Hooray For Me!
A Friendly Rant From Captain Spaulding
(Captain Spaulding Action Figures Sold Separately)

THE LAST SEINFELD: THE LAUGH'S ON YOU

First things first. My recent column--the one in which I "revealed" the plot to the final episode of Seinfeld--was meant to be a joke.

I hope that the joke played well with the masses who did not email me, because the steady stream of responses I've received today (the Friday after the final episode) have not been friendly. Half of them were gloats over my putative missing of the mark with my plot outline, and half of them were angry invectives (one of which was colorfully profane) over the fact that I had misled my readership.

To these people, I say this: Life is tough, but it's much easier when you learn how to accept being the butt of a joke with a bit of grace. You don't hear all of those other readers complaining, do you?

The gloaters would have realized that the joke was on them, not me, had they stopped to wonder how a seagoing man like me could gain access to one of the most closely-guarded secrets in television history. And the angered should never have shot their mouths off at the water cooler (or the coffee machine, as George Costanza would prefer) about their secret Internet source for the ballyhooed final Seinfeld script without thinking the matter through.

I wonder, though, if the sneering and the bitterness might have more to do with the final episode itself than with me. I can rein in my ego long enough to realize that people are more put off by having Seinfeld creator/writers Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David dupe them than by having me dupe them. Because America was truly duped by the brains behind Seinfeld.

The last episode, after a chain of the increasingly improbable plot devices that have marred the series' last few seasons, concerned the trial in a small Massachusetts town of the show's four main characters over violations of the "Good Samaritan law" after they had failed to intervene in a robbery they had witnessed. They are found guilty and each is sentenced to a year in prison. The series ends with Jerry bombing in a jailhouse standup comedy routine.

The episode was a failure, at least on the mundane levels of humor, plot, and resolution by which a sitcom episode is usually measured. It was ridiculously contrived, the main characters were completely passive throughout the second half of the episode, and it lacked the trademark quartet of intertwined subplots (one for each main character) that made each Seinfeld episode an intricate Faberge egg of comedy. My guess is that the felt need to trot out the long line of Bubble Boys and Soup Nazis in all of their aggrieved glory--and the list of testifying witnesses ill-treated by Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer could actually have been much longer--cut into the time the writers would have had to devote to the jigsaw-puzzle tetrad so beloved by Seinfeld fans.

The one affecting moment--the slow pan-out from the jail cell as a subdued Jerry and George rehash a discussion of shirt buttons from nine years previous--should have been the series coda. But it was too reminiscent of Samuel Beckett for the great unwashed, apparently, so the writers ended the series instead with Jerry's tacked-on Blues Brothers prison performance.

I could live with an unfunny episode; they popped up from time to time, but at least you never felt that you had wasted your time. Even a bad episode furthered your investment in the characters. More to the point, it didn't make you want to boycott the products offered by Seinfeld's fine sponsors. But there was a sense in which the hollow thud of the final episode was analogous to the winning touchdown pass being dropped in the end zone as the final gun sounds.

But the episode also failed on a more intrinsic level than the usual dramaturgical ones. Seinfeld and David had had two rules from the outset that they wanted to convey in each episode: "No hugging and no learning." Presumably, the latter rule was supposed to extend to the audience as well. That's what audience identification is all about.

This was a show about four thoroughly despicable people. Plenty of comedies both high and low have been created over the centuries about despicable people, but seldom have these characters also been more likeable than they were despicable. The "no learning" part was that you were never supposed to despise Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer as much as you liked them. That would have threatened the show's watchability...and it would have meant that you had learned something about these four people.

Some of the finale I had inadvertently predicted in my tongue-in-cheek column: Newman's ultimate revenge, some attempt at resolution in the Jerry/Elaine relationship, and the lengthy parade of memorable minor characters trotting out in front of the camera like the Looney Tunes parade in "The Bugs Bunny Overture". But I never would have predicted that four characters whose most salient feature was their above-it-all lives--the very engine that could drive a show about nothing--could finally be called on the carpet over their mean-spiritedness. I mean, accountability is something, not nothing.

All throughout the episode I had the nagging sense that the show's braintrust were thumbing their noses at the world. Apart from dispensing with the minutiae of a good Seinfeld production, they wrote the episode to run for an hour and fifteen minutes. That was one more insult; it's impossible to chop up 75 minutes of programming for future syndication.

There's always the chance that Seinfeld and David wanted a sendoff that was mostly memorable in terms of how cavalier it was with the major premise. While the characters themselves never broke the two rules--Jerry and George resisted a hug after a successful meeting with NBC to revive the sitcom Jerry, and the four major miscreants remained unrepentant and oblivious to their callous, shallow lives even when sent to prison--the premises of the show were violated left and right.

As I said, the audience was force-fed a litany of the loathsomeness of the characters against its will. Beyond that, the essential life patterns of the characters was disturbed. Jerry, as one episode ("The Opposite", #82) had revealed, was "Even Steven"; life never got the better of him, because he always came out of things at exactly the level at which he went into them. Going to prison sure ended that. George was an example of someone so stepped on by life that he couldn't possibly exact the revenge upon others that he constantly swore he'd wreak. That's one reason why the "Susan is dead" episode at the end of the seventh season ("The Invitations", #126)--a tin-ear precursor to the final episode, in retrospect--seemed off the mark. No one in George's life was supposed to end up worse off than George, particularly as a result of George's actions. Playing up Elaine's callousness could hardly work when she spent the entire episode attempting to call her friend Jill to ask about Jill's sick father; Elaine's concern with appearances may have been false, but it would have prevented her from joking while someone else was robbed. And it's impossible to picture Kramer's blithe spirit enduring, much less surviving, the brutality and sodomy of prison.

There have been other cavalier sendoffs in television before--how much more fast-and-loose can you be with a show's finale than to posit at the end of it that the show had never even existed, as St. Elsewhere and Newhart managed to do? But at least the former was poignant, and the latter was one of the most amusing twists ever conceived on a television sitcom. Seinfeld's finale was, by contrast, just one big screw-you to the audience.

Maybe, in the end, that was the whole point--the writers were supposed to be just as loathsome as the characters that they created.

I'll probably continue to watch Seinfeld reruns. But it will be hard to look at the show in quite the same way. What's done (or viewed) can't be undone (or unviewed). Maybe the final word is what Seinfeld and David had intended all along--never take anything that comes out of your television set too seriously.

Captain Spaulding

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Previous Mountaintop Experiences with Captain Spaulding:

Hooray For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?

Hooray For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations

Hooray For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel

Hooray For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic

Hooray For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee

Hooray For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup

Hooray For Me #7-- Princess Diana

Hooray For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat

Hooray For Me #9-- Mother Teresa

Hooray For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash

Hooray For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?

Hooray For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks from Soccer

Hooray For Me #13-- O Canada! Who Stands on Guard For Thee?

Hooray For Me #14-- Suicide is Painless, but Loss of Creative...

Hooray For Me #15-- Synergy for the Devil

Hooray For Me #16-- Of Hissy Fits and Human Freedoms

Hooray For Me #17-- Naked Raygun's Hook Back in Anger

Hooray For Me #18-- Trees 2, Celebrities 0

Hooray For Me #19-- What Grad Students Need to Know About Sex

Hooray For Me #20-- Just Another Yellow Brick in the Road

Hooray For Me #21-- Can "Soy Bomb" Save the Oscars

Hooray For Me #22-- I Pick the Songs

Hooray For Me #23-- Asking Me Lies (Replacements, Alex Chilton)

Hooray For Me #24-- Careless Whispers From the Vox Populi

Hooray For Me #25-- Seinfeld Farewell

Hooray For Me #26-- Sympathy Cards in the Offing

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