Almost a quarter of a century after its end, ‘Seinfeld’ is still considered one of the best series in history. The magnificent comedy starring Jerry Seinfeld and co-created with Larry David who has given us magnificent and hilarious moments with the adventures of a comedian and his friends.
And, as with so many mythical series there are certain myths difficult to eradicate due to the depth it has. Or, in this specific case we have a very big “mandela effect“: and the fact is that normally the media and fans (among which I include myself) describe it as a “series about nothingbased on the belief that this is how David and Seinfeld “sold” her to NBC. However, it was not.
The comedian’s material
An erroneous belief that series co-creators have denied for decades. Specifically, Larry David did it in a pleasant interview with Charlie Rose in 1998. In it, after talking about his departure from the series (after season seven) and his reaction to the end of ‘Seinfeld’, the interviewer talked about the infamous pitch. Something David had to correct:
«In fact, we never use that expression – “nothing” -. That only came up in that episode and it really stuck. No. We initially presented a series about how a comedian gets his stuff, so we followed a comedian in his day-to-day life. We would go from the grocery store to the dry cleaners, maybe he would have a date or go out with his friends and at the end of the program he would do a monologue and incorporated into the monologue there would be some of the things that we saw happen in the series. And that’s presumably how the comedian gets the material. That’s what we pitched to NBC.”
Years later, it was Jerry Seinfeld himself who clarified the matter again on Reddit:
«The presentation of the series, the real one, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was that we wanted to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was a joke in an episode many years later and to this day Larry and I are surprised that it stuck so well as a way to describe the show, because to us it’s the opposite of that.”
The episode causing this “mandelazo” is ‘The hook‘, the third episode of the fourth season of ‘Seinfeld’. In it, Jerry and George (David Alexander) went to the NBC offices with their idea to shoot a series. Here would begin a horizontal plot in which both would deal with the ins and outs of television for their comedy about nothing.
A plot understood as a meta referencewhich helped to sink the conception that ‘Seinfeld’ was a series about nothing.