Seinfeld

Season 3 Episode 15:

The Suicide

Elaine needs to fast before an x-ray, so she tries stuffing herself three days before the test. After his neighbor Martin tries suicide, Jerry is hit on by his girlfriend, Gina, while at the hospital. A psychic warns George to cancel his vacation to the Cayman Islands, but never can tell George why. Jerry becomes worried when Newman (a friend of Martins) sees him with Gina. Elaine starts hallucinating from hunger. Everything hinges on a Drake's coffee cake.
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About Seinfeld:

Widely known as ‘the show about nothing’, Seinfeld is about 4 people solving everyday problems and living mundane lives the audience would also experience. Jerry Seinfeld plays a more amped up version of himself, who is a ‘minor celeb stand-up comic’. The writers based many of the stories on their own experiences. These stories are the adventures Seinfeld has with former girlfriend Elaine Benes, friend George Costanza and neighbour Cosmo Kramer. Usually, these stories are about petty rivalries and elaborate schemes that never work. 

Whilst this TV show is considered a sitcom or comedy, it doesn’t follow through many of the tropes a typical sitcom would. Sitcoms such as Friends and How I Met Your Mother makes the central characters likeable, moral, and sentimental amongst one another. Seinfeld does none of that. One of the famous mottos the show creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David follow is ‘no hugging, no learning.’ There are no moral stories such as when a member of the core gang does something wrong and tries to fix it in shows such as the ones mentioned before. The show and its characters in Seinfeld are cold, cynical, and unapologetically amoral. One example of this can be when George gets engaged on a whim to his ex-girlfriend, Susan Ross. When she dies because of his negligence, he shows no emotion. He even admits he has ‘restrained jubilation’ because he doesn’t have to be with her anymore. 

We can see this through many of the running gags and personality traits seen most frequently throughout the show. Elaine pushes another character screaming “get out!” whenever she wants to express excitement or gratitude. George has many unsuccessful relationships with women. Jerry references Superman in almost every episode, and Kramer just helps himself to Jerry’s food and apartment. As said before, there is no moral in the stories or attempt to develop the characters. They just are there. These four will act inappropriately such as feeling some happiness at one’s death or tell gigantic lies to impress strangers because that is just how they are.

Seinfeld is one of the most quoted sitcoms with many recognisable quotes such as ‘no soup for you’, ‘Yada, Yada, Yada’ and ‘not that there's anything wrong with that.’ (the last referencing homosexuality). The show won 10 Emmy awards, and 3 Golden Globes. Using irony for humour and the amoral character in comedic situations is why this show still generates money and is still talked about 20 years after airing. This was one of the first sitcoms to talk about taboo subjects creatively which many sitcoms would follow such as homosexuality in the 1990’s. It also changed the industry on how stars such as Friends get paid per episode. For a show about nothing, it changed a lot about the industry and inspired sitcoms today.


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