Upon mention of the nineties sitcom Seinfeld, a common response is, “Oh yeah, the show about nothing.” This description is generally accepted not only as a fact but an intentional element of the show’s design — which couldn’t be further from the truth. Seinfeld — and Netflix now offers the entire catalog — is far from a “show about nothing.”
In Seinfeld’s Season 4 episode “The Trip,” main characters Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza have the opportunity to pitch a TV show to NBC but struggle to come up with an intriguing premise. At one point, George distractedly asks why the tables at their favorite diner aren’t stocked with salsa, which he claims is now the number one condiment in America. This leads to a jovial conversation about how fun it is to say “salsa,” at which point George says, “This should be the show — just talking.”
“What’s the show about?” Jerry asks, confused.
“Nothing!” George answers.
For the rest of the season, Jerry and George pursue this idea as their pitch, writing down instances of daily drudgery as sources of comedy – a “show about nothing,” and a clear nod to the origins of Seinfeld itself, which finds stories in the same mundanities of modern American life.
It reads like a mission statement, but Seinfeld’s writing is rarely that straightforward. The “show about nothing” pitch is actually a jab at the show’s early critics. He’s not sure who started it, but Jerry Seinfeld claims that the description was “made up by the press,” as he told the Hollywood Reporter in a 2016 interview.
“The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it’s the opposite of that,” Seinfeld answers in an “Ask Me Anything” thread on Reddit.
But never mind what the creator says. Art always breaks away from the artist’s intentions. What does the show’s content have to show for itself?
Nearly every episode features at least one main character in a burgeoning relationship, which breaks up by the end of the episode due to a misunderstanding or some trivial annoyance. In season seven’s “The Soup Nazi,” Jerry gets kicked out of the popular new soup restaurant because he and his girlfriend engaged in excessive PDA. Jerry chooses to stay and get one more bowl of soup instead of standing by his girlfriend. In Season four’s “The Pick,” another woman ghosts Jerry when she thinks she sees him picking his nose (in reality, he was just scratching.) In Season five’s “The Sniffing Accountant,” Elaine’s boyfriend writes her answering machine messages on a scrap of paper, and she breaks up with him immediately because he didn’t put an exclamation point after her friend’s pregnancy announcement.
We like to think we’re not that shallow, but we laugh because we reach that point sometimes. The little things are deal-breakers sometimes. Does she chew too loud? Is that the same pair of jeans he wore yesterday? Maybe we don’t care as much about punctuation, but we certainly care.
In “The Chinese Restaurant,” the gang is stuck in the waiting area of a Chinese restaurant that seems to have forgotten their reservation. In “The Raincoats,” everyone hates Elaine’s new boyfriend because he stands an inch barely from people when he talks to them. “The Parking Space” is entirely a debate over who got to a parking space first.
The subjects the show handles are trivial at best, but do they constitute “nothing?” Did Qdoba get your order wrong today? Does a mutual friend tend to embarrass you when they find you out and about with another circle of friends? How far away does lower-class parking feel in this cold?
Once we’re done dealing with our daily frustrations, we forget about them, but at the moment, they are all-consuming, and when a new one rears its head, it feels all too familiar. We resonate with a show like Seinfeld and the many sitcoms it inspired because they are not shows about nothing but us. If Seinfeld is a show about nothing, maybe we need to reevaluate what exactly qualifies as “nothing.”
