The conventional wisdom was that sitcoms should hit the reset button every week, so as not to confuse or alienate nonregular viewers. began dropping regular references to Art Vandelay or Bob Sacamano, the idea of season-spanning storylines - let alone call-back jokes - was unthinkable. That "callous indifference" and "utter disregard" helped to normalize the tone for many popular sitcoms that followed in Seinfeld's wake, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia to The Office to Larry David's own Curb Your Enthusiasm.īut Seinfeld's influence goes beyond characterization. Seinfeld gave us a different group: The hypercritical titular comedian, the eternally shallow Elaine, the slacker supreme Kramer, and George Costanza, who was such a loser that it practically defied superlatives. Contemporaries like Married…With Children, The Cosby Show, and even Cheers all followed a familiar format, with their (relatively) likable characters doing (relatively) wholesome things. Pre- Seinfeld, the sitcom was a genre renowned for mollycoddling its audiences. That made it unique among all sitcoms of its era. The comedy wasn't in the situation - it was in the characters' reaction to it. Significant time was spent on magnifying everything, from waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant to the importance of shirt button placement to the best kind of babka. Seinfeld's genius, of course, was turning "nothing" into comedy gold. MASTER OF MY DOMAIN SEINFELD EPISODE SERIESNot bad for a series which was famously described by its creators as "a show about nothing." Even in syndication, Seinfeld remains master of its domain though it hasn't produced a new episode since 1998, the series has earned $3.1 billion from reruns alone and still lords over the writers' rooms of dozens of sitcoms looking to replicate its success. From those inauspicious origins came Seinfeld, the sitcom juggernaut that served as appointment viewing for more than 76 million Americans at its peak.
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