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Monumental nothingness By ERIC DEGGANS © St. Petersburg Times, published April 26, 1998
Don't bother asking the nation's hopelessly snide TV critics, already smirking at the flood of publicity heralding the end of television's most-watched sitcom, insisting it doesn't really matter.
"For TV comedy shows, it set the standard," says 15-year-old Steve Vitolo, whose S-Man's Seinfeld Explosion Web site (http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/3583/) has already drawn media interest from NBC's Today show and Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. "Now, there are so many TV shows out there about nothing. But they were the originators of that." Certainly that's the stated focus of Seinfeld, taken straight from the self-reverential episode "The Pitch," in which TV pals Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza decide to create a show based on Jerry's life that's totally about . . . well, you get the point. But there's growing evidence that Seinfeld is a show that only seems to be about nothing. Talk to those who study America's ever-evolving pop culture landscape and you get the idea that Seinfeld is really about everything -- from hidden, Jungian concepts of self and mythology to the irritation that arises when you take yet another bad driver's license picture. "In a time of relative prosperity, when (America) has too much time on its hands, (the show) taps into a generation that has time to sit around and talk about nothing," says David Wild, a senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine who is such a big fan that he wrote a 179-page book on the show called Seinfeld: The Totally Unauthorized Tribute. "I've never really bought into the notion that Seinfeld is a show about nothing," he adds. "It's about the reality of how much of our life is sitting around and dealing with the minutiae of life." The flood of pervasive catch phrases spawned or fed by the show -- "not that there's anything wrong with that," "master of your domain," "yada, yada, yada" -- serves as evidence of Seinfeld's towering influence on the nation's pop culture lexicon.
"The thing that's unique about Seinfeld is that it not only reflects pop culture, it influences it as well," says Lisa Bernhard, a senior editor at TV Guide, where she spent months directing the assembly of a special, full-size magazine tribute to the show for its April 20 edition, dubbed Seinfeld Forever. "It's become ingrained in our society . . . to the point where people describe situations by saying, "It was just like a Seinfeld episode,' " Bernhard adds. "It supersedes being a sitcom . . . It's intertwined into the fabric of our (nation)." Not that there's anything wrong with that. Or is there? Ask some scholars about the message of Seinfeld and you'll hear some analyses that are downright depressing, focused mostly on the achingly self-obsessed behavior of Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer. Standing above more conventional sitcom characters like the Mount Rushmore of TV comedy, this wonderful quartet -- ever-nitpicky Jerry Seinfeld, promiscuous ex-girlfriend Elaine Benes, neurotic boyhood pal George Costanza and wacky, mooching neighbor Cosmo Kramer -- bring superior comedic magic through a near-pathological focus on their own needs. Nowhere does that selfish focus gain more clarity than in "The Invitations," the episode in which George's fiancee drops dead after licking the cheap adhesive on far too many wedding invitation envelopes. In the end, the gang heads out of the hospital for dinner as if nothing happened (the show-closing scene features a newly unattached George trying for a date with bald-guy aficionado and actor Marisa Tomei). "Seinfeld has no moral conscience," says Gary Hoppenstand, associate chairman of the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "People are tired of the media trying to preach morality to them. Most sitcoms now don't have a message, and Seinfeld was one of the first shows to begin that." Co-creator Larry David -- whose famous "no hugging, no learning" edict has been the series' Golden Rule since its inception -- has made no secret of Seinfeld's lack of values or life lessons. Hoppenstand contends that part of the show's massive success stems from its pointed aversion to addressing substantive issues, mirroring the American public's own willingness to overlook allegations of immorality in its leaders, as long as the economy keeps rolling along. "People are drawn to the show because it's a non-thinking kind of humor," the professor says, noting episodes that revolve around waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant or forgetting a parking space at the mall. "A lot of sitcoms are socially integrating . . . they bring people together in a society," Hoppenstand says. "Seinfeld is an isolationist show . . . one's own problems take precedence over any other issues. None of these people have any noble sentiment . . . they're all kind of pathetic. We feel superior to them even while we identify with some of what they do, and that's the humor of the show." Indeed, there are many examples where the characters' efforts to take a moral stand actually bring more harm than good: from Elaine's being forced to dump a boyfriend who opposes abortion rights to Jerry's honoring a misunderstood promise to wear a ridiculously puffy shirt on the Today show. For Jimmie Reeves, of the mass communications program at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Seinfeld draws a clear line back to '60s-era sitcoms such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched, in which turbulent events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War were never acknowledged. "In the '70s, (producer) Norman Lear made sitcoms into this vehicle for looking at contemporary problems in a new way," says Reeves, recalling classic shows such as All In the Family and Maude. "Seinfeld is kind of retro in that it's a throwback to watching TV in a way that doesn't challenge you," he adds. "There's a lot of things going on in New York City in the '90s, but to watch Seinfeld, you wouldn't know there's racial strife, anti-Semitism or class struggle going on. It's an ostrichlike reaction to avoid confronting the real world." Another thing some critics say you'd never learn about is Manhattan's ethnic diversity. It's a subject the series has addressed better in recent years, but Seinfeld is still very often a show about the lives of very middle class, very Caucasian urbanite Americans -- set in a city teeming with every sort of ethnic grouping possible.
Though it officially began with a disappointing pilot episode in 1989, Seinfeld gained steam around the same time the '90s did -- say, 1992 or so -- making it the comedy that has come closest to reflecting America's urban life and lifestyles in this decade. "This is not a time of grand, noble ideals . . . in a way, looking out for yourself is a sensible approach," says James Von Schilling, a professor of English at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Penn., and a board member of the American Culture Association. "Seinfeld basically says, "This is what you do to survive in this world,' " Von Schilling adds. "These four people are using each other to cope with life. They're improvising their lives, in a sense, maybe not with the greatest success in the world. That could be a theme of the '90s." Ginny Rowden, an assistant professor of communication arts at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, has her own theory about Seinfeld's four lead characters. In a symbolic sense, they're really one person. Really. Using the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, Rowden theorizes that Jerry is that part of the personality that hides behind a role, Elaine is the female element of self (if anyone tries to show compassion among Seinfeld's classless crew, she does), Kramer is the trickster who often does harm while trying to help, and George is the shadow side. Perhaps the series' greatest contribution, the professor says, is advancing the idea that many of us quietly indulge in less-than-desirable practices -- from masturbation and nose-picking to lying about our occupation to get dates -- and that's okay. It's human.
To be sure, there's a lot more to Seinfeld's record-breaking triumph, including its engaging use of language, deft writing, Borscht Belt-in-the-'90s shtick, and characters who seem to reflect qualities everyone can relate to while also acting with a wonderful outrageousness. But it's also clearly a show powered by a subversive, darkly humorous edge, which only increases the morbid theories about how Seinfeld and David will draw the curtain on this aggressively low-brow series during its hourlong finale May 14. Or maybe we're all just thinking too much about a show about nothing. As the most popular TV comedy series of the decade comes to an end, authors and academics also come to a conclusion: Seinfeld is about much more than its sly take on "nothing." They say it reflects a prosperous and self-absorbed America, a populace drawn to "non-thinking humor."
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or a show about nothing, there sure is a lot of something to Seinfeld.
