Legend or Loser: Does ‘Seinfeld’ Still Hold Up After 10 Years?

Nope: When 'Seinfeld' signed off, it was hailed as a classic—the original must-see TV. Looking back now, you can't help wondering, what were we thinking?
By Marc Peyser

Are you ready to feel old? It was 10 years ago this month that "Seinfeld" went off the air. The decade may have flown by in less time than it took Jerry to find his next girlfriend, but a decade seems like the right distance from which to evaluate how successful the show really was. When it left prime time in 1998, "Seinfeld" was widely considered to be a classic, and many fans call it the best sitcom ever. Was it either?

Or neither. As someone who doesn't dip into its bottomless rerun pool much, I was surprised when I sat down with the show again by how poorly "Seinfeld" holds up. What once seemed smart—they just did a storyline on John Cheever's diaries!—feels like shtik. The pacing—no show had ever packed in so many scenes, some of them lasting a few seconds—now seems formulaic and forced. You can almost hear the guys sitting in the writers' room throwing out ideas: Wouldn't it be funny if (a) Jerry dated a deaf girl? (b) Elaine was an embarrassingly bad dancer? (c) George got a job with the Yankees? (d) Kramer invented a bra for men? Chances are, you can immediately remember the episode I'm talking about, and it's probably making you smile. But I bet you can't remember much beyond that tagline, because the show was one big conceit: four characters—whiny wackos with hair, really—who managed to turn life's most ordinary situations into something outrageous, and with a laugh track.

Seinfeld and cocreator Larry David (lately of "Curb Your Enthusiasm") might not disagree much with that assessment. They always said that "Seinfeld" didn't aspire to be anything great— after all, this was a show about "nothing." They went out of their way to create a sitcom that treated happy endings and character development like kryptonite. "Seinfeld" was about finding humor in ordinary situations: relationships, jobs, parents, a bite at the local coffee shop. If you could dig up laughs in a chocolate babka, you really were the funniest show around. And if you could do it in an entire episode about masturbation—and, even tougher, without ever saying the word "masturbation"—you were the master of the comedy domain.

But, like a cheap sweater, or a cheap puffy shirt, the "Seinfeld" humor wears thin fast. It's hard to concoct four storylines an episode that are simultaneously ordinary and over the top. After all these years, the show's meticulous architecture creaks so loudly, it drowns out the comedy. Which leaves you with something very silly. I don't mean juvenile. The truly naughty episodes—such as the one about being the "master of my domain" (see above) or the one about breast implants—are still must-see TV, because they cover ticklish territory no one went near before, and they did it with a verbal panache that could easily have become crass. But in between, there were an awful lot of clothes jokes. And food jokes. And car jokes. And was that George Steinbrenner stuff ever funny to anyone who's not a Yankees fan? Maybe it's not the writing that's to blame at all. We all know that Jerry was no Olivier, but could he be a worse actor? I found myself wondering if "Seinfeld" would work better if Seinfeld weren't in it.

Perhaps none of this will bother you as you watch the one about George buying Jon Voight's car for the 153rd time. Part of the reason we loved "Seinfeld" was that these guys were our buddies. For eight years we hung out with them, along with those kids just down the street on "Friends." "Seinfeld" became the '90s version of bowling night: the place you kicked back once a week and shared life's little triumphs and humiliations with folks who knew just what you were going through. They made you feel like part of the gang, right down to the inside jokes. The problem is, we've changed, and the "Seinfeld" gang hasn't. There's a reason that the great sitcoms—"The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "M*A*S*H" and "Taxi," to name a few—still work. They're not just about being funny; they're about people who grow enough in a week, and over time, to keep them interesting. They have depth. Jerry and George have issues. That can be amusing, even occasionally hilarious. But after a while, it all has started to sound like a whole lotta yadda yadda yadda.