While new TV shows will help you hook viewers straight out of the gate in their first season, there are many cases where you will need that early period to resolve some twists and find your identity. As for NBC sitcoms, shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “Office” American remakes started just the following season to find a cultural foothold. The same can be said about “Seinfeld.”
The creators of the series, pitched as a show about how comedians get their material, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, expanded the range of comedy possibilities of this amount each year. By the fourth season, “Seinfeld” was the major water cooler phenomenon that you had to catch up with, and many of its jokes were introduced into cultural dictionary. It didn’t matter that characters like Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), Elaine (Julia Louis Dreyfuss), George (Jason Alexander), and Kramer (Michael Richards) learned absolutely a lesson from their destructive behaviour. People were unable to fully obtain these walking chaotic symptoms. On top of that, “Seinfeld” rarely hesitated to try anything new. But one episode took things even further.
In the ninth and final seasons of the series, writers Peter Melman and David Mandel decided they wanted to pay tribute to playwright Harold Pinter with a comedic spin in the play “Betrayal.” The stage show revolves around a nearly decade-long story about extramarital affairs between groups of friends. The “Seinfeld” adaptation opens with the Castle Rock Entertainment logo, closing at the epicenter of the entire series where Jerry and Kramer first meet as neighbors, doing something similar. The key difference from play to parody is that you get two adulterous stories here for one price.
Jerry meets her old girlfriend, Nina (Justin Miseli). He introduces George to a potential romantic outlook before going to bed behind his back. Meanwhile, Elaine is invited to India for the wedding of her fiance, Sue Ellen Mishke (Brenda Strong). In the process of “betrayal,” we witness how both stories, albeit a much more entertaining ability, mix together with each other in the same opposite direction as stageplay. “Seinfeld” was so popular that it allowed them to lean towards these more experimental concepts without shaking their eyes, leading to expensive site gags.
Seinfeld director Andy Ackerman got the elephant gag simply by asking for it
Given that a significant portion of “betrayal” is to take place in India, the extra decoration could help sell the fantasies of the crew of “seinfeld” actually I’m there. Episode Director Andy Ackerman talks about how he went to the network on the way and got exactly what he wanted. DVD featurette):
“We were in a position to do whatever we wanted, finance wasn’t the issue. [NBC] For the elephants and obviously, they took me seriously. ”
The funny part of the whole request is that the elephant is only on screen in under 10 seconds. It never comes back to the plot, nor does it actually interact with the characters. It is used to establish two shots in the first half of the episode. that’s it. This kind of fruitless spending may seem like a genuinely bad idea, especially on a 30-minute sitcom, but when it comes to the show burning NBC money, they’re I did it.
Even in its ninth season, “Seinfeld” was still a very popular show on the network. Of course, you want them to be happy. Jerry was offered a massive salary increase to move forward in his 10th season, but refused because it was just money. It’s best to know when you stop doing it when you creatively exhaust yourself. That being said, it’s funny to think that if the “Seinfeld” crew were able to get a huge elephant for a few seconds in the final batch of episodes, they could have made other expensive efforts if they kept moving forward.
All episodes of “Seinfeld” are currently streaming on Netflix.
