Honeymooners did—there was way more money at stake when it came to Seinfeld.
Bob Wright, the president of the network, called to say that he and Jack Welch, the chairman and chief executive of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, would like to have brunch with Seinfeld and his managers, Howard West and George Shapiro. For two weeks beforehand, they negotiated everything, down to what Seinfeld would like to eat—oatmeal? French toast? When the day came, they all gathered in Wright’s apartment on the thirty-eighth floor of Trump Tower in New York City. Wright sat at the head of the table, with Welch and West flanking him. Across the table sat Seinfeld and Shapiro. Three waiters attended to them as they overlooked Central Park on a sunny, clear, early-winter day.
West was in heaven, talking to his business hero, Welch, about everything but Seinfeld. Then it came: The GE-NBC guys started talking Seinfeld research, complete with charts. Seinfeld, Welch insisted, hadn’t reached its peak. The NBC guys felt like they’d nailed this. “You know, Jerry, I go all over the world,” Welch said. “People only want to know about one thing—Jerry Seinfeld and his show.”
But as it turned out, the sales pitch wasn’t enough. Seinfeld noted that there was only one way to find out where the show’s true peak was—by hitting the downturn, something that didn’t interest him. Seinfeld wished it were a “regular show,” he later said, “like a grocery store. You don’t close it. You leave it open. ‘We’re making money here!’ But the show had its own rules, so I felt like I had to play by them.” As Seinfeld continued to demur about doing another season, Welch said, “Jerry, come here,” and took the comedian off to the side for a private conversation. Welch wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to Seinfeld: $5 million per show, up from the $1 million he was currently making. Another season of twenty-two episodes could net Seinfeld $110 million. That was Welch’s offer.
Seinfeld declined.
He felt that, with episodes like “The Betrayal”—in which the action unfolded in reverse—and “The Bizarro”—in which the characters met their opposites—Seinfeld had “broken enough china in the china shop. . . . There wasn’t much left to break down, and I didn’t want to twist a dry sponge.” He’d sensed for years that he was running out of material because he spent so much of his time making the show instead of living a normal life. He once went into a deli on the Upper West Side and saw little credit card–type things for sale that apparently allowed people to buy phone time. He had no idea what they were, and he hated feeling so disconnected from the sort of minutiae that had inspired his show, and his act, to begin with. He thought of the Beatles, who dominated entertainment for nine years, then stopped.
Seinfeld’s ninth season would be its last.
Shapiro, West, and Seinfeld left the meeting and went for a walk around Central Park. Seinfeld stopped at a bench at Eighty-First Street and Central Park West and said, “Guys, when I was twenty-one, I sat on this same bench.” There, he told his father he was going into stand-up, just before he moved into his first apartment. His father gave his blessing to Seinfeld’s career choice, saying he wished he could have gone into comedy himself.
“For me, this is all about timing,” Seinfeld told the New York Times on Christmas Day. “My life is all about timing. As a comedian, my sense of timing is everything. . . . I wanted the end to be from a point of strength. I wanted the end to be graceful.” He added that the show was “the greatest love affair of my life. . . . We felt we all wanted to leave in love.”
Though Seinfeld’s costars would collectively lose an estimated $40 million without another season (presuming they signed for the same salary as the previous year), the cast supported the decision. Every year for the previous four years, around the holiday season, they met in Jerry’s dressing room to talk about how they felt about another season. When they did this before Seinfeld’s meeting with Welch and Wright, they all said they felt like calling it, as Alexander and Louis-Dreyfus later recalled.
Louis-Dreyfus was tired of juggling the intense shooting schedule with her two young sons at home. They knew they could keep making funny episodes, but they didn’t feel like they could surprise the audience anymore. Plus, they agreed, it would be classy to go out on top. “It seemed artistically right,” Alexander later said. Seinfeld told his writers that nine was his lucky number, so he just had to go out with his ninth season. “There’s just something perfect about nine,” he said.
MEDIA CHATTER ABOUT THE SHOW’S impending end exploded. Camera crews and photographers lingered outside the studio gates at all hours, hoping to feed demand for even the tiniest hints of Seinfeld “coverage.” People magazine planned an entire special issue. One of the magazine’s reporters camped out at music director Jonathan Wolff’s office because Wolff was one of the few people in the world with a full set of Seinfeld videotapes—a standard contract stipulation for him. Wolff set the reporter up in a spare room, where Wolff’s staffers would stop in to watch an episode or two with him.
Newspaper columns obsessed over the hole the loss would create in NBC’s mighty Thursday night. The network still had ER, now TV’s top show, on that night. But that show was up for renegotiation in February, and could consider offers from other networks. Warner Brothers could ask for more than $10 million per episode for ER, which it produced, rather than the $2 million it was currently receiving. At the time of Seinfeld’s announcement, Mad About You’s stars, Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser, hadn’t decided whether to do another season of their hit show—a decision that seemed even more potentially perilous for NBC given Hunt’s probable Oscar nomination for her recent role in the film As Good as It Gets. Every permutation of the possible schedule meltdown fascinated media reporters and competing networks alike. Fox Television had to deny reports that its president, Sandy Grushow, sent Seinfeld a thank-you note for quitting.
Perhaps the New York Post put it best in its front-page headline: “Plucked Peacock: NBC Badly Hurt After Seinfeld Calls It Quits.” “Plucked Peacock” would be a nickname that stuck, even fifteen years hence, as the network’s luster faded.
Grushow wasn’t the only person (allegedly) thrilled at the announcement: Al Yeganeh, the owner of Soup Kitchen International, rejoiced over Seinfeld’s demise. The show had ruined his life, he told the Post when a reporter visited his West Fifty-Fifth Street restaurant. The Iranian immigrant—who’d kicked Jerry Seinfeld himself out of his store after the “Soup Nazi” episode aired—was besieged with media requests all over again. Yeganeh told the Associated Press that Jerry Seinfeld was just “an idiot clown.” Reporters swarmed to Soup Kitchen International, and one unlucky one, WABC-AM’s Babita Hariani, asked Yeganeh to repeat the Soup Nazi’s catchphrase, “No soup for you!” Yeganeh threw a headset at her and chased her out of his establishment. The entire incident was broadcast on the air.
IN THE SECOND WEEK OF January 1998, Seinfeld stood in front of a two-hundred-person studio audience for the first time since his announcement. A lesser-known comedian did the audience warm-ups, but Seinfeld usually mingled briefly with the crowd before the show. “Five million bucks a week?” the comedian said. “Is he crazy?” He may have been, but with the demise of Seinfeld, everyone in Hollywood wanted a ticket to the crazy man’s taping. “Welcome to the last helicopter out of Saigon,” he added. The cast shot their 169th episode of what they now knew would be 180 total. The episode was “The Cartoon,” in which Elaine obsesses over an inscrutable New Yorker illustration.
End-of-Seinfeld excitement built. Seinfeld writers were snapped up by studios handing out
holding deals—which give studios first rights to anything they produce over a specified period of time—to anyone who might give them the next Seinfeld. Syndicator Columbia TriStar locked down the largest single deal in syndication history by selling the show to WNYW for $300,000 per week as the “supply” of Seinfelds became suddenly finite. A thirty-second ad spot during the finale now cost $2 million; by comparison, the same spot in the 1998 Super Bowl went for $1.3 million, and in a regular 1997–98 Seinfeld episode for $575,000.
Even the possible scheduling shuffles Seinfeld’s absence would cause the following fall riveted readers. Fox had a rumored plan to move its animated hit King of the Hill from Sunday to Thursday to anchor a one- or two-hour comedy block that could rival NBC’s. ABC could move The Drew Carey Show from Wednesdays to Thursdays in an effort to take advantage of NBC’s weakness.
The most speculation focused on which show would inherit Seinfeld’s slot on NBC, as if it were the 9:00–9:30 P.M. time period itself that made the show so magical. Frasier could move from Tuesday into Seinfeld’s Thursday spot on NBC, but that would break up the network’s other successful comedy block. Or Third Rock from the Sun could move there from Wednesday. Friends could move to Seinfeld’s slot, but then what would NBC put at 8:00 P.M.? Variety reported that the sitcom Just Shoot Me! was “in the lead” to take over Seinfeld’s slot. Broadcasting & Cable suggested that other contenders included a new sitcom from Frasier’s creators, starring Nathan Lane; and established shows like Mad About You and Veronica’s Closet. In the end, Frasier got the spot.
The media coverage then swirled toward what might happen on the finale itself. Perhaps Jerry and Elaine would get married. Perhaps George would get a clue. Perhaps they all would grow a conscience, or grow up. A New York Post “fax poll” found that two-thirds of readers—or at least those who bothered to send their thoughts through their fax machines—thought the show should go on without Seinfeld, as a spin-off that featured his three friends. “We think it’s all a trick, and he’ll be back,” said one waitress at Tom’s, voicing the sentiments of a nation.
On the alt.tv.seinfeld newsgroup, a variation on the Tom’s waitress theory popped up: The joke of the finale would be that it wasn’t the finale, and the show would, in fact, carry on. Others on the site thought that perhaps the whole cast would move to California because Jerry would get another shot at a TV show, or that Kramer would swallow an irreplaceable key to Jerry’s apartment, or, in a strangely specific theory, that the last line of the show, uttered by George, would be, “What am I going to do now?”
On his GeoCities page, Adam Rainbolt, the cocreator of the SeinFAQ page, posted polls to gauge audience reaction to each remaining episode. He asked users to give the week’s half hour a letter grade between A and F, the way Entertainment Weekly critics rated shows and movies. Rainbolt also posted unauthorized excerpts from magazine coverage of the finale. He even considered recapping the remaining episodes, but then thought, Who would want to read about what just happened on a show they already watched?
Jason Alexander thought the show’s only hope might just be a non-finale. A regular episode, as if it were no big deal. The pressure was just too much for any script to handle. Lucky for him, the finale script wasn’t his problem. It was Larry David’s.
THE SEINFELD WRITERS BID GOOD-BYE to their dream jobs by collaborating on the show’s penultimate episode, “The Puerto Rican Day Parade.” Several of them had pitched the idea of a “one-set show”—similar to “The Parking Garage” or “The Chinese Restaurant”—that would take place in a traffic jam. O’Keefe, for instance, had pitched the idea of a Yankees Stadium traffic jam, Mandel pitched a Puerto Rican Day Parade traffic jam, and others had pitched backups at other major New York landmarks or events. Seinfeld settled on gridlock related to the Puerto Rican Day Parade, a New York event known for its ability to snarl traffic and co-occur with—some would say cause—mayhem in the surrounding areas. Every writer would get a credit on the episode. They would all work together one last time, on a production that would be almost as elaborate as the finale.
They each took their allotted scenes home to write. As Jeff Schaffer typed away at night, sending Kramer into a stranger’s apartment during an open house to use the restroom, he realized: These were the last Seinfeld words he would type. This was it.
They shot at Universal Studios, which had a bigger New York street set than the one on Seinfeld’s lot, with several intersecting blocks. Everyone threw bits of story into the hodgepodge they’d created, in which almost anything could happen: The foursome was stranded in a traffic jam due to the parade. They abandoned the car, and split up to try their luck separately navigating the city to get home. The debacle culminated in Kramer accidentally setting a Puerto Rican flag on fire, then stomping it in an innocent effort to put it out; this did not go over well with parade-goers.
The episode was shot on location in five days, with no studio audience. This gave it a surreal quality: The finale felt nothing like a regular weekly episode, and “The Puerto Rican Day Parade” took place off the home set, so the episode the week before—“The Maid,” an unmemorable half hour in which Jerry sleeps with his cleaning lady—was, the cast and crew realized, the last normal episode. They’d left their old lives behind before they realized it.
National Puerto Rican Coalition president Manuel Mirabal wrote to NBC before the episode even aired, after hearing about the episode’s title. He asked that the network allow Hispanic consultants to review it for offensive content before it went public, but NBC declined. “We don’t consult a rabbinical council when we do a show about Jews,” writer Alec Berg later said.
When the episode ran, it was the show’s highest-rated yet.
Things would get more incendiary from there.
DAVID RETURNED TO WRITE THE actual finale. It was always David’s show, and he had left it on good terms; it made sense to bring him back to end it. But that also meant taking on all of the pressure of delivering on the hype’s promise. He spent a month crafting the show’s good-bye script. He started his brainstorming by thinking about how much he’d miss the characters, so he figured he’d want them to end up in a place where he could imagine them being when the show ended. He asked himself, “Where could I send them for a year or two with the possibility of them coming back?” First he thought of Biosphere 2, but that seemed a little too out-there.
So instead, he settled on prison. He had heard about the “Good Samaritan law” in France that required onlookers to rescue anyone they see who is in danger if it’s reasonable for them to do so. He figured he—and, thus, the Seinfeld characters—could get in a lot of trouble under such a law. They could go to jail for a year, and when they got out, everything would be pretty much the same. Perfect. Of course, he knew that if one of his writers had pitched him the idea back in the day—that the characters would stand by while someone got mugged, then make fun of him—he would have said, “No, it’s too mean.” But it seemed like the best way to get them arrested, but for something not so bad, like, say, murder. He also liked the idea of a trial that would bring back a parade of the most memorable former guest stars to “testify” to the ways the foursome had wronged them.
The writing staff had no idea what to expect from the finale. They had no idea what was in the final script until the table read. Each got a script with a watermark bearing his or her name. They had to turn their scripts in after each reading or rehearsal. The script came in at more than a hundred pages (as opposed to a regular week’s, which would’ve been closer to forty-five or so). The shooting schedule stretched to eight days, instead of the usual three.
Secrecy enveloped the episode in the weeks before its May 14, 1998, airing. In fact, the Seinfeld crew kept everyone so in the dark that it was “frustrating some at NBC and leaving eager viewers to soak up morsels of information from the Internet,” as USA Today reported. David and Seinfeld gave the finale a fake title, “A Tough Nut to Crack,” to throw off snooping reporters and fans. Any
one involved in the finale had to sign a confidentiality agreement, and the actors beyond the core cast had to work without a full script. Seinfeld really liked the idea of using ink that could not be copied, because it had such spylike implications. The production staff looked into it, but it didn’t turn out to be practical on that scale. (Go figure.) Instead, they went with shredding each set of scripts after every rehearsal, then making new photocopies for the next. Mandel saved a handful of shredded scripts in a glass box as a memento of the week.
Filming would take place over the next week and a day following the table read, on several locations and soundstages, before culminating in a studio-audience taping on April 8.
On March 31, the cast gathered with David for their last table read, and that’s when emotions started to flow. They were sitting in their well-worn places for the last time, crunched together at the end of the long, folding tables set up in front of the empty area where the audience would later sit. Seinfeld compared it to no less a life-changing experience than birth or death. “You’re going to hear me say ‘thank you’ a lot during the week,” he said to his costars. “Here’s the first one.”
For the first time since the first episode, their parts were announced before the reading: “Michael Richards in the role of Kramer, Jason Alexander as George, Julia Louis-Dreyfus will be playing Elaine. And Jerry Seinfeld as Jerry.” Louis-Dreyfus started crying before they read a word.
After the table read, a rehearsal began with some supporting characters. As David and Seinfeld stood on the sidelines, they discussed an editorial in the New York Times that credited their show with New York City’s turnaround in the ’90s. “The image of the city is this fun, silly place,” thanks to the show, Seinfeld explained to a Rolling Stone reporter visiting the set for a cover story. As a native New Yorker, Seinfeld still couldn’t help being a little impressed with himself for making the Times op-ed page: “The lead editorial!” He’d already sold his Hollywood home and was looking forward to moving back where he belonged. “I’ve had enough of Los Angeles,” he said. “I always say that Los Angeles is like Vegas, except the losers stay in town.”
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