Movies - Seinfeld

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Seinfeld

	Movies - Seinfeld

Seinfeld is an U.S. television sitcom set in New York City that ran from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998. It was one of the most popular and influential TV programs of the 1990s. In 2002, TV Guide released a list of the top 50 greatest shows of all time and ranked Seinfeld #1. The show was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. It stars Jerry Seinfeld playing "Jerry Seinfeld", a character named after and based largely on himself, and is set predominantly in an apartment block in Manhattan's Upper West Side. It features mainly Jerry's friends and acquaintances such as Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George Costanza (Jason Alexander) and Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards). It was produced by Castle-Rock Entertainment (then helmed by actor-producer Rob Reiner) and distributed by Columbia Pictures Television (now Sony Pictures Television).

Overview

The show has been famously described as "a show about nothing" (a self-referential phrase from an episode describing Jerry and George's attempt to create a sitcom), as most of the comedy was based around the largely inconsequential minutiae of everyday life, and often involved petty rivalries and elaborate schemes to gain the smallest advantage over other individuals. Seinfeld himself notes that his original premise - and the purpose for the standup excerpts that bookended each show - was that the show would be about how a comedian gathers material for his act. The characters have also been described as utterly selfish and amoral; the show stood out by depicting these traits in a comedic fashion (However, it should be noted that a common motif concerns characters' attempts to make correct moral choices, only to have their attempts backfire exponentially). In contrast to many other sitcoms, the allowing of scenes to lapse into sentimentality was generally avoided, and Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's dictum of "no hugging, no learning" gave the show its distinctively acerbic and cynical tone. However, themes of illogical social graces and customs, neurotic and obsessive behavior, and the mysterious workings of relationships ran in numerous episodes, making it possible to categorize the show as a comedy of manners. The show's creators made a conscious effort to reflect the activities of real people, rather than the idealized escapist characters often seen on television, although many of the show's plots involve intricate, and often cyclical strings of events that converge in the end to form a grand irony.

Previous shows on television were almost always family or co-worker driven, but Seinfeld holds itself up as being a then-rare example of a sitcom wherein none of the characters were related by blood or employed in the same building or business. In fact, many characters were not employed at all.

According to Bruce Fretts' 1993 The "Entertainment Weekly" "Seinfeld" Companion, Seinfeld's audience was, "TV-literate, demographically desirable urbanites, for the most part-who look forward to each weekly episode in the Life of Jerry with a baby-boomer generation's self-involved eagerness." Likewise, in episodes adhering to the original concept, the show featured clips of Seinfeld himself delivering a standup routine at the beginning and end of each episode, the theme of which relates to the events depicted in the plot. By this device the distinction between the actor Jerry Seinfeld and the character who is portrayed by him is deliberately blurred. In later seasons, these standup clips became less frequent. All of the main characters were modeled after Seinfeld's or Larry David's real-life acquaintances. In fact, many of the plot devices are based on real-life counterparts - such as the Soup Nazi (based on Al Yeganeh) and J. Peterman of the J. Peterman catalogue.

Another violation of the fiction convention of isolating characters from the actors playing them, and separating the characters' world from the actors' and audience's world, was a story arc that concerned the characters' roles in promoting a television sitcom series named Jerry. Jerry was much like Seinfeld in that Seinfeld played himself, and that the show was "about nothing". Jerry was launched in the 1993 season finale of Seinfeld, in an episode titled "The Pilot". This story arc, along with other examples of self-reference, have led many critics to point out the postmodern nature of the show.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Seinfeld ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Seinfeld; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Movies - Seinfeld

Overview

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay