‘Seinfeld’ Live Reunion Episode Offer Has Been Made, And Jerry Has Responded
A Seinfeld reunion offer has been made, and Jerry has already responded!
According to a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Seinfeld the man had been approached about bringing back Seinfeld the TV show for a one-off live episode that would reunite Jerry, Kramer (Michael Richards), George (Jason Alexander), and Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
The episode would presumably be about nothing, only nothing in the 21st Century.
The original series ended in 1998 after nine seasons, and is one of the most well-regarded sitcoms of all time, finale aside.
“Kramer, is that woman wearing just a bra?” #TheCaddy pic.twitter.com/HGstTuZmym
— Seinfeld (@SeinfeldTV) August 12, 2016
But before fans salivating for a return get carried away with themselves, here was Jerry’s response to the offer.
“No,” he answered when asked if he would consider a possible comeback. “But we did have an offer — I won’t say who from — to do a new, live episode of Seinfeld on TV.”
Asked if he considered “any piece of it,” Seinfeld laughed and said, “No!”
Jerry has been accused in the past of being downright curmudgeonly about the possibility of doing another episode. Some feel he’s a bit “no-for-the-sake-of-no” out of some contempt for those who enjoyed the original series.
However, his motivations for not doing a reunion episode are a bit more “for” the fans than against.
In fact, in one of his last Reddit AMAs (hat tip to AdWeek), the star of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee elaborated on why a comeback episode is a really bad idea.
Responding to a fan who thought it would be a great idea to bring back the Fab Four, Jerry had this to say.
“I think you’re wrong. I think it would be lame, and I think it would be an embarrassment to the nice place that the show occupies. I’m absolutely happy keeping it the way it is.”
Jerry expanded on those thoughts, telling the questioner that you “can’t keep asking for more of certain things, you know?”
He believes that one of the keys to life “is having a sense of proportion, knowing how long to sit at a restaurant after you’ve eaten, or how long you should go on vacation.”
To illustrate that point, he used the example of a Hawaiian vacation, stating that if you go there for a month, “I guarantee you that by the end you’ll hate it.”
He continued,
“So it’s the same with a TV show, you want to do a certain amount of it, so that [t]hen people look back on it and they love it. I could have easily done the show for one or two or three more years, but it would have changed the way people look back at it. I think I made the right decision. Because people like the show now even more than they did in the 1990s, because it didn’t get worn out.”
Jerry is right in his assessment of how people still feel about the show. It is aired every day in syndication and the entire series is now available on Hulu Plus and remains one of the streaming platform’s most popular commodities in spite of not having a new episode for 18 years and counting.
But in Seinfeld’s answer, he misses one other reason that bringing the show back would be a bad idea. The world with regard to comedy has changed dramatically.
The most talented comedians — himself included — refuse to play college campuses because of political correctness run amok.
The original series innovated and set the tone for breakthrough comedy. Now it would be entering an embittered and uptight landscape — one as humorless as it is blunt.
Seinfeld was always at its best when it had to think of creative ways of dealing with taboo and borderline taboo subjects. Those margins are no longer there for the show to play with, so existing as it does “in the past” makes it this lost-in-a-way holy grail of comedy that the art form needs to get back to.
It essentially sets the terms by which you enjoy it. A new episode with that type of attitude would be subject to current comedic terms, and quite frankly, the landscape doesn’t deserve it.
A DMX supercut catalogs Seinfeld’s many, many fictional girlfriends https://t.co/zEhysTqP37 pic.twitter.com/ytkvgZcE2S
— The A.V. Club (@TheAVClub) August 12, 2016
But what do you think, readers?
Is Seinfeld right to say no to this offer, or should he consider bringing it back and trying to do something innovative with it? Sound off in the comments section below.
[Image via NBC]
