GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

lol sleepingbag

'show about nothing' was just a joke premise that got repeated cause it was memorable -- larry david has said a bunch of times that the actual premise of seinfeld was 'where a comedian gets his ideas.'

• jessa eats pretzels, gets thirsty

I seriously will just come home and make a seinfeld joke on a girls thread on the internet in 2013 apparently

Seinfeld came out at a time when sitcoms were still aggressively premise-y -- most shows were about some offbeat workplace, or a family with an inordinately large number of children, or a wacky fish out of water guy from another country/space, etc. "a group of friends getting into awkward social situations" became a default template mostly after Seinfeld, and mostly because of Seinfeld.

some feld

some1 should do a the league vs girls thread maybe in like 15 years or so idk

it just seemed to me like the unspoken premise of Seinfeld was "four single adults living a slightly juvenile/arrested life in Manhattan" -- I guess I see why that was a different kind of premise from most shows, but I don't think it's not a premise. TBF, Living Single had "single" in the title, so it was always right there in your face -- these women are STILL NOT MARRIED (!!!). Whereas Seinfeld was about these neurotic friends who seem a little old to still be hanging out with each other all the time in this collegey sort of way, but the show just kind of accepts that and never makes a thing out of it.

cf. "all human lives are pointless, technically."

sorry

I think you mean "pointless"

i think it makes more sense in the context of how the phrase turned up in the show, as how they pitched a show to NBC. the average viewer doesn't necessarily think about the premise of a show once they get to like the characters and just wanna see what they're up to every week. but in 1980s network pitch meetings, it was probably a lot easier to sell "i become somebody's butler" than "i want to take the observational humor in my standup and apply to actual daily social situations."

when you think about what sitcoms were like in the 80s (and hell, what they were mostly like in the 90s) it's almost unbelievable that seinfeld managed to slip on to the air at all, let alone become a bigger and bigger hit the more un-sitcom-like and surreal it became.

living single was very very much about the romantic travails of those girls

also at the time (and to an extent still, you'll see some shows attempt this and you know they're thinking 'maybe we can approach seinfeld') plots along the lines of 'they wait for a table at a chinese restaurant', 'they try to remember where they parked', and 'they get stuck in traffic after a baseball game' were fairly radical. combine that w/ characters that weren't designed to be likeable, that actually reveled in how petty and unlikeable they could be, and then add 'no hugs, no lessons' and you're talking a pretty big break w/ anything that had been on tv before, neverminded succeeded.

there's a good documentary on the first/second season dvd where jerry seinfeld and larry david talk about how furious the network was when they presented them with the chinese restaurant episode. one of the execs talks about how they half-seriously thought the clowns behind this none-too-popular new show were playing a prank on them by giving them an episode with no plot.

i've been thinking abt this lately, and wondering just how many sitcoms before then were not essentially set in a family home, a proxy family, or the workplace (or a combo of those, like MTM's apt/job).

the seinfeld group seems kind of set in a sweet spot pretty far away from 'proxy family' / 'workplace'

the only one that jumps to mind is 'the abbott and costello show' (which jerry has cited as a model for seinfeld).

i guess there's 'gilligan's island' too.

neurotic friends who seem a little old to still be hanging out with each other all the time = yes, secretly a show about stand-ups

and now, back to Girls

this idea that ppl stop hanging out with their friends after they reach a certain age is kind of weird.

why do we keep talking about Living Single as if it predated Seinfeld?

the idea that ppl stop hanging out with their friends after they get married is not weird.

and none of the characters on seinfeld are married -- this is weird how?

even the hangout shows that have come since that you can kinda trace back to seinfeld (or at least friends, which was seinfeld as dreamt up by suits) are basically 'yr friends are the family you choose!' cuddlestein mountain nonsense. you take the most contemptious relationship on friends or himym or new girl or maybe even happy endings (note which of these was not a hit) and it doesn't even really approach the casual contempt that jerry felt for george, his best friend.

god i would have such a deep respect for a show that would routinely write off characters w/ 'they got married and they were never seen again'.

yeah, himym is college friends (incl. dorm roommates and a pair of college sweethearts!), a weird dude who chose THEM, and the girl whose getting roped into the group is part of the show's origin story

i can't remember, are george and jerry supposed to have gone to the same high school?

^^Yeah, they went to the same high school (see the one about the library book).

it's not weird that the characters on seinfeld aren't married, but it's unusual to have a whole group of them without the ongoing stories about them being marriage-oriented. which is why susan, and puddy, and man-hands and regina and so on - to kind of internally shore up the idea that there are people who are just intrinsically/constitutionally not about those kinds of stories.

routinely write off characters w/ 'they got married and they were never seen again'.

A few sitcoms have ended this way (the British Office, The Odd Couple, Sex & the City... others?)

i feel like there is some affection between the characters on seinfeld but it's expressed in such a low-level, buried way, you have to sort of ferret it out. like jerry often expresses mild irritation with kramer constantly visiting him but he never kicks him out like a normal person would; he obviously enjoys the effect this friendly, eccentric nutjob has on his drab, lonely, misanthropic bachelor existence, but he'd never actually say that and the show would never have a scene where it was explicitly stated.

liked Alex Karpovsky in the crack party episode

"I'm not fucking JAP daycare"

also at the time (and to an extent still, you'll see some shows attempt this and you know they're thinking 'maybe we can approach seinfeld') plots along the lines of 'they wait for a table at a chinese restaurant', 'they try to remember where they parked', and 'they get stuck in traffic after a baseball game' were fairly radical.
― balls, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 8:42 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

honestly IDK much about seinfeld but some of these plots would not really have been that unusual in earlier sitcoms. stuff like dick van dyke would often have episodes centered around some trivial misunderstanding or mishap (like the one where MTM is stuck in the bathtub?).

the unlikeability (sp?) of the main characters, while not totally new of course, would have been reasonably novel though.

Kinda lol but mostly sad that when Morbius wants to talk about a TV show he enjoys for once everybody goes on a tangent about Seinfeld.

i think the point is that "waiting for a table at a restaurant" or looking for a parked car are suitably banal things to make a sitcom *about*--i dont think earlier sitcoms were ever so brazen in that regard. that's where the "show about nothing" came in--in that it was a show about the parts of life that before did not seem to be portrayed on television. even Seinfeld gets away from this towards something more neurotic and manic in the latter years though.

i mean unsuitably banal things. i can't really think of a comedic voice before Seinfeld that really focused on such things--though im sure there are precedents.

i think Seinfeld's "did ya ever notice" school of observational comedy was not wholly unique in standup, whether among his contemporaries or older guys like Carlin. but nobody really committed to stretching those kinds of jokes across a half hour of scripted television before.

After watching Curb Your Enthusiasm I came to the conclusion that Larry David was responsible for the general tone of Seinfeld (including the "show about nothing" focus on minutiae), with Seinfeld providing only bits here and there.

morning after or 20 years after, only way to discuss sitcoms

i mean unsuitably banal things. i can't really think of a comedic voice before Seinfeld that really focused on such things--though im sure there are precedents.

― ryan, Saturday, July 27, 2013 4:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah i really think there were plenty of dick van dyke or lucy or honeymooners episodes like this. but cosign that it was a style that really went out of fashion in the 80s, where things were much more explicitly about people and their relationships, etc.

you may be right but I still think Seinfeld takes on things that are more than typical, they're usually essentially boring things.

some particularly seinfeld-ish dick van dyke episode summaries

"With Jerry at a dentist's convention, Rob is forced to see another dentist after breaking his tooth on a chicken bone."

"Rob goes on Ray Murdock's X-Ray where he inadvertently describes Laura as a nut."

"The Petries hire an Italian painter to paint their walls."

"Sally dates a comedian who never paid Rob and Buddy for writing his material. "

"Rob thinks he's just seen the suspects of a recent jewelry store holdup and wrestles with his conscience about informing the police."

"Rob goes to see a psychiatrist to find out if his back pains are psychosomatic."

"Rob and Laura are caught in the middle of a feud between their parents over cemetery plots."

"Sally's secret admirer is a deli owner."

'Rob catches a cold from golfing in damp weather just before a dinner party with Laura's relatives."

"Rob takes on a crooked pillow salesman in court."

"Laura accidentally reveals on television that Alan Brady is bald."

"The freckles on Rob's back appear to form the Liberty Bell, so Millie suggests that he submit it for a column that discusses strange things."

"Rob accuses his friends of stealing his new watch."

(not tryna throw down, just think that its interesting to dig 'em up)

haha i need to watch some of those, they sound good.

a lot of stuff that's "new" is just stuff that we forgot about

"Sally's secret admirer is a deli owner."

i watched this one a few weeks ago FWIW

it's funny, if anything you could combine 3-4 of those plots and come up with a pretty good Seinfeld script--though you'd have to find a way for them all the converge at the end.

I guess you'll get back to "Girls" when a new episode is actually on right this second. Fucking internet.

Contrived silly situations are not new in sitcoms, it was the style which differentiated Seinfeld. And that it was semi-openly Jewish.

'seinfeld' made a big impact on baby dunk due to its wholehearted embrace of promiscuity and rejection of the american adult's duty to marry and have kids (it's one of the queerest shows ever to me) and feels more like 'art' in the modernist novelist sort of way (ie; expressing one person's way of seeing the world) than pretty much any other sitcom i've seen. i still can't really separate my aspirations of big city living from what i imagined real-life Seinfeld characters would live. for a sheltered home-schooled christian adolescent it was a transmission from a bigger, funner, planet, and i'll be forever glad that it was on network tv. if i was 13 now and knew how to bittorrent 'girls' would serve the same purpose.

morbs -- yeah i was thinking the relationship between the dick van dyke show and seinfeld was really a certain strain of jewish humor. carl reiner was behind the former.