The policy switch came as a symptom of a larger sea change in affiliate-network relations spurred by the Fox network’s 1994 bid for legitimacy. That year, Fox paid $1.6 billion to run NFL games and the Super Bowl for the first time, a move CEO Rupert Murdoch believed was necessary to establish his network as a major power. At the time, most of its affiliates were lower-powered UHF stations instead of VHF, like most of the major networks’ affiliates. After the NFL deal, Fox dropped many of its old stations and acquired dozens of new stations on the VHF dial, which would give them more pull with advertisers. To do this, Fox made an unprecedented type of deal to purchase a $500 million minority stake in New World Communications, a production company and owner of several stations. The deal meant a dozen stations across the country, most of them previously affiliated with CBS, flipped to Fox overnight.
Fox’s sudden major moves set off a chain reaction of effects throughout the television industry. One of them was that networks gained more power over the affiliates, Lipps felt. Since the advent of television, affiliates had been treated as customers of the networks, wined and dined and wooed with swag while retaining control of their stations. Now, networks were increasingly bossing the affiliates around, using their symbiotic relationship to force changes. Networks, for their part, didn’t feel like they could trust their affiliates anymore—suddenly, stations across the country were flipping to Fox for the right price. The networks felt backed into a corner. They reacted with new rules that forced their power onto their affiliates, the television-system equivalent of the national government trumping states’ rights.
In the case of Lipps’s purchase of Seinfeld, that turned out okay in the end—and hinted at the power Seinfeld would have in syndication. The show didn’t rake in major profits in its riskier time slot—the price was too high for that—but it did something else. It won the slot and took viewers from Oprah. Its “halo effect,” as Lipps characterized it, helped lift the station’s entire afternoon heading into the local evening news. It was like Must See TV all over again, with local afternoon programming benefiting this time.
Seinfeld’s small victory in the Lubbock market demonstrated exactly what was special about the show. It pulled off surprising feats in other markets as well. As soon as reruns started airing at 11:00 P.M. on WPIX in New York City, for instance, Seinfeld started beating all three local newscasts on the other major networks in the market, a historic accomplishment. When it went off the air, its influence refused to abate. The more it played in reruns, the more it permeated culture. Viewers could now watch it, if not any time, at several times, on several stations that had purchased those pricey syndication rights.
Even as fans grumbled over the finale, they found comfort in watching Seinfeld after work, with dinner, during sleepless nights. Soon they forgot about that finale and retreated into the repetition, the routine, the night-after-night way the show just became part of their lives. Despite its cynicism, its aversion to hugging and learning, it started to feel like a family member, thanks to the ways it brought people together to watch and bridged generations. Maybe you didn’t have much to talk about with Dad, but you could instantly spark a laugh or a happy exchange by dropping a “yada yada” or a “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Seinfeld’s syndication success took on enough significance that several inconsistencies in the show’s casting were reshot or redubbed for the reruns—an unusual, and possibly unprecedented, move for a sitcom at the time. This was possible because the show was still in production when the first syndication deals were struck. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, who knew how much their fans fixated on every detail of the show, reshot any earlier inconsistent scenes that they could. For the second-season episode “The Revenge,” actor Wayne Knight redubbed scenes that featured the voice of his character, Newman—originally voiced off camera by Larry David. Once he became such a well-known recurring character, it made sense to give him the voice viewers would recognize when they rewatched in syndication.
The fourth-season episode “The Handicap Spot” got entire new scenes in syndication: When Jerry Stiller joined Seinfeld in 1995 as Frank Costanza, he replaced John Randolph, who’d made just one appearance. After Stiller’s hiring, the crew reshot Randolph’s scenes with Stiller and subbed them into the syndicated version. The first-season appearance of Phil Bruns as Jerry’s dad, however, couldn’t be reshot with his replacement, Barney Martin—Jerry’s apartment set had changed significantly, and Jerry had aged enough to make any changes look too obvious.
Fans online seemed to relish the changes, enjoying sharing this bit of trivia with other fans to prove their insider knowledge. Only a few grumbled online that the changes showed a lack of faith in audiences’ intelligence. For the most part, viewers seemed to like this attention to detail, this attempt to make sure Seinfeld was as “real” as possible.
AS SEINFELD RERUNS SPREAD ACROSS the TV dial in the United States and across the world, the show gained new generations of fans, and its influence on television grew. In the years that followed Seinfeld’s finale, TV remade itself in Seinfeld’s image. Just seven months after Seinfeld ended, The Sopranos premiered on HBO and became the new Seinfeld—that is, the show that America was proud to obsess over, an entertaining, but still smart, series that proved TV wasn’t just for idiots. It also owed at least a little creative debt to Seinfeld—after those lovable idiots were tried and convicted for their lack of morals, a show about a sympathetic family man who kills people for a living wasn’t as much of a stretch. (In 2013, The Sopranos and Seinfeld would occupy the first and second spots at the top of the Writers Guild of America’s list of TV’s best-written series.) Sopranos creator David Chase said the concept came to him as “a mobster in therapy, having problems with his mother”—an idea one can imagine showing up in a Seinfeld script.
With The Sopranos, HBO became a beacon of the coming “Golden Age of Television.” As Seinfeld later said: “The idea that you have two guys who have never written a show, being run by a network executive that had never had a show, leading to a show that has a unique and unusual feel—this is a model that all the networks subsequently ignored and never did again, except for HBO. That’s a network that hires people that they like and says that’s the end of their job. We like you; do what you think you should do, and it leads to much more distinctive programming.”
Of course, Seinfeld’s influence showed most obviously in the next decade’s sitcoms. Though Seinfeld ended up in a strange netherworld between the traditional taped-before-a-studio-audience approach and a more filmic, on-location approach to production, its quick scene cutting and multiple locations made an impression on viewers and future comedy producers. In the following years, sitcoms dropped their laugh tracks and embraced “single-camera” shooting—that is, the filmic approach that Seinfeld secretly pioneered.
Specific shows took on even more Seinfeldian characteristics. When NBC remade the British sitcom The Office for an American audience, it was because Seinfeld’s awkward humor and unlikable characters had paved the way for a similar sitcom from abroad. In 2006, comedian Tina Fey created her own show, 30 Rock, stuffed full of surreal antics, dovetailing story lines, and absurdist bits that made almost every character at least as weird as Kramer. Even shows in much different genres carried Seinfeld DNA: Lost obsessed Internet-fueled fans with its every interlocking detail. In all of these shows and others of the era—The West Wing, Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Six Feet Under, The Wire—the narrative complexity that Seinfeld pioneered became the norm.
And despite all that artistic advancement in television, Seinfeld would continue to hold its own against the onslaught of sophisticated shows over the decade and a half after it concluded its run. As TV audiences—with hundreds of cable channels, plus online and streaming services to choose from—fragmented down to slivers of the ratings Seinfeld once pulled, TV’s last Great Big Hit would remain more universally quotable than its heirs like South Park, Entourage, Modern Family,
Parks and Recreation, Louie, and Girls.
BY 2013, SEINFELD WOULD BECOME the most successful show ever in syndication. Networks buy reruns in packages sold in “cycles,” and Seinfeld was the first show in history to get to a fifth cycle, taking its rerun sales through 2017—nearly twenty years since its finale. As of 2014, it still played in 90 percent of TV markets across the country, on top affiliates such as WPIX in New York, KCOP in Los Angeles, and WCIU in Chicago. Its syndication ratings at the time remained in the top five among adults twenty-five to fifty-four, along with more recent hits such as The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother, and Family Guy.
It had brought in more than $3 billion in revenue since its network run ended, with a million viewers still tuning in every weeknight for TBS’s reruns, in 2013. The repeats did so well for WPIX that in 2014, the station bought out the ad space on several of the city’s subway cars; it ran ads that made the train interiors look like riders were hanging with Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer at Monk’s Café. In 2014, WUTV in Buffalo, New York, tried to move Seinfeld reruns from 10:30 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. to make way for the much newer Hot in Cleveland in the prime syndication spot. Outraged viewer response caused the station to move it back two months later.
New generations continued to discover the show, as did countries across the globe. The actors found themselves recognized around the world: Alexander was approached at a market in Budapest during the World Cup, and on the streets of Ramallah. Richards went to Bali and, he later claimed, found fans who spoke in a language he didn’t understand, except for one word: “Kramer.”
Anything known via Seinfeld now stood a chance of being recognized not only across America but across the world. Demand increased for real-life appearances by Seinfeld-related characters, from the “real” Kramer to the guy who played the Soup Nazi. Fans clamored for a cast reunion. Scholars studied the show. Artists paid tribute to it. Bloggers dissected it.
Seinfeldia grew far beyond what its original architects had imagined.
13
The Bizarros: The Sequel
AS CALYPSO MUSIC PLAYED, KENNY Kramer bounded onto a tiny stage in the cramped Producers’ Club Theaters on West Forty-Fourth Street in Midtown Manhattan, almost as recognizable now to locals and Seinfeld fans as the man who played the sitcom character he’d inspired. On this temperate and sunny May Saturday afternoon in 2014, he was kicking off his seventeenth year of playing the “real Kramer” to crowds willing to pay $37.50 for a tour of Seinfeld-related city sites and a brush with a guy who knew a guy who made a TV show. This seemed perfectly reasonable to the dozens of us who had shown up that day.
Kenny Kramer dresses nothing like the character based on him. His signature uniform is a backward baseball cap, long gray hair, Magnum P.I. mustache, flowy white shirt, and black pants. Grinning and taking the microphone, Kramer seemed to relish the role as if he’d just been cast in it. He had room for sixty-one tour-goers, but sixty-five had shown up; his solution was not to turn people away but to give prizes to those willing to sit on each other’s laps once we all boarded the bus. Four volunteers obliged in exchange for KRAMER’S REALITY TOUR coffee mugs.
Welcome to the capital of Seinfeldia, where Kenny Kramer is, of course, mayor. (More on that in a bit.)
About half of those in the audience indicated with a show of hands that they were visiting from Australia. Kramer nodded: He’d done very well on an Australian tour, performing a stage-only version of his act, a retelling of Seinfeld history, heavy on the Kenny Kramer and the charming jokes. In that country, he said, he’s even recognized on the street. Australians account for about 20 percent of his business these days.
He launched into his retelling from there, augmented by breaks for video clips, funny old footage of Larry David with a halo of frizzy hair, or bits of interviews in which David talks about Kramer. Kenny explained that he still lived a few blocks away, in Manhattan Plaza, where he’d met David nearly three decades earlier. He paid regular rates now, not the subsidized rates for struggling artists ($62 per month in the ’80s when the two lived there). He met David for the first time, he recalled, while organizing a talent show among residents of the complex. He knocked on David’s door and asked him to do ten minutes of stand-up material for the event. If David agreed, he’d get paid $150 for his trouble. “Everybody was excited about this except Larry David,” Kramer joked.
“If I did it, and I wasn’t good, I was worried they’d kick me out of the building,” David explained in a video clip, “because they’d see I wasn’t a real comedian.” But Kramer wore David down.
The two bonded over their mutual Yankee fandom. David had an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball that Kramer admired, and an unusual dedication to the Yankees for a guy who grew up in Brooklyn, which was then Dodgers territory. Kramer liked to listen to David kvetch about Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s decisions.
During his show, Kramer slayed the audience with tales of David’s early stand-up career, particularly his confrontations with audiences. “I think you’re a bunch of assholes,” Kramer imitated David saying. “You can sit there for the rest of your life and I won’t tell you another joke.” David would also sometimes come to the microphone, Kramer said, look around at the crowd, and say, “Eh, I don’t think so.”
After Seinfeld became a hit and David moved out to Los Angeles, Kramer lost his everyday connection to David, but, he said, they remained in touch. When Kramer visited the set for the taping of the episode “The Pilot,” he recalled, there were then three Kramers present: Himself, Michael Richards, and Larry Hankin, who played the actor playing Kramer in the faux pilot, Jerry. Once again, Kramer recalled, he asked David and Seinfeld if he could play this Kramer. Once again, they said no.
When he finished telling stories, Kramer next directed us to another room he’d dubbed “KraMart,” where we could purchase all manner of souvenirs. But he didn’t just direct us there. He showed us each and every treasure available, somehow making the tchotchke tour enjoyable. A VANDELAY INDUSTRIES bumper sticker. A KRAMER FOR MAYOR baseball cap. (A must-have, he said, since “I have a shitload of them left.”) A REAL KRAMER T-shirt featuring himself. A blanket bearing the image of Cosmo Kramer.
Over the years since it began, Kramer’s tour has grown from needing a thirty-one-seat van to requiring a sixty-one-seat luxury coach. He has managed to make the operation into his entire living, supplemented by corporate speaking gigs (he bills himself as a “demotivational speaker”) for up to $25,000 a pop, and theater tours. In the years just after Seinfeld ended, he did college speaking appearances that paid up to $150,000 each, but budget cutbacks have brought offers down to the $7,500 range—hardly worth his time. He has turned down offers for radio shows and TV roles. He runs tours weekly between May and September, then takes off to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for the winter.
When he’s off tour duty, he can seem a little tired of talking about Seinfeld—say, in an interview—even though he’s game to do it. He perks up more when he can talk about a different part of his life: his run for mayor of New York City on the Libertarian ticket in 2001. “Tired of career politicians ruled by special interests, patronage, and cronyism?” his mission statement said. “Then Kenny Kramer is your candidate.” Despite that weak nod toward a clear philosophy, Kramer ran mainly as the guy who inspired the guy on Seinfeld. He wasn’t terribly serious on the campaign trail. He proposed giving cell phones to the mentally ill people wandering the streets talking to themselves—if it looked like they were on the phone, they wouldn’t scare visitors as much. Or the city could pair people who talk to themselves, he suggested, with people who hear voices. When asked during the candidates’ debate what he would do if he became mayor, he had a simple answer: “I would go out and buy a suit and necktie.”
Then airplanes slammed into the Twin Towers that September, and New York City was suddenly the most serious place on earth. Kramer was already on the ballot—in fact, primary day for Democrats and Republicans fell
on Tuesday, September 11—but his approach fell out of favor. He understood that giving money to Red Cross trumped giving money to his campaign.
He’s since settled for life as a civilian, and as a major force in Seinfeldia. He and the other Bizarro versions of characters from the show continue to keep its spirit alive, giving tours, doing public appearances, and even reviving one of Seinfeldia’s chief industries, the clothing-order business of one Mr. J. Peterman.
JOHN O’HURLEY WAS HOSTING THE game show to tell the truth in 2001, a perfect use of his blend of glittery charm and smooth authority. He invited his Seinfeld character’s inspiration, John Peterman, on as a celebrity guest. On the show, Peterman and two “liars” would try to convince the players that they were the real J. Peterman. This process did not acknowledge the confusing mess Seinfeld had made of the word “real.”
As Peterman remembers it, when the taping ended, he joined O’Hurley at the actor’s house for dinner. As the two public faces of J. Peterman stood in the backyard at the fire pit, overlooking the glittering San Fernando Valley, Peterman and O’Hurley discussed the public failure that had befallen the clothing company in the three years since Seinfeld ended.
After hitting a sales peak of $75 million and opening retail locations across the United States, J. Peterman had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 1999 and was purchased by the Paul Harris Company. Peterman attributed the failure to pursuing too much expansion—a chain of stores, expanded catalog offerings, $198 reproductions of the necklace in Titanic—which he had originally thought the company could handle because of the Seinfeld exposure. One of the final pieces of catalog copy written for the company, but never published, said everything: “As my boat sank into the Sambezi I watched all my luggage float downstream over Victoria Falls. But the day wasn’t a total loss. The trek back to the hotel gave me time to think about things. How much does a man need, really?”
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