What is the deal with Seinfeld, as the man himself might nasally snark into a mic? Decades later, TV fans return time and time again to Jerry Seinfeld’s misanthropic, game-changing nineties sitcom.
It’s such an enduringly popular comedy, in fact, that Seinfeld recently made the switch from Stan to Netflix for Australian subscribers. You can now check out all 180 episodes, all nine seasons, all the time on Netflix.
Streaming services tend to invest heavily in these well-loved series with plenty of episodes, ensuring that subscribers return to their particular platform to watch and rewatch classic episodes like, say, ‘The Soup Nazi’ (season 7 episode 6). In this instance, Netflix allegedly paid about $690 million to make themselves the new home of Seinfeld for subscribers. That’ll buy creators Seinfeld and Larry David a whole lot of big salads and black-and-white cookies.
The series is most commonly explained as ‘a show about nothing’, borrowing from George Costanza’s own failed concept for a sitcom in season four episode ‘The Pitch’.
But true fans know that there’s a lot more going on under the surface of Seinfeld: it’s a show about how a stand-up comedian draws inspiration from the innate irony and humour of daily life, and in particular, from the vices and disasters in the lives of his three dysfunctional friends. The bizarre mundanity and the mundane bizarreness of dating, work, food, manners, yada yada yada.
Seinfeld is both extremely of-its-time (that normcore fashion aesthetique…), and still funny to this day—Elaine’s shameless ‘little kicks’ dance is just as hilarious as it was in 1996. But if you’re not a Seinfeld fan, it may be because every other great sitcom you’ve enjoyed has borrowed so heavily from its groundbreaking format. Consider the ‘Seinfeld Is Unfunny’ phenomenon, and then give the show another go on Netflix.
