"Seinfeld" might be one of the funniest shows in TV history,
but showrunner Larry David had some truly dark rules about its storylines.
Keep watching to learn more about David's bleak rulings.
"Seinfeld" was famously a show about nothing. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer would get
into all kinds of awkward predicaments, which is typical for sitcoms. However,
in most other programming, the characters learn some sort of lesson about morality and/or ethics.
They grow into better people by the end of the episode, even if they completely forget
said lesson by the next one. But not "Seinfeld:" the characters would be
precisely the same by each episode's end. It turns out there's a good reason why,
because show creator Larry David had two very strict rules about "Seinfeld:"
No hugging. And no learning.
You can see this ethos in every half-hour installment. There aren't any sentimental
moments where the friends come together to hug one another after a misunderstanding.
And they never learn their lessons, often going through a comedy of errors just to
wind up the same exact people at episode's end. As the infamous series finale showed,
their inability to become better people is the whole point.
David once elaborated on this to an interviewer, saying,
"A lot of people don't understand that 'Seinfeld' is a dark show. If you examine the premises,
terrible things happen to people. They lose jobs; somebody breaks up with a stroke victim;
somebody's told they need a nose job. That's my sensibility."
At their core, the four friends are awful people,
as exhibited in Season 5's "The Hamptons" when Jerry and Elaine meet a friend's new
baby. They proceed to call it "the ugliest baby" that either one of them has ever seen.
"Boy, a little too much chlorine in that gene pool!"
And that's them actually being nice.
On multiple occasions they actually killed someone by accident!
Look at the insanely dark season eight episode "The Checks."
In the episode, Jerry hits Elaine's boyfriend in the head with an axe,
and he dies during the subsequent surgery when the surgeon gets distracted. Amazingly,
no one learns a lesson of any kind: instead, the death is just played for dark laughs.
But nowhere is the show's insistence on everyone being awful more evident than in the episode "The
Invitations," in which George's fiancée Susan dies. Usually, when a major character on a
sitcom dies, it's a "very special" episode played straight with some kind of emotional message.
But not on "Seinfeld!" When Susan died, it was done in a classic "Seinfeld"-esque way:
she was poisoned by licking cheap envelopes because George was too stingy to pay for
nicer wedding invitations. And George isn't at all upset by her death, in fact,
he's not-so-secretly happy about it, because he had been trying to figure out a way to break it
off without looking like the bad guy. With her death, not only does he get out of the marriage,
but he gets sympathy to boot. He couldn't be more pleased!
"She's dead."
"Yes." "Huh."
The reason she was killed off sounds like it could've come out of a "Seinfeld" episode itself,
as Jason Alexander later revealed that actress Heidi Swedberg was fired from
the show because he couldn't figure out her sense of humor. He told Howard Stern,
"Her instincts for doing a scene — where the comedy was — and mine were always misfiring.
And she would do something, and I would go, 'OK, I see what she's going to do,
I'm going to adjust to her,' and then I'd adjust, and she'd change."
Which brings us back to that series finale, where the four characters go to jail when,
instead of helping a robbery victim, they merely watch and laugh. It was Larry David's
way of telling the devoted audience that we really shouldn't have been laughing at
this stuff all these years, because these are fundamentally bad people we're identifying with.
The success of the show ultimately inspired a whole sub genre of popular sitcoms like
"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and "You're the Worst" about bad people doing bad things.
Of course, one of those is "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Larry David's HBO
show that could be considered a spiritual successor to "Seinfeld" in a lot of ways.
Nevertheless, we keep cheering these awful protagonists on — so it seems that,
like the "Seinfeld" characters themselves, we didn't learn anything either.
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