The Pilot

Woody Allen. Claire. Kessler's dog. Looking back at The Seinfeld Chronicles, scene by scene.

Let’s begin at the beginning with the first ever stand-up set of the series.

A selected piece of Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up set was used as a device to open and close each episode of the first seven seasons of Seinfeld, and this first offering feels so much more relaxed compared to later versions. This is the only time the director goes behind Jerry so we get a sense of the venue he’s performing. This feels a little more like a documentary, we’re getting a feel of Jerry at work. Because this is Jerry at work.

In the opening scene Jerry and George talk about Jerry meeting a woman. They are sat in a coffee shop that is not Monk’s yet. For some reason George is working at the table with books and folders, suggesting he’s heavily involved in his work even when he’s not in the office, which is not how we’ll come to know George in later seasons.

Here he’s very much in Woody Allen mode, making a convincing argument (in a much whinier voice that will eventually dissipate over time) that the woman Jerry met (Laura) is not interested in dating him and is using him as a backup for when she visits New York. Here, we also meet Claire, the waitress whom they both seem to know well. She is rundown and tired and fed up with customers being overfamiliar, like a fatigued and less spiky Clara from Cheers. Maybe that’s why she’s called Claire. This would be her only scene in the history of Seinfeld despite all indications from this pilot that she would be a regular character.

It has always been accepted that Jerry Seinfeld is not a very good actor, although at some point I will state the case that it’s not that he’s not a good actor, it’s just that he’s doing his own thing. However, in these opening scenes, he seems so genuine. He is playing himself after all and these interactions with George and Claire show a kind of authenticity which is really quite admirable given he is sat in an obviously fake set in front of a live studio audience, surrounded by extras pretending to drink coffee.

The laundromat scene really emphasises Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s initial concept that their sitcom would be a show about nothing. Here are two men talking about a woman who may or may not visit Jerry from out of town, while he waits for his laundry to finish its cycle. This is it. This is the show about nothing. And in addition to this, they will veer away from the issue of Laura to talking about the laundry itself, making observations about interrupting the cycle and noticing another guy with a myriad of detergents for his own wash.

The most telling moment in this scene is when George confesses that he wants to get out of the city, that he feels like he has to escape the cycle of his own life. But Jerry isn’t interested in this line of thought at all, he is far too preoccupied as to whether Laura will call him or not.

And that’s a great moment because George’s admission that he wants to change his life in some significant way is just the sort of major storyline you would get in a regular sitcom or drama. But in this scene, it’s shot down before George can finish his sentence. And in the next beat, they’re back to Laura.

As with a few of these early episodes, there is a middle section devoted to Jerry’s stand-up. Of course, this would disappear very soon as the stories started to take control of the show, but it’s interesting to see them now because it seems very much like they were intended to be integral to the storylines in each episode. Here in the middle section, he turns items of laundry into anthropomorphic characters and invites us to view the mundane task of doing the laundry differently, to appreciate the humour of this tedious chore that we all have to endure. This was the sort of well-executed bit that made Jerry such a success on the comedy circuit. And in this pilot, it’s obvious that the sitcom is trying to feed off this success. But eventually this idea, like so many other initial ideas for Seinfeld would wither and die on the vine.

The first scene in Jerry’s far more beige, 80s-looking apartment is where we’re introduced to his incredibly odd, agoraphobic neighbour Kessler. Although before Kessler appears we enjoy a little bit more ‘nothing’ that David and Seinfeld were trying to establish, as Jerry enjoys a bowl of cereal, watches a taped baseball game and receives a wrong number. All these little moments add to the slow, unconnected feel of the pilot. For the first time in a sitcom, things happen that have no consequence, that don’t move the story forward.

Kessler also embraces the nothingness of the show. Here is a character that according to Jerry, hadn’t left the building in ten years. Everything he says and does in this opening scene has no bearing on the narrative. He is just a deluded crank with slices of bread in his pocket ready for a future sandwich.

This first interaction between Jerry and Kessler shows that Jerry is still a little uncomfortable that Kessler treats his apartment like an extension of his own. He reluctantly moves a pile of newspapers on his sofa so Kessler can sit down. Somewhere in the past, he invited Kessler over because he felt sorry for him, and now the boundary has been erased forever. And I’m purposely ignoring the little scene right at the end of The Betrayal episode in the final season when Jerry moves into his apartment for the first time, introduces himself to Kramer and says ‘What’s mine is yours!’ because that was only written as a frivolous, slightly self-indulgent sign-off to that particular episode and feels far too theatrical and incongruous to have actually happened.

The scene between Jerry and Kessler shows that Jerry does have a compassionate side. He’s a likeable central character whose anger with Kessler for blurting out the result of the taped baseball game lasts for all of thirty seconds.

The last part of this scene actually moves what plot there is forward, when Laura, the woman whom Jerry isn’t expecting to call, calls. Jerry writes her details on his cereal box (bringing a nice cyclical feel to this scene too) and the screen fades to black.

At this point one could imagine viewers using this obvious commercial break to switch over to something else. And I don’t entirely blame them. This is a slow show. Up to this point it’s well written and well-acted with some beautiful lines and observations. But we’re twelve minutes in and literally nothing has happened apart from a phone call.

Of course, I’m looking back on this pilot and watching it again in 2024 with nothing but affection. It’s wonderful.

But would I have had a different view if I were watching it back then for the first time, not knowing what it was all about? Yes probably. Would I have switched over when the protagonist with the cereal box faded to black? Yes there’s a good chance. And this is why watching the pilot of a show that went on to become such a behemothic cultural icon is so fascinating and what is ultimately the reason for me writing this in the first place. The incredible transformation of Seinfeld over its nine season-run will never cease to intrigue me.

The next scene has Jerry and George moving an extra bed into the apartment so there are no preconceived ideas about what Laura’s visit will entail. At this point we have perhaps the best line in the episode. ‘I can’t believe you’re bringing in an extra bed for a woman that wants to sleep with you. Why don’t you bring in an extra guy too.’ This is a perfectly delivered line and the audience really enjoy it. And yet it doesn’t feel like it fits in the Seinfeld universe. It’s a ‘joke’. It has a sentence which establishes the scenario and a punchline to illustrate its illogicality. This is the sort of well-crafted joke you’d hear on Friends or Frasier (e.g. ‘You slept with somebody three hours after you thought you broke up. I mean, bullets have left guns slower.’) It’s a moment from the pilot which again demonstrates that the two writers working on this script were still finding their voice.

This is also the infamous scene which sees the one and only appearance of Kessler’s dog who tramples over George on the sofa and then goes into the bathroom for a ‘drink of water’. According to Seinfeld and David, the dog was introduced in the pilot so they could engineer another stand-up scene where Jerry talks about dogs. But they cut that scene and so now we just have the introduction of Kessler’s pet dog, leading the viewer to assume that this will be a double act in the series, like Martin Crane and Eddie. But this was not to be. We’d never see the dog again. And it is bizarre to watch this dog appear from one door and disappear into another, like a ghost, trapped in a loop. Barely acknowledged yet forever part of the most popular sitcom of all time.

Also it’s worth mentioning that the decision to give one of the main characters a dog so they could include a stand-up bit about dogs suggests that David and Seinfeld didn’t really know what they were doing with this pilot. Was the intention to burden Michael Richards with a dog, season after season because of one sixty second piece of stand-up in the pilot? You don’t make decisions like that as a writer, not if you envisage a long series run. Perhaps they didn’t at this point.

George continues to give Jerry advice about the best way to approach his situation with the impending visit. Jerry is seemingly without a clue at every turn and George is pointing the way, often yelling and gesturing in such an aggressive way that you wonder why they’re friends. It’s rare to see Jerry at such a loss like this because as the seasons pass, it will be Jerry who will firmly establish himself as the cynical oracle of the group.

An interesting note here is that George instructs Jerry that whatever his instincts are, he should always do the opposite, which, coincidentally, is a concept that George revisits for a storyline many seasons later in an episode which bears no resemblance to anything in this pilot.

When Jerry gives in to his fastidious side and decides to have an emergency clean of his bathroom before his guest arrives – a characteristic of Jerry’s that stays throughout the show’s run and is often accentuated to theatrical levels of ridiculousness for the sake of a number of storylines – George and Kessler are thrown together for a couple of minutes of social awkwardness. Kessler’s bizarre behaviour and appearance unnerves George; he’s so uneasy he doesn’t know what to say, which given that he hasn’t shut up since the show started is quite an achievement.

Over the nine seasons, George and Kramer do have some kind of relationship. You would never call them buddies, not in the way that Kramer and Newman are buddies, but they do have a regular symbiosis with regards to each other’s storylines. Usually, one needs help from the other to move their plots forward. In the pilot, the dynamic is far simpler. Kessler is Jerry’s weird neighbour and George has no time for him. That’s it.

If Kessler had stayed as Kessler, would he have continued to be this inconsequential outsider, forever making meaningless comments and hanging out with the cast but never involving himself in anyone’s storyline? If he had, I wouldn’t have minded. I like a character who isn’t moved by events, who just stays in the same spot, watching everything, observing everything from a safe distance.

Perhaps the greatest example of this is Norm from Cheers. Norm was the embodiment of the mantra ‘no hugging no learning’ before David and Seinfeld had even come up with it. But even with Norm, the writers couldn’t resist giving him weighty storylines where he lost his job and split up with his wife, despite the fact that he was the archetypal barfly character. And the thing about barflies is nothing ever changes for them. Nothing ever happens to barflies. They just...sit and drink. I’ve long thought that an episode with Norm perpetually on his stool was always better than an episode with him off it.

Kessler was never going to be just Jerry’s weird neighbour. And there’s only one reason for that: Michael Richards. His performance in the early shows indicated that he was capable of so much more. Every time he slid through Jerry’s door and straight into the spotlight, he was surreptitiously demanding to be let off the leash, much like his non-existent dog. As early as episode two, it appears that Richards is influencing the writers (directly or indirectly) to write for him. David and Seinfeld knew that what they had with Richards was different to what they had originally intended for the character. And crucially, they knew that it was better too. So they changed Kessler to Kramer and the rest is television history.

The scene in the airport as they await Laura’s arrival again features George coaching Jerry. He really is his counsel in this episode, there’s no hint of a suggestion that George has any problems of his own, with the exception of his half a sentence about getting out of the city. There is some strong observational material here about how men have to interpret the actions of women rather than just come out and ask them what they’re thinking. And the interesting thing here is that as the episodes and seasons rolled on, the relationship stories completely lost this sort of authenticity, this relatability.

Another interesting note is that at no point does Jerry realise that perhaps having his little friend with him at the airport, wearing a bright peach bowling shirt and flat cap, might hinder his attempts at finding chemistry with Laura. But that’s the nature of the sitcom. If George wasn’t there, who would he talk to? It’d have to be a book.

Back at the apartment for Laura’s arrival. The first thing I notice is that Jerry’s layout by his desk is completely different. He has a much larger window like Monica’s enormous window in Friends. It even looks like it has a little balcony. Why this was erased I have no idea. Perhaps it just felt a little too fancy for a jobbing comedian. But the most fascinating item in this area is Jerry’s typewriter. He has a typewriter. There’s no Mac to be seen. Only later will we see his trusty Mac on the desk, to be replaced in the last season by that strange twentieth anniversary special edition Mac that looked nothing like any computer before or since. The speed at which technology advanced throughout the 1990s can be illustrated quite neatly with Jerry moving from a typewriter in 1989 to a slimline Mac in 1998.

This scene where Jerry finds out that of course he’s not about to begin a meaningful relationship with Laura, is very nicely paced and played out. The little moments such as when Jerry slips his shoes off to demonstrate that he is 99% certain the evening is going to go the way he wants it to go, are beautiful. And just when Jerry thinks all the pieces are falling into place, a call from Laura’s fiancé swipes the whole jigsaw puzzle off the table, and we are faced with that extremely rare conclusion: George was right all along.

The final few minutes is again devoted to Jerry’s stand-up and it’s a great segment about how men simply do not have a clue how to read women nor understand them. It still holds up today. And yet as soon as Jerry wraps this segment up, we get an unceremonious long shot and fade. And we’re done. Credits. If there is such a thing as the multiverse, you can guarantee that this is the only universe where NBC commissioned a run of episodes on the strength of this pilot.

That’s not to belittle the pilot. It’s a quality pilot. It’s just it was unlike anything else on TV at the time. Apart from the classic apartment/coffee shop set up, this was different. And the problem with different is that...it’s not the same. Audiences want their sitcoms to follow a certain pattern, they want to feel familiar and comfortable, they have a list of expectations, and at the top of that list is that every thirty seconds, a joke should land. Seinfeld didn’t offer that; what it did was it invited its audience to shift gear, to take a breath, to enjoy the different textures and moments. But they didn’t. They didn’t warm to Jerry Seinfeld making a relatable observation about the way dads move furniture with a perpetual cigarette hanging out of their mouths. They wanted payoffs and punchlines.

Executives at NBC believed that, in time, audiences would come around, that they would start seeing the world through Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s eyes, and that it was just going to take time. However, the greatest irony in Seinfeld’s history is that NBC gave them a run because they saw something in the show. But that ‘something’ is not what Seinfeld became. It became something else. Something else entirely. Something that hooked the world.

But in 1989 no one knew that yet.