Seinfeld Review

The reputation rests on the writing architecture, and it should. From the fourth season onward the standard structure gives each of the four leads a separate trivial problem, keeps them apart for twenty minutes, and converges everything in the final two with a precision closer to stage farce than to sitcom. The Contest never says its subject aloud and was still the most explicit thing on network television that year. The Marine Biologist ends on a monologue that pays off a joke planted twenty minutes earlier.

Larry David's refusal to let anyone learn anything is the structural rule that makes all of it possible, because characters who cannot grow can be dropped into any situation forever. Jerry Seinfeld is the weakest actor in his own show and it does not matter, because Julia Louis Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards are each doing something nobody had tried before. It looks like nothing, flat multicamera light on standing sets. The final episode is a misjudgment. The nine years before it are the ceiling of the form.