Finally, the Definitive Take
We all know the Seinfeld Finale was terrible; the only question is why? After nearly three decades of befuddlement, I am pleased to deliver the elucidation you’ve been craving.
After airing on NBC on May 14, 1998, the negative response to the finale was virtually universal. The episode centered around the arrest of the four friends for their failure to intervene when they watched a stranger get mugged on the street (actually, they videotaped the mugging while mocking the victim). The trial that followed essentially functioned as a device to bring back the entire train of nine years’ worth of characters whom Seinfeld and company had treated horribly. These former girlfriends, bosses, co-workers, and acquaintances were called as character witnesses who could finally bring to light the unconscionable behavior of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, and hold them to account. The foursome ended the series with the usual banter about nothing, now from a jail cell instead of the familiar diner booth.
Most critiques of this episode focus on the content, rather than form. And I agree with most of them: Sure, we could argue that the finale didn’t deliver the extremely high quality of writing that fans were accustomed to, that it included no new viral quotes or catchphrases, that by parading all the past characters through the episode it relied almost exclusively on old groundwork, old dynamics, old jokes. We could point out that, by season nine, much of the cast was delivering canned performances, virtually doing impressions of themselves from earlier seasons (George Costanza of Season Nine is 10x more angry and explosive than George of Season Four). This of course does not apply to Michael Richards, who was the most dedicated actor of the lot to the very end, nor to Jerry Seinfeld, who was never acting in the first place.
But no, the finale was not just disappointing. It’s not a question of content. It was somehow wrong. We all sensed a vague violation of the underlying software that made every other episode work. It broke its own vital unwritten rules: the necessity of (1) absurdity and (2) disconnectedness.
Absurdity was always central to the comedy of Seinfeld. The show improved upon the ubiquitous setup-punchline sitcom format by interweaving ridiculous plotlines of each of the four main characters. It delivered witty repartee and gags like George going out for a job interview and returning wearing nothing but a hotel bedsheet, Elaine pretending to be a janitor to get her favorite Chinese takeout, or Kramer becoming a Calvin Klein underwear model.
What made it work was maintaining the minute plausibility of each scenario, keeping the tenuous tether to reality intact. At the beginning and end of every episode we all still believed these four friends were fundamentally regular people like you and me. We identified with their desires, their foibles, their motives; and this relatability is a vital premise to every joke. If these friends found themselves in a basement at 3am watching cockfights, it wasn’t because they were crazy people, it was because life itself is that absurd.
The genius of the show was continually showing us how short the line is between mundanity and insanity. If you met an attractive girl at a party, found out where she worked but never got her number, why not stake out her building and pretend to bump into her? But then you’re going to need to tell her why you’re there. Jerry’s motivations and decisions up to this point are utterly plausible, but a minute later this leads to George adopting an alias (Art Vandelay) and pretending to be an architect. Or in another episode, when George finds out his parents walked out of his in-laws’ dinner party with the same marble rye that they had brought as a gift, offended that the hosts hadn’t set it out, we completely identify with George’s horrified embarrassment. The sympathy we have provides the necessary grounding to juxtapose the hilarity of the elaborate scheme he embarks upon to get a marble rye back into their apartment. The comedic payoff works because we can put ourselves in George’s shoes. When his in-laws discover him in their 3rd floor apartment with a marble rye at the end of a fishing pole, the punchline hits hard.
The point of every episode is to show that we are never more than a couple decisions away from the preposterous. Elaine is given a big career opportunity heading up the next issue of the fashion catalogue … and ends up putting the urban sombrero on the cover. Each story draws the shortest route possible from rational motivations to ridiculous outcomes. We laugh because this trajectory is true of our own life, and it’s a relief to discover that the experience is universal. But the key is that the motion is always outward, from our sensible expectations to the absurdity of life. And if this direction is reversed the episode won’t work at a fundamental level.
The other foundational premise of the comedy of Seinfeld is the disconnectedness of the stories. What happens in one episode has little to nothing to do with what happens in the next. (Multi-episode arcs are a rare exception to the norm.) This accentuates the absurdity of the plotlines – each story is hermetically sealed from consequences, deeper significance or meaning. It’s important to both the comedy and the overall sense of the show that nothing ever really matters; every episode is a sound and fury signifying nothing.
Episodes often open with Jerry in the middle of a relationship with a new girlfriend, with no backstory or explanation of what happened with the relationship he was in last episode. Throughout the series, no matter what scale of mayhem occurs – loss of limb, home, job, or life – we know that the foursome will be back at their usual booth at Monk’s Diner to agonize over the minutiae of social etiquette.
The episodes are disjointed and insignificant for the same reason that our lives feel that way: because the Seinfeld friends, like many of us, are hopelessly mired in the pursuit of self-gratification. The lack of consequences or integration with moral significance is part of what makes it the perfect modern sitcom. That is why it fused so seamlessly into the zeitgeist. So, introducing moral consequences to the show would be deeper than a change of tone; it would violate its defining characteristic.
The decision to base the finale on a criminal trial of the four friends makes sense on the surface. What better way to sum up the hilarious misadventures of the last nine years than to have them serially recounted by the victims? But in a law-and-order context, it simply doesn’t work as a Seinfeld episode.
The finale was the first episode where the trajectory to the absurd was reversed. Instead of flying outward, the Four were brought back to earth, to the sober reality of legal justice. You can put some funny quips into a script like this, but it’s no longer structurally comedic the way every other episode was. The viewer feels understandably betrayed when, expecting to enjoy the usual short road to absurdity, they receive instead the moral accountability of the real world.
Worse than that, the finale undoes the vital disconnectedness of the entire series. The existential meaninglessness of every other episode is what makes it modern and gives it the extra comedic horsepower that turned Seinfeld into a cultural icon. But the finale put an end to this dynamic by providing a superseding moral reference point. The finale showed that, in hindsight, the objectionable behavior of the cast was never meaningless, and therefore less absurd and less funny. The depiction of amoral modernity was undone by a kind of Judgment Day.
So the failure of the finale was one of form and not content. It’s not that it wasn’t as funny as it “should” be; it’s that it was fundamentally incorrect. Instead of a centrifugal motion to the absurd, this was the one episode that thudded into sobriety. Instead of the usual disconnected vignette of inanity, the finale integrated nine years of selfish behavior into a moral arc ending in their demise. The hilarious lack of consequences underpinning the entire series vanished, replaced by a moral object lesson.
This is why the reaction from fans was not just disappointment but furor at the betrayal that it represented. Everyone wanted meaninglessness, but accountability is a real buzz-kill.