Hacker Cinema
Seinfeld
1989 · TV series · 9 seasons
Created by Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David
A stand-up comedian and his three offbeat friends weather the pitfalls and payoffs of life in New York City in the '90s. It's a show about nothing.
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601 comments on Hacker News
>"Exploited auth failures in an API to cancel other people's gym classes"
An AI cancelling other people's gym classes is a felony?
?
Don't computer systems fail all the time at holding reservations for people?
Heck, don't people fail all the time at holding reservations for other people?
You know, like in Seinfeld's "Alternate Side" Episode (S3 E11):
Jerry (to car rental attendant): "You know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation... and that's really the most important part of the reservation -- the holding!"
:-)
Not holding a reservation should not be a felony... it should be a minor infraction at best, a Class C Misdemeanor (the least serious kind) at worst...
Also, there should be no jail time...
And no fine...
The criminal penalty for not holding other people's reservations should be that you actually have to start holding other people's reservations!
That's the Court sentence!
You actually have to start holding other people's reservations!
:-)
(You know, "let the punishment fit the crime!" :-) )
It is coming up with Seinfeld episodes even with voice overs. Unless it is trained to do so, don't think that would happen. This model is just around the corner from getting banned due to this copyright issue. (which i hope not)
So many plots in Seinfeld would have been trivially solved with cellphones. Get separated in the parking garage? Call each other. Need help carrying an armoire? Call each other. Trying to meet up at the movie theater? Call each other.
You could write a Seinfeld episode around this.
The defendant fears that the news coverage of his case means that no woman would ever be interested in him again. Once the judgement and the payout is announced he finds himself being constantly approached by gorgeous women.
Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.
Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George tries to move a Frogger arcade machine without powering it off in order to not lose his high score leaderboard.
https://youtu.be/5etwHVarNgI?t=256
agree.
I hacked a Panasonic GH1 to use 24fps in 2014. My newer camera, the GX85 includes this frame rate by default. Movies look more dreamlike in 24fps, due to the magic number of resetting some cycle every 5 seconds (24 frames in 5 seconds is 120 frames). Seinfeld was also filmed in 24fps. Maybe the jokes sounded funnier becaue of that? I don't know, but I enjoy playing games at 20- 30fps more than 60fps for the cinematic effect.
There was a whole episode of Seinfeld about a pilot forcing Jerry off because he just didn't like him. Seems legit.
Is privacy a concern if the monitoring is locally processed? Apple claims it is.
I say it's amazing how far we've progressed. We could've prevented an entire Seinfeld episode if cameras could warn the user of the presence of nudity in their photos.
That reminds me of the Seinfeld show and their own judgement of their characters in the last episode.
I tried this idea for the books and gave up. No rules for book purchases.
But for something like netflix, I create a list. And when I start repeating something like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, etc. rather than not-yet-watched items from the list, I cancel the subscription. And I don't renew till some time passes (6 months). Only then there are a few different movies/ series I can add to the list.
> Unless you're thinking Alibaba is going to ship chat logs to some government ministry
This made me think of a Seinfeld episode: "I didn't know it was possible not to know that."
It's so strange sometimes watching tv shows and movies from the 90's where you see characters smoking indoors in public places.
Like in Seinfeld you will have episodes where Kramer is smoking in offices....and even in the doctor's clinic! There was an episode where Kramer took out a cigar and smoked in a doctor's waiting room. I thought he would immediately get in trouble but none of the other characters cared.
And then you got movies from back then like Jackie Brown (which is a great movie by the way) where you see character's smoking in a mall cafeteria. A mall! A family friendly environment! And it's considered normal!?!?!? Blows my mind.
Reminds me of this Seinfeld episode when Elaine was marked as "difficult" in her chart, and then she couldn't get a single doctor to see her. She wasn't allowed to see her chart or edit it after that. As soon as she got to a new clinic, they would receive a phone call from another doctor warning them not to treat her.
S8.E5 The Package
(https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/seinfeld/comments/168m2d9/anyone_else_get_super_irritated_by_the_doctors/)
I doubt it was a critique of HIPPA, although the episode was published a little under 2 months after HIPPA was signed.
How great would it be for our privacy if they went back to paper records, though.
It was a syndicated show, the goal is to license it to as many companies as possible. It was never a network TV show like Seinfeld, those syndication rights are way more expensive than created for syndication shows like WTR.
I make a point of downloading sitcoms in SD, creating my own DVD rips if needed. There's something wrong about watching Seinfeld or Friends in 1080p.
I think people forgot how bad it was. It was much more fragmented before but instead of services it was fragmented by time. Sure you have access to Seinfeld, but you can watch one or two Seinfelds a night at 8pm and 11pm.
I also remember base cable without any movies was around $60 or something and with some movie channels is >$100. And that's not inflation adjusted. You can easily get 3 or 4 of the top services for $100 today.
Finally claiming there are more ads on these services is a joke. There was ~20m for every 30m of programming, meaning 1/3 of the time you're watching commercials. And not just any commercials, the same commercials over and over. There was even a case of shows being sped up on cable to show more commercials.
I get it, everyone wants everything seamlessly and for next to nothing, but claiming that 90s cable was even comparable is absurd.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/how-networks-speed-up-tv-shows-to-fit-more-ads-reddit-seinfeld/
Consider just fast-forwarding past a scene you can't handle. Like many shows, it takes a few episodes before the actors truly understand their characters.
The feeling you're experiencing has a name: it's called "cringe". I can't watch Frasier for more than about half an episode because of it. Or I Love Lucy... same problem. But Seinfeld, which has plenty of the same humour mechanic, always seems to manage to stay just below the threshold for me.
Halt and Catch Fire is really, really good. Please trust us. Give it another shot. Skip forward a bit when you feel the need to. Skip the first episode entirely and just read a synopsis if you need to.
Honestly I’ve been sick to my stomach these past few days. I wasn’t even looking for the files and saw some in my feed on Reddit.
Basically take the most sad and disturbing Eastern European horror and put it in email form.
I had to stop my Seinfeld rewatch because I saw one email were he just happened to be boating by and stopped by the island for lemonade.
The richest people and political elite were openly trading prices on children, leaving rave reviews on child services and how great that torture film was that was sent
Its sick
Wayne Knight aka Newman was - as far as I can tell - the most successful regular cast member from Seinfeld with respect to a movie career outside of that show.
> I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience.
Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is.
It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.
There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.
You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.
A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."
Reminds me of the Seinfeld fat-free frozen yogurt episode.
This is the basis of the fictional sitcom ("Jerry") written by Jerry and George in Seinfeld.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry’s broken video player in the mail to claim the postal service broke it and get money for it.
“It’s a write off Jerry. It costs them nothing. They just write it off!”
Of course that Kramer also didn’t had any idea of what a “write off” was. He was also just throwing words around to justify theft.
Bannon for a while was deeply ingrained in Hollywood. He still earns residuals on episodes of Seinfeld [0], and owns the film rights to Michael Lewis' Liars Poker (even supposedly writing a screenplay for it himself) [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Media_and_investing
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/steve-bannon-almost-teamed-moneyball-153916348.html
The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
The fact you can't see the pothole in the pothole episode still cracks me up. Ironically the kind of plotline you'd see in a Seinfeld episode. https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/seinfeld-netflix-aspect-ratio-pothole-cropped-1234668934/
US and EU law already cover this: undisclosed paid promotion that looks like neutral content is generally illegal (FTC Act + Endorsement Guides in the US, UCPD + DSA in the EU). Product placement in old TV/film is the historical exception, not the rule. An interactive "assistant" secretly steering you because someone paid for it is legally much closer to a deceptive influencer ad than to a Snapple bottle in Seinfeld.
I don't know of any legal rulings or laws, which say not disclosing an embedded ad is illegal. In fact quite the opposite. There are loads and loads of prior such cases, movies, TV shows being an example.
For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.
This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.
Why would ChatGPT be special?
I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.
If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.
The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.
>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)
This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
Or from the Seinfeld episode "The Pool Guy" (Aired November 1995) which had a fictional movie called "Chunnel" -- probably based on the very same channel tunnel.
In the US, there was a period when phone numbers were getting scarce in some locales as faxes/modems/etc. were coming in. Additional area codes were added, as was lampooned in a Seinfeld episode at one point; some people got rather hot and bothered when they got migrated from the "main" metro area code to essentially a suburban area code.
Its not the set of the TV show I beliefe, but a recreation.
https://nypost.com/2015/06/23/you-can-now-visit-the-iconic-seinfeld-set-in-new-york/
It looks a bit different wrt. the stuff on the fridge and the items in the cupboard
> That said it is a living demo that can help make an idea feel more real. It is also enormously fun. Think of it as a delightful movie set.
[pedantry] It bothers me that the photo for "think of prototype PRs as movie sets" is clearly not a movie set but rather the set of the TV show Seinfeld. Anyone who watched the show would immediately recognize Jerry's apartment.
Also, you can only deduct it in a single financial year if you are eligible for the Instant asset write-off program.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but this common misunderstanding about tax deductions does remind me of a certain Seinfeld episode :)
Kramer: It's just a write off for them
Jerry: How is it a write off?
Kramer: They just write it off
Jerry: Write it off what?
Kramer: Jerry all these big companies they write off everything
Jerry: You don't even know what a write off is
Kramer: Do you?
Jerry: No. I don't
Kramer: But they do and they are the ones writing it off
the life support machine called
In case anyone is out of the loop, these are both lines from an eminently quotable Seinfeld episode (The Comeback, S8E13) that perfectly encapsulates the concept of l'esprit d'escalier, which I’m not sure has a direct English translation in common terms, but is a sort of loan word in my parlance, but I’ll admit I have studied French in secondary school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comeback_(Seinfeld)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
> L'esprit de l'escalier or l'esprit d'escalier (lit. 'staircase wit') is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
Now that Curb Your Enthusiasm has wrapped, I could go for a rewatch of Seinfeld, as I can’t think of a better coda to Curb than a return to the roots from which Larry David’s own show sprang.
Hope springs eternal, and both Seinfeld and Curb are wry reminders that every silver lining has its cloud. I’ll take the rain.
I have long thought Netflix should offer such a service. Have a sitcom channel that plays constantly from a slowly evolving list. Even better if I could just pick say Seinfeld and get random episodes from an episodic show. I do not want to have to expend energy picking a season+episode, just trying to decompress.
The replacement may be AI generated content or something.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
Ah yes, polyphasic sleep. Like the classic Seinfeld episode [0].
Inspired by this, a buddy of mine tried "DaVinci Sleep" at our residential high school, and lasted a week before he crashed for 20 hours and went back to a normal schedule.
Apropos of nothing, he's now a very well regarded academic - in an unrelated field.
To be fair, computer science is famous for people rearranging their sleep schedule around when the compute time was available.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friar%27s_Club
They just don't produce very good tv shows anymore. There is nothing to watch.
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
Have you ever watched someone use Google? Most people look at and click on the sponsored links as if they are organic search results.
Product placement, especially without specific calls outs, are something subtle that most people don't notice. Something like the boxes of cereal sitting on the shelf in Seinfeld's kitchen. Are those ads, is it just set design? I don't really know.
There is also car choice in a movie or TV show. The studio isn't going to design and build an actual car just to avoid using a company's product. Which car do they pick and what does that communicate about the brand to the viewer. Is this an ad?
[url-redacted]
I have a lot of (legally acquired) shows and movies. I like making playlists with many shows that fit a theme (e.g. a cozy sitcoms playlist with MASH, Sanford and Son, Seinfeld, etc.). Some playlists have over 5000 episodes. I calculated one and it was almost a year of playtime if I only let it play while I'm sleeping (my primary use-case).
I want to shuffle the shows I'm watching, but I can't stand standard shuffling in VLC because it puts, for example, S8E4 before S1E1. Total loss of plot. So I wrote a shuffler that shuffles shows but keeps the episodes in order.
It deploys symlinks numbered 0-n, as well as an index of what episode each number corresponds to. Then I just slap the whole folder in VLC and let it play until I get bored of that theme.
I just make a copy of the script for each playlist and put it in the playlist folder. It has to be run as administrator on Windows, which is unfortunately where it's run at the moment because my gaming PC is also my TV for now, although I did just migrate everything to a Debian NFS server so I'll need to address that probably.
I decided to come back and work on this open source project more. I updated it to 1.1, with a big focus on performance.
The feed is random (based on the collections and identifiers enabled). By default I just enable a collection by "AV Geeks". It's usually NASA/Space stuff, or old educational videos. I use them cause their videos are optimized the best! Other collections have varying degrees of loading issues. Sometimes I can compensate in the player, but sometimes it's just slow to load. But AVGeeks is rock solid unless the server is down! I had the complete collection of Seinfeld in the main feed when I launched v1.0. (There is a ton of copyrighted content on the Internet Archive). I wanted to see how long it would take to see it taken down...3 days. lol. Anyway, to customize the feed, you can create Presets where you can flip on collections. You can add any identifier you find to a preset as well.
Search was custom implemented. Internet Archive does have a basic keyword search, but I wanted something more. So I used the Internet Archive cli tool to download metadata for all the collections I liked. I used OpenAI to generate embeddings for the metadata (just the metadata, didn't get super fancy here, but would be fun to maybe extract more metadata from the frames?). Anyway, I stored the embeddings in Pinecone. Boom. Natural language search with easy 'show me videos like this one'. Also added a year filter to only focus on older videos (otherwise you get tons of lame G4 vids). I want to include more metadata on Pinecone, I stupidly only included year at first. Now I'd have to reindex and just haven't bothered yet.
Another interesting thing I learned was that identifiers on The Internet Archive can have multiple individual video files. For example, before it was removed, Seinfeld has each episode in a different video file, all organized under one single identifier. SO, if I had a preset with only that one identifier, as I swiped, each time I would make it show a random identifier, cued up to a random point in the video. This made it so I could swipe thru all the episodes of Seinfeld...get bored, swipe to the next...watch a bit, get bored, swipe. SORT of like a clip show? But each video was the FULL episode, so if it was a part I knew and liked I could watch for a while. Could always swipe when I got bored tho. This sparked in me, cause I think it's a good interface. Short form video interface for long form legacy video content. I dunno. I like that. Really good for old sitcoms, skit comedy shows, etc. Similar to how shows like Parks & Rec just post up hour long clip comps on Youtube. This is like that, but you are more in control. Like I said, there is a lot of copyrighted content on the Internet Archive, but it regularly gets taken down, as expected. And therein lies the problem. I like the interface enough tho, so I made a version of this app for the Plex Media Server. So I loaded up Parks and Rec, and did exactly what I described. But, eh...I think the Venn diagram of people that like this type of TikTok interface and people who use Plex Media Server are... me? lol. I briefly looked into how to do this for real, but UGH. The FAST licensing model is the most likely candidate, and my friend at NBC says that would be the easiest to get, but after investigating it's purely about linear programming. Specific ad placement at specific times. Not setup for a vertical swipe feed. Would have to negotiate a totally new thing. FAVF=Free Ad-supported Vertical Feed? Not my thing. Anyone a tech media legal person interested in negotiating a new licensing format?
So thats how ended up back on this open source project, hanging with Claude again. Enjoy the v1.1 update.
Great so real life is turning into a Seinfeld episode. My opinion that we have reaced
It’s impossible to explain to kids now why it was funny on Seinfeld when Kramer pretended to be MoviePhone and says “why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you selected!”
Curious why the name change suggestion. Honestly, I immediately thought of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry forgets the woman’s name.
> Mullva?
For the Seinfeld fans, there is a whole episode on this. For a man to ask another man for a ride to the airport, it's like asking them out on a date.
Was the co-worker called Newman?
I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:
From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:
"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."
The reverse effect is also interesting: I think what women think men go for in a woman is very different from whan men actually prefer. Reminds me of Seinfeld's The Fix-Up episode: "Who cares about eyebrows"!
Oh there are certainly some excellent American comedy shows..
Seinfeld, Curb, Arrested Development, Modern Family, The Office (US), South Park, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Frasier, Fresh Prince, Friends, How I Met Your Month, Futurama, Simpsons (OG) and then there's not a lot more on the bench unless you include the lesser remakes of British shows.
A lot of them aren't funny or aren't satire.. just look at the Shameless remake - they turned that into a character drama when it was a sitcom.
America has more of a stand-up culture I feel.
I wonder if it's because the news in America is pretty much fiction that they basically don't have political satire as a genre outside of the topical news shows (Daily Show / John Oliver) which are honestly more like real news shows than comedy at this point.
(British OP)
I agree that British sitcoms (not comedy generally) were superior for a couple of decades, but think we need to give modern American comedy much more credit; Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry Sanders, various animation series, etc, etc have established them back at the top. I can't see the UK as that competitive these days.
That's not considering American standup, movies etc which leave us in the dust.
> Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching.
What, apart from Stranger Things and Squid Game, has been enough of a cultural touchstone that it keeps people on Netflix? Those aren't things you keep coming back to again and again.
Netflix doesn't own Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Community, Parks and Rec, etc.
I'd argue Max (nee HBO) has better legacy titles and franchises. They have both enduring IP as well as the reputation of being "destination television".
The thing that keeps people from cancelling Netflix is that they have a better content slate of licensed classics paired with new originals. And they do it in the greatest volume of all the streamers, so there will be "something" on, even if it isn't particularly good.
No one in Asia wants to visit nyc because of friends, sienfeld or sex and the city. These shows to them are mostly raw garbage. The reason is because these shows are culturally focused. Its catered exclusively to the type of American humor and values that most people in Asia do not give two shits about.
They want to visit Hollywood because they want to see the technology that built these blockbusters because internationally everyone understands heroism, sacrifice and special effects. Additionally these movies aren’t watered down. The writing and the effects have gone through years of development to get to that point. It just doesn’t cater to your sensibilities. The term is snobbish.
The writing for Seinfeld and friends and sex and the city took years to get where they are. These aren’t inborn cultural talents. You can easily compare stories from past American movies to see how cheesy and stupid they are. It takes development for stories to come to where they are today and it’s a back and forth between the audience and writers. As writers write more stories audience members learn and become more sophisticated and twists and humor that worked in the past become cliche. Why do you think you’re too snobbish to appreciate something like avengers? You think someone in the 50s wouldn’t appreciate it? Fuck honestly if the whole mcu up till end game came out in the 50s that whole thing would win a Nobel peace prize.
China is 100% going through this learning process right now. The audiences sophistication and the writers as a result are growing at a breakneck pace. I think movies from China that might appeal to who you are is crouching tiger hidden dragon or Hero as these movies share the more universally appreciated parts of Chinese culture and since that is what you’re interested in, I recommend them to you.
Well I don't know about the "porn algorithms", people are free to choose what they want. So if they continuously choose from the "teen" category, I'm guessing some sort of deviation must be at play.
Like if you check the teen category on https://www.pornpics.com/ , many of the girls there seem awfully young with some, practically kids.
For me the feeling is too uncomfortable to watch those. But I did notice a curious phenomenon, now that I'm approaching 50s. There were all kind of movies I watched as a kid, teenager or young adult and I completely ignored the beauty of the actresses in them, they were at best associated with "mom" if not "granny". But now, that their age in the movie is 10-20 years below my current age, suddenly I discover that they're pretty good looking. Like Elaine from Seinfeld for instance :)
I heard somewhere this saying and I'm afraid it's true: "When a man is in his 20s, he finds beautiful maybe 5-10% of the women of his age. When they're in their 40s, they find about half the 20-somethings beautiful. When they reach 80s, they find all of the young women beautiful." :)
Bluey is like Seinfeld.
It's timeless, everyone gets a laugh (including parents) and is a "show about nothing" (just the daily lives of family dynamics).
As a parent, I really appreciate the show and no other show can compare.
(For those who haven't seen it, it's more akin to a family sitcom than a traditional kids show/cartoon)
> I cant think of how slapping a union on top of an already unstable foundation is going to solve anything
You mean like the entire television and film industry? Any production over a certain (small) size is completely unionized. It's so massively successful the American cultural exports dominate in almost every corner of the world.
I'm not sure where the idea that unions can't work for the games industry comes from since it's almost identical to the film and TV industry. Unions exist so workers don't get exploited and to provide stability.
What about Nintendo? They famously have very limited layoffs. They see value in providing stability and maintaing culture and institutional memory.
If anything, it's short-term profit-seeking that destroys industries. You see this in the world of original content production for streamers. They cut the size of writers rooms. They tried to no longer have writers on set. There's a push for "mini writing rooms". Why? Because it cuts costs on a very short term basis.
In doing so, Netflix (etc) are intentionally throwing away the model that created billion dollar properties like Friends, Seinfeld, ER, MASH, Cheers, etc that, to this day, generate massive profits. Seinfeld was known for getting over a million viewers when it was running in syndication.
Long-term it creates problems. Future products and showrunners are writers who need to get experience on set. Shortsighted cost-reudction is literally killing the future of the industry.
As for the price of video games, there are several aspects to this:
1. AAA publishers like to complain that games still cost $60 after years. That's true but also the distribution is significantly higher than it was 20 years ago. You're selling way more games;
2. The marginal cost of producing a game via download is essentially zero; and
3. Games eventaully get much cheaper on Steam. That's a good thing. Early experiments with this showed that selling a game cheap on Steam could generate significantly more revenue than the original release. And because the marginal cost is zero, it's all profit.
17.5Mbps is one episode on a DVD. Asking "getting up and switching your DVD every episode" to compete with streaming is laughable. Nobody would accept that today.
In a world without DRM, streaming would be even more attractive.
Just look at music as a real example. There wasn't any DRM for the majority of the digital music purchasing era (only a brief window of AAC protection from iTunes, but Apple took it DRM-free afterward and for the majority of the iPod era).
We already had completely DRM-free media with the iPod that was far smaller in file size and less cumbersome to store and manage than video.
Despite that ease and convenience, locally stored digital music was eaten completely alive by streaming subscriptions because the convenience was so much better. [1]
Nothing about losing DRM makes managing terabytes of media simple for the average person.
Let's say I wanted to store my favorite show, which for the purpose of this argument is Seinfeld. I need to be able to pick any episode at any time and just play it with no waiting. It's in really nice HD quality (thanks film!), so I store it at 10 Mbps.
I will need 297GB of storage to store the entire show.
That's just one show!!
It's also somewhat of a misnomer that VHS was affordable, at least not in the same sense as streaming. VHS tapes started out very expensive and were initially only practical for recording and re-using since each tape cost double digits of dollars. Video rental stores became popular especially because owning home video in the beginning was somewhat expensive. The technology really only became cost-practical for read-only media in its last 10 years. You would buy a movie once for ~$20-25 and that's it, you'd have your single copy of one movie. That costs more before inflation than a digital movie purchase today! VHS as you describe it is a recording technology (home movies, recording your own content, etc). As a consumption medium, streaming would demolish it, just like it demolished the digital purchase market for movies, TV, and music.
Again, use digital music as your practical example: in a world without DRM, recording your own media suffocates under the convenience and pricing pressure of streaming.
[1] https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2023-Year-End-Revenue-Statistics.pdf
This is one of the weird US debates I, a German, don't understand, like that Seinfeld episode back then.
I never had the feeling that any of the shower heads here I was standing under was particularly bad. Maybe it's different with those ominous low flow thingies.
But: If you're not using massage jets, is high or low flow even relevant? To get shampoo out of your hair you just need water and hands. But according to Jerry and Kramer it's a catastrophe.
(Maybe because American shower heads are fixed mounted and as such are higher above the head?)
Seinfeld's experience is interesting. I'll admit that the first half of season 1 was bad but, thereafter, it gained strength which lasted to the end (less the two-part finale). Of course, there were clinkers but surprisingly few, ever after Larry David left. As to the first episodes, I'll attribute that to the actors getting to know their roles, developing their styles and their quirks and how they interact with one another. The goes for the writers. Someone who bailed that first year, missed some great comedy.
Ah yes, Ive seen this episode of Seinfeld.
I watched the full series again a few years ago. I’m not sure it held up. It wasn’t bad, it was just that so many of the plots would end in just a few minutes if they had cell phones or smart phones.
One of the classic Seinfeld episodes is where they are stuck waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. The whole time George is freaking out, because some guy is on the pay phone and he needs to make a call. This was a very relatable frustration when the show was released, but something people today have no concept of.
I found a lot of episodes fell into this category, to the point that it was my primary takeaway from the series (at least for the re-watch, I originally watched it when it first aired and this obviously wasn’t a problem or something of note).
There are still streaming shows that drip feed new episodes (S2E3 of Severance releases tomorrow for example) but it’s still somewhat diluted because there is so much content, it’s likely you don’t run into too many people who watch the same stuff as you. I can’t imagine a single show whose finale would have Times Square staring up at the screen like Seinfeld did.
One of the hilarious things about rewatching old episodes of Seinfeld is his use of a cordless phone that I swear is the size of a toaster!
A denim vest? This sounds like an episode of Seinfeld.
This is precisely the tepid, data-driven "future of entertainment" that the genAI boosters are desperately trying to sell. Remember the hubbub about that ridiculous AI Seinfeld stream? Turgid LLM nonsense, but hyped to the skies by people who presumably haven't watched Seinfeld and have no clue what makes it a funny and iconic sitcom.
I had an awesome uncle when we were kids (70's). He was a mover and shaker, a real-life hustler, the kind of guy who carried around a stack of 100s with a rubber band around them. He wore a long fur coat with a black hat. He looked like Cramer in the episode of Seinfeld where he had the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Every Christmas Eve after dinner he would take me and my brother out to the movies. Good Times....Good Times....
I've often wondered if the balkanization of streaming services would lead to a resurgence of physical media ownership, along with piracy of course
I had an argument some time ago with a friend who was a devout "streaming enthusiast" for lack of a better term. Netflix had Back to the Future on and I watched it
Understandably I wanted to watch the second movie in the trilogy. But...they didn't have it! Somehow they'd only acquired the rights to Back to the Future 1 and 3. But not 2
His genuine response was "just rent it on Google Play then"
This absolute stretching out of content to ensure every single penny on the table that could possibly be obtained is hoovered out of wallets is absolutely pathetic. At least when Netflix was a "dumping ground of old TV and movies" we could reliably go watch "re-runs" of Seinfeld forever. But not so much anymore
I would recommend the Assimil language courses, very good if you consistently do it every day, they're also not too expensive. Like 75 bucks last i checked, and that'll keep you busy for 90+ days.
Assimil says it can get you to a b1/b2-ish level, which i think is about where it takes you. I did their German course a long time ago, and was able to read paragraphs and understand them just fine by the end of it(didn't keep up with German, so that skill has atrophied.
After finishing Assimil, i would watch a tv show you've already watched but now in french. Ie: go to Netflix or Prime(which in my experience have the most language options) and watch Friends, 24, The Blacklist, Seinfeld etc etc whatever you can think of, in French, it'll help a lot, and make acquiring vocab easier. Native language content can sometimes be a bit harder to grasp because of cultural events/history you may not be familiar with yet.
But French language content I have enjoyed in the past are the podcasts "Podcast Marketing Digital"(also a youtube channel), deux mille ans d'histoire(history podcast)
There’s an episode of Seinfeld that opens with some standup where Jerry is joking how scientists are working on seedless watermelon, and why aren’t scientists working on more important things. And I always think the same thing! “… so the comedian is complaining about how scientists spend their time…”
It’s a fine joke, but deep down the instinct is very top-down and suggest centrally planned economies, dare I say communism!
I've tried to watch an old Seinfeld episode during this event. It was freezing every few minutes even at downgraded bitrate. A video that should be on my local CDN node.
Your old car radios don't store presets?
For an example of how radio presets can leak personal information see the Seinfeld episode "The Burning" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_(Seinfeld)
Yeah, the technical aspects of the subway shots in Seinfeld are interesting, and really give a sense of how hard everybody worked to make that show what it was.
The first scenes to take place in a subway (to my knowledge, anyway) were in the 30th episode, which was called "The Subway". And indeed, most of the episode takes place in a subway.
The subway set for this show was rented from Warner Brothers and was sent to the Seinfeld lot in several pieces on trucks. It was apparently a huge PITA and presented a lot of technical limitations.
They assembled it on springs and had a bunch of crew shake the car to simulate movement. They had to light it using stage lights, manually simulate the mechanical opening of the doors, etc. And it was apparently difficult to do anything but a closeup without it looking fake.
They redecorated it for each of the different subways that it was used to depict (in the episode, different characters are simultaneously taking different subways to different places).
After the episode, the set was disassembled and placed back on the truck to send back to WB, but the truck driver went under a low underpass, which the set struck and was destroyed. As a result, Tom Azzari, Seinfeld's Production Designer, led a small team within the show to design, engineer, and build an entirely new subway set, fixing all the technical problems while they were fresh in the team's memory. They even got actual subway light fixtures and pneumatic doors. This set was used for the remainder of the show, and went on to be used in other shows and films as well.
(There are a few interviews about this process on the Seinfeld DVD extras, Season 03 "Inside Looks")
Seinfeld was also filmed in LA, but I recall at least one episode where they took the subway.
If I had to speculate about your question, I would guess that a) there was almost no digital video to matter a few decades ago, b) there was different culture regarding digital media (or maybe I'm misremembering), trailers were more tame and there was less of them overall (I'm not from USA btw), like maybe 1 or 2 before the movie, not 5+. There were much less story based TV shows with contiguous plot, which are all the fad now. Making a trailer for Seinfeld can be done easily. Now making a trailer to say Game of Thrones will most likely involve some major spoiler (or a dozen).
So my guess answer is - the social pressure finally rose high enough that there is now critical mass of people who care about spoilers and got spoiled a few times by official media. That's why there are more posts about this. More instances of the issue multiplied by vastly bigger market due to cheap internet and streaming.
> to submit evidence back to the grocer that the produce or other perishable was not in condition to be sold
this reminded me of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer tries to return fruit: https://youtu.be/IgZkMRfnomI
AI content is already very dull, the text is dull the music is dull the images and videos are also dull. No one is interested in AI Seinfeld or this short movie that AI created. Their only audience is just people admiring what the machines come to be able to do.
Any AI content that's good, and there are a few of them, actually has plenty of human creativity in it.
There are some AI artist that begin to emerge or there are some AI generated personas out there who are interesting but they are interesting only because the people behind it made it interesting.
I am not fatalistic at all for the creatives. AI is going to wipe out the producers and integrators(people that specialize in putting things together, like coders who code when tasked, painters who paint when commissioned, musicians that play once provided with the score), not the creatives.
The GOTCHA, IMHO, will be people not developing skills because the machine can do it but I guess maybe they will the skills that make the machine sing.
I think theories of humour have to explain why some jokes/stories are less funny the second time you hear them, while others remain funny forever. Does the "violation" go away after you hear the joke and your brain adapts? That seems plausible to me, but if so, why doesn't that always happen?
There's a Seinfeld episode where George gets fired -- and then decides to go back to work anyway, believing that he's teaching them a lesson. I've seen it many times, so I know exactly what's coming, but my brain still can't seem to prepare itself for the deep, character-consistent idiocy of it. I will never not laugh while watching this. The question is: Why?
> That's not to say there wasn't artistic merit in the project as a whole
Yeah, I think what really made it work is the context of Seinfeld's conceit of being a "show about nothing" while also being so influential that people encountering it for the first time today tend to see it as a bland proto-sitcom. It wouldn't mean the same thing to give that treatment to a show like Full House or Family Matters.
Seinfeld, season 6 episode 17:
Elaine takes a urine test in order to go on a work trip to Kenya with her boss, J. Peterman. She tests positive for opium. Elaine insists she has never taken drugs, but when a frantic Kramer shows up at her office begging her to let him use her normal-pressure shower, Peterman mistakes him for a drug addict and fires Elaine. Elaine realizes that the test is picking up the poppy seeds in her favorite muffins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shower_Head
You seem to be an English-speaker, so you're likely to be hearing jokes from people who, by and large, have a fair bit of cultural context on Christianity, but almost none on Judaism or Islam. So, naturally, the religious jokes you hear, particularly on the media, where jokes have to be comprehensible to a broad audience, are more likely to be about Christianity than about Judaism or Islam, because the average viewer/reader doesn't actually know anything about Judaism or Islam, but a fair bit of context on Christianity is part of majority English-speaking culture.
An example - in the Seinfeld episode 'The Bris', there's a bit of exposition where Kramer finds out what a bris is (and is disturbed by it). The reason for that exposition, presumably, is to explain it to the _audience_; the jokes wouldn't work if the audience don't know what it is. This just isn't work you have to do for the basics of Christianity, so making jokes about it for a wide audience is easier.
I thought that would be a link to the Seinfeld episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEL65gywwHQ
What I am really missing is a "Play random episode" or "Randomize episodes" button on TV shows. I want to just flip on Seinfeld or Family Guy and watch random episodes, not in order. Such a missed opportunity for Netflix, etc.
I have long wanted Netflix to offer this feature. Just give me a random episode of a low stakes sitcom. Seinfeld, SVU, whatever.
My other wishlist item was that Netflix would offer a “shuffle” this series option. For standalone episodic shows, ordering does not matter, and it is a bunch of overhead to pick something.
I can't recall which episode it is exactly, but there's a Seinfeld episode where he's doing a standup bit in the opening sequence where he's talking about how glasses are a thing that are associated with intelligence and style while hearing aids are not.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this but yesterday and how it relates to Bluetooth earbuds. Somehow Apple managed to make hearing aids cool.
It crossed my mind when I was thinking about a coworkers hearing aids and if they were ever picked on as a child for wearing them. I bet that the rise of earbuds has made life a lot easier for children who are hard of hearing.
Just one note on Elton John's Cold Heart: its reappearance on the chart was due to a remix that featured the (very current) Dua Lipa [1].
I liken this kind of prolonged success as similary to winning the lottery twice. It happens. But it's a lot more common to only win once.
With music you never really know what's going to resonate with audience. It can be a complete accident. It could be a song being featured in a movie or TV show that completely blows up. It could be used in a Tiktok that goes viral.
There are many enduring artists from the 1960s through 1980s. I'm talking the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Queen, Elton John, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, Prince and so on. In their times they dominated the airwaves in a way that doesn't really exist anymore.
It's a bit like how TV used to be a shared cultural experience because it was broadcast at the same time before streaming. Non 21st century TV show has hit (or will probably ever hit) the kind of numbers you saw from Seinfeld, MASH, Cheers and the like..
Taylor Swift is obviously massive. But she's the outlier among outliers, almost the exception that proves the rule. And even though Taylor Swift has incredibly popular music, she doesn't produce enduring "hits" in the way the aforementioned artists did. Will current music have the same cultural power in 50 years that Bohemian Rhapsody or Billie Jean?
My thesis is that we don't have the same shared cultural experiences anymore because of the Internet and I suspect this will make the likely duration of a music artist even shorter.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qod03PVTLqk
Watch Seinfeld and write down the lines. Every episode is filled with a lot of “talking about nothing.”
So ... the checksum of all the Seinfeld episodes?
youre doing a seinfeld bit right?
season 7 ep 13
Love the creativity and humor which is often the spark for true innovation.This guy is a real life Kramer from Seinfeld. Reminds me of the episode where Kramer drops a ball of oil from his nyc apartment while testing a business idea.
I had stopped watching Seinfeld beyond the first season. Had no idea.
Shit, do I always sound like a fool because I am a fool, or just because everything I know has been turned into a sitcom joke that I never found out about?
I thought you were confusing this with an episode of Seinfeld, when Kramer has seizures in response to Mary Hart's voice.[1]
But you're right. This was a real case that Seinfeld must have been referencing.[2]
The doctor, Venkat Ramani, is still active and is the Vice Chair of Neurology at New York Medical College. [3]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Samaritan_(Seinfeld)
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240324001523/https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/11/us/doctor-says-voice-on-tv-caused-seizures.html
[3] https://www.nymc.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/by-name/ramani-venkat/
If the Seinfeld episode about rental cars was made nowadays, it would be in a Hertz office (or tactically renamed version like Hearts or Hurts).
I wonder how many minutes (seconds?) would make the cut if they did the same with all episodes of Seinfeld
Are you ignoring the whole era of ABC TGIF and family sitcoms?
Seinfeld was invented as an antithesis to that whole genre. "No hugging, no learning". Maybe they were so successful that they obsoleted what they were rebelling against.
Earl Boen, the late actor who voiced LeChuck in this game, would be recognised by many from his profilic career across the past several decades of television, movies and video games.
He was in everything from The Wonder Years and Seinfeld to the Terminator movies. Game-wise, his resume included entries from series like Baldurs Gate, Krondor, Zork, Star Trek, Metal Gear Solid, and as the narrator of World of Warcraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Boen
People used to tend to carry more. Cash, membership cards, etc. There was even a Seinfeld episode on the theme.
Gemma 2B told me Kramer's first name is Jerry and when I asked a follow-up, "The premise of your question is incorrect. Kramer is not a well-liked character in the sitcom Seinfeld."
Gemma 7B got both right on the first try, but if I didn't specify "from Seinfeld" it refused to answer as "the answer was not included in the question". It seems that once refusal like this is in its context, it responds like that to everything, too. I guess that's better than hallucinating.
Countdown to when studios licensing this for "unlimited" episodes of your favorite series.
There was Seinfeld "Nothing, Forever" AI parody, but once the models improve enough and are cheap enough to deploy, studios will license their content for real and just have endless seasons.
Or even custom episodes. Imagine if every episode of a TV show was unique to the viewer.
I find it entirely baffling that the top shows on Netflix are lighthearted shows (usually comedies) that go on for many seasons. Friends, Seinfeld, suits, office, Gilmore girls, supernatural
But… Netflix doesn’t make these kinds of shows. They give small orders of episodes to niche shows and cancel them quickly before they have time to gain an audience.
Obviously they know which shows people watch, but why doesn’t that translate into them making those shows at presumably less cost?
It's just a different kind of environmental requirement.
It's useful for some people to have recognisable sounds going on while they work, so they have something to latch their focus if they lose it for a second. Whether that be music, or every seinfeld episode on a shuffled loop on the TV.
I have found it useful in the past to listen through every song I have on shuffle while I read, which was nice when I took a few-seconds break every couple of pages and came across a song I wouldn't have picked out otherwise. Alt-tabbing out of a podcast or something completely wrecks my focus on both for some reason though.
>For example, suppose I take the upper left pixel from a hundred thousand images, then arrange the collected pixels into a new image (using an unspecified combination of manual and/or automatic methods).
That's "de minimis" copying.
>It's not out of the question that model weights would be <that hypothetical term for "created from works but doesn't copy expression">.
Model weights would be a derivative work that might be a fair use because of its transformative nature.
The issue with derivative works isn't necessarily the extent of the copying so much as that it seems logical that we'd let the creator of Seinfeld have control over whether or not a Seinfeld movie exists.
I feel like many people here struggle with copyright because they try to treat it like a math problem, but it's not a math problem. it's a political and social problem that we try to resolve by applying principles and reason (like much of the law). so if you aren't applying reason and principles, but instead treating it like a computer system and trying to blow it up by stuffing the inputs, etc, you aren't really getting it and you aren't engaging with the actual law, which doesn't work that way and doesn't suffer the problems that computer systems do, in part, due to their lack of ability to reason.
> "created from works but doesn't copy expression"
This is what I'm getting at. Copyright only applies to expressions. So you can't be a copy of something without having copied its expression. For the same reason you can't be a derivative of another work, without having copied some of that expression. To put it another way, if you have a copyrighted work, and you subtract out the expression - there is nothing left of the copyrighted work. There might be things left, but they were never what was captured by the copyright, because copyright only pertains to expressions fixed in a tangible medium.
Most of my car rental experiences are like that one Seinfeld episode. I reserve car X, and when I get there, they say they don't have car X (that they allowed me to reserve) but I can use car Y. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all, especially if they're going to pay for the gas. But it does bother me that I want a Honda Civic and walk out with a Dodge Charger or Ford F250.
When I was in high school, I lived in high school's students hostel during the week. Bit of an army-like experience, for instance there were 8 beds in a room.
Anyhow, at some point someone (one of my colleagues) stole an industrial light bulb from I've no idea where and replaced our regular 100Watt bulb in the room. I've no idea what wattage it was but probably in the 500W - 1000Watt or something. It was an experience exactly like in Seinfeld's "Chicken Roaster" episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q40fKsRsHFU
We closed the door so the warden won't see us (I dunno the word, basically the fearsome guy that was in charge of controlling some 100 restless teenagers). But light would creep out though cracks like lasers, basically everyone noticed.
Anyhow (kinda stupid probably, good think we didn't get lasting damage), we would stay in the "laser" room with eyelids shut and hands over them and gradually open them and remove the hands. Eventually we got used to the extreme light although it was clearly very bright. Then we'd exit the room to the normally lit corridor and ... stumble like blind people, effectively couldn't see anything, it seemed completely dark.
The whole fun lasted some 10-15 minutes until the warden caught notice and came shouting blasphemies to confiscate the corpus delicti (stolen light bulb).
I always appreciate when authors of successful projects decide to stop after they've figured out the formula for success. Whether these are films without sequels, TV shows without dozens of seasons, or video content creators who are not compelled to keep uploading in perpetuity. It shows true care and dedication to their craft, and a desire to keep innovating in perhaps other areas of their career. It also avoids the pressure of keeping the high bar for quality, as there are not many authors who can consistently pull this off. I'd rather enjoy high quality content for a short time than see it gradually worsen over a long period.
Still, 10 years is a long run for any type of content, and uploading every week without fail is very impressive. I'm sure Tom Scott used the "Seinfeld strategy" for this, which goes to show that great minds think alike, considering Seinfeld is one of the shows that ended at the peak of its success.
Thanks for the interesting content over the years, Tom, and best of luck in whatever you decide to pursue next.
I'm both a casual TV viewer and someone with a short attention span. My experience was: I tried comparing a few Seinfeld episodes, found that I am unable to recall the episodes from the descriptions, then gave up.
The stats for watched shows are pretty interesting - https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-spent-a-record-23-billion-on-original-new-content-last-yearso-why-is-everyone-watching-movies-and-tv-from-the-past-aden-ikram/
Nothing prestige, almost entirely NFLX. A lot of it is back catalog licensed stuff. NCIS, Criminal minds, lol. Disney+ on the scoreboard with basically a couple kids shows plus the Simpsons.
Previous year stats pretty similar - https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-audience-in-2021-drama-reality-and-kids-programming-lead-the-content-wars/
Prestige stuff like Game of Thrones, Succession, even each of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is $100M/season. None of these make the scoreboard for views.
Meanwhile most people are watching boomer reruns and midbrow stuff. Even Seinfeld licensing only cost $100M/year for NFLX to end up one of the top 10 viewed shows.
Interestingly, the end of public medical procedures is fairly recent in US history. There's a Seinfeld episode that revolves around a public procedure. [1]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697715/
That reminds me of the plots of certain Seinfeld episodes where George or Kramer combine life functions that would normally be kept separate.
Whenever location data collection comes up, I always think about that Seinfeld episode where Kramer is receiving misdialed MovieFone calls -- at first he just talks to the person and reads the movie times out of the newspaper. Very helpful.
Eventually, he starts emulating the phone menus, asking the caller "Using your touch-tone keypad, please enter the first three letters of the movie title, now."
When this doesn't work, he blurts out "Why don't you just tell me the movie you want to see???"
Why in the holy hell do app developers who are trying to provide some kind of location-specific data not just ASK YOU WHERE YOU ARE? "I'm in Los Angeles" would suffice 99% of the time. If you go to Idaho, and care enough, change your location in that app -- now you get local bulletins about russet potatoes instead of encampment fires.
This is a rhetorical question, no need to answer it, just screaming into the void.
It's been the storyline of many sitcoms at least going back to at least the 90s set in Manhattan. The Andrea Doria episode of Seinfeld immediately comes to mind...
Friends and Seinfeld are still two of the most popular syndicated programs in America, and generally you can find at least one episode of either or both on at any given time of day on modern basic cable in 2023 USA.
Certain groups absolutely have valid reasons not to return to 90’s cultural norms but a pretty large majority would have no objection, at least initially.
It varies from episode to episode is the thing. Seinfeld in every way was not about continuity.
i.e. everyone can relate to George drivingmand thinking of the perfect comeback to a mean spirited comment.
The 90's were such an amazing decade, maybe one of the most perfect in the past 100 years(at least for the US).
You had a outstanding job market for all professions with tech jobs still around if you chose. No wars(besides smaller conflicts in desert storm(91) and Bosnia(98)). Politicians/politics during that time were very moderate, George HW Bush and Clinton both governed from the right and left center respectively. Housing was extremely affordable and if you worked a half decent job you could expect to buy a house in most markets, My Wife's family bought a house in Redwood city and her Dad was in the trades, and Mom worked in printing. A house in the mid-90's in Palo Alto CA would run about $350-400k.
Music was outstanding in grunge(Nirvana, STP, Peal Jam) and hiphop was in its golden age(Wutang, Biggie, Tupac). For TV such classics like Seinfeld, Friends, and Star trek TNG were around. Movies like great sci fi and action movies - Matrix, T2, Jurassic Park and many many others were coming out all the time.
Having been a teenager during that decade I feel really lucky compared to the following decades and how bad they have turned out. The only downside to the 90's was crime was relatively high compared to today, but almost every aspect of life was superior unless you miss social media and glued to a phone(I don't).
Putting Seinfeld and Big Bang in the same bucket hurts my soul. Not sure how either are bad for you though. People need a way to decompress and a 22min sitcom is a great way to transition from one mood to another.
Yes, the made-up holiday from a 1997 episode of Seinfeld.
I guess you could say the same about Seinfeld? How could a night club comic or serially unemployed people like George or Kramer afford apartments like that in Manhattan. But I never thought that TV shows were obligated to be 100 percent authentic, especially sit-coms.
> am I required to forget that you came into my store?
No. Your head is not covered by the GDPR. It requires you to not keep a record of all your clients' personal info without a legitimate interest.
There's a Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes to buy a fancy pen at a stationery store which isn't available atm. The clerk asks for her full name and number to notify her (that's a legitimate interest) but then uses it to hit on/stalk her (that would be a GDPR violation). Presumably he also doesn't get rid of the number after their business transaction.
I was literally just searching for an episode of The Fifth Estate from 1988 a week ago. A current events/documentary show is never going to get remade.
There's plenty of reasons that people watch old shows. Even on streaming services, the biggest shows seem to be older stuff like The Office, Seinfeld, Friends, etc. Seinfeld will never get remade, and Friends and the Office might, but will not in any way reflect the original.
Going to youtube its pretty clear that there is plenty of demand for old shows: Secrets of War, an obscure 90s era cable documentary show has millions of views across the episodes they uploaded.
In a Seinfeld episode, is the laughter noise in the script or is it just up to the editor to figure out when to add it in post?
There was an AI doing nonstop video streaming of Seinfeld episodes for a while there. Not sure if it was taken down but it did get in hot water for a bit when it had the cast say some inappropriate things.
Elaine feels strongly about the use of exclamation points in Seinfeld episode "The Sniffing Accountant" [1], leading her to break up a relationship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sniffing_Accountant
The lunchbox, is that the movie they watch in Seinfeld, which Elaine hates?
> I honestly can never understand people who say there is not enough good content on streamers.
What is there that is worth watching? They don’t make anything good anymore: no Seinfeld, no Office, no Parks & Rec, no Castle, no Bones, no House. Everything new is terrible, often embarrassingly so.
It’s as though sometime in the last decade all the talent and skill left media, and now we have corporations and people going through the motions but not actually producing anything worth watching.
"Tupac was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip after a Mike Tyson fight. Now how many witnesses do you need to see some shit before you arrest somebody? Shit. More people saw Tupac get shot than the last episode of Seinfeld." - Chris Rock, 2004
Been waiting a long time for this headline!
I think it's wack to bounce back and forth between "doing news" and "doing comedy".
It blurs the lines and honestly as terrifying as it sounds, some politically active, white collar, college educated, liberal people I know genuinely consume the majority of their news through these types of shows. The Daily Show, Patriot Act, Last Week Tonight, etc.
I constantly get told by these people, who openly admit to not reading local news and are blissfully unaware of things in their own neighborhood, that I should watch X episode of Y news comedy hour so that I can "understand" issue Z.
Sorry, but I'm literate and capable of reading, I don't need my news fed to me on a spoon while a comedian makes airplane noises.
Chappelle never did a news show, and Peter Jennings never had a stand up tour. I prefer it that way.
Seinfeld was funny, and his jokes never came across as being necessarily purely true.. but his whole shtick wasn't about being constantly persecuted for being a Jew or that say, Hispanics are mean to him.
Chappelle told outlandish stories, but even his stuff was never like "let me tell you a particular story about the FBI trying to entrap my family / being the subject of a terror incident / etc". His stories were always more low stakes.
They actually seem pretty accurate depictions of friend groups to me.
Friends: the friend group was defined by college room-mate, family and room-mates i.e. people thrust together as a unit and then socialising together. They went to Central Perk as this unit, and did not become friends through it.
Seinfeld: the friend group was defined by college room-mate, a neighbour and an ex-girlfriend. They didn't meet in third-places, they went to the diner as that unit. That Kramer was an outgoing weirdo using his proximity to basically force himself into a pre-existing relationship is familiar. The presence of Elaine is unusual but she was basically grafted-on to fix a sitcom rather than drawn from real life.
Cheers: this is more of the "people you know at a third place" but the running joke was that despite drinking every day with each other, they weren't really friends and didn't even like each other. This type of "regular acquaintance" is perhaps a familiar experience for a lonely adult struggling to find new friends. You can shoot the breeze with someone you see regularly but it's a constrained relationship.
It's unfortunate that the strangers who want to talk at third-places are only the Kramers and Cliffs of the world. A combination of bores and nutters that you have to actively avoid. Anyone vaguely normal has ear-buds in and head down. It would be nice to try and reverse that. At a minimum, normalise saying "hello" to strangers as a polite necessity instead of a red flag. For some reason it's common when hiking but not in a city. I'm more likely to chat to a stranger in the wilderness than a dense neighbourhood.
Hmmm...
It seems like someone, by gratuitously inserting the "Seinfeld" brand name into the title of their article, was trying to make their article a bit more "attention-worthy" than it would have been without such doctoring... :-) <g> :-)
Perhaps the article is actually virtuous in some way, but the title-wise "system gaming" via "Seinfeld" title insertion, for intentional additional clicks and potential virality -- certainly is not! :-) <g> :-)
The whole cast of Seinfeld (post Seinfeld, that is!) -- are very unhappy with the article author's careless desecration of their sacred sitcom title! :-) <g> :-)
Seinfeld actually worked hard on making their own sitcom title their own brand name -- they didn't steal titles from other sitcoms, and insert them into their own sitcom title and expect more people to watch their show! :-) <g> :-)
TLDR: Discusses how popular TV shows of the '90s like "Friends," "Seinfeld," and "Cheers" portrayed characters spending most of their time hanging out at cafes, diners, and bars. These shows depicted work as an afterthought or a joke, with the characters prioritizing their social lives and relationships. In contrast, modern shows like "Succession," "Superstore," and "Industry" emphasize work as all-consuming, leaving little room for personal connections outside of work. The article suggests that the decline of places for people to socialize, such as bars and parks, has contributed to the loneliness epidemic. It argues that shows like "Friends" and "Seinfeld" provide a cure for loneliness by depicting characters who prioritize social interactions and spending time with friends.
Also covers a study conducted by the Canadian design firm Happy Cities in Seattle called "the lost-tourist experiment." The study involved an actor pretending to be lost on two different street corners, one with a blank wall and one with shops and cafés. The results showed that people were four times more likely to stop and offer help on the street with shops compared to the street with the wall. The article highlights the importance of having more things to do in a community to encourage interaction and engagement among people
> We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke.
These were television shows, not reality. Even in the 80s and 90s you couldn't spend all of your time in a Manhattan coffee shop or a bar (unless you were a drunk). I think our concept of what a "friend" is was heavily shaped by 20th century sitcoms and not realistic, setting up a couple of generations to be very lonely and very disappointed that life doesn't turn out like TV.
Yeah, during the period you mention, a lot of old urban area codes were being split up with what would have used to have been streetcar suburbs (and sometimes still literally sort of were around Boston for example) getting a new suburban area code. The result is that some number of people who had always identified as living "in the city" now found themselves with a suburban area code. (And, yes, real people actually did care.)
As you say, I recall there was some Seinfeld episode where someone broke up with someone because they didn't have a 212 area code or something along those lines. Which wasn't a totally outlandish plot point.
I was a kid when Seinfeld aired originally and didn't find it that weird. My grandmother would often give her phone number to older people as SHerman-2xxxx. She stopped doing that after Chicago and the suburbs split 312 and the suburbs became 708 in ~1990. I can see it still being common among older people in the 90s in Manhattan until more area codes were added towards the end of the decade (there was also some restriction of the 212 area that factored into a Seinfeld episode too).
It's worth noting that during the run of Seinfeld the number of telephone numbers was growing rapidly. Until dial-up internet took off it was pretty uncommon for a house to have 2 numbers - usually just well off people or those who ran businesses out of their homes. Then dial-up internet happened and phone rates were also getting cheaper, so a lot of families opted for a second line in their home to not tie up the primary phone for hours on end. At the same time beepers, then cell phones went from something for doctors (and other important people) and drug dealers to "pretty common", adding to the growth rate of assigned telephone numbers.
Put another way - during the run of Seinfeld my grandmother lived in the same house and had the same 7digit phone number that she had since the 1940s, but got 2 new area codes (708 split into 847, 630 and 708 in ~1995), and 10 digit dialing was required not long after. All the rapid (compared to decades of sameness prior) change is what finally broke the old habits, more than silly things like touch tone dialing or direct dial long distance.
I don't remember the exact timeframe but it wasn't far from then when I switched from Verizon to Comcast and it meant I had to switch phone numbers for exchange reasons. It was sort of annoying and, among other things led to me getting very persistent calls from some debt collector for a while.
My cell phone number now is one I've had for ages and actually dates to when it mattered what area code you had for cell for cost reasons based on who you called before "favored" area codes became scarce. Think there was a Seinfeld episode based on that too.
> Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too?
The cliff note's version is that the BBC perfected filming live TV. It worked because their analog version of deinterlacing 50 fields per second to 25 frames per second matched European film.
But, in the US, where TV ran at 60 fields per second, filming it at 30fps was just too short of an exposure time. So video was favored in the US.
A lot of pre-digital stuff was shot on film for various reasons. One reason is that 24/25fps film adapts very well to 50 fields per second or 60 frames per second; the consequence is a very minor speedup / slowdown. In contrast, it's a lot harder to adapt video between the two framerates with analog technologies.
Edit: I also suspect cost may have had something to do with it. I suspect that film was cheaper than video in the 1970s, but someone who was around at the time might understand the cost difference between video versus film.
I don't know if anyone "anticipated" HDTV in the 1970s, but back then artists did like putting their videos up on a big projected screen. At least in the 1990s, a lot of content, like Seinfeld and Friends, was done on film; both for the look, and so that it could be remastered for HDTV.
Thing about Henry Ford is, he's dead. _Some_ people actually will be concerned with historical wrongdoing in their brands (remember the episode of Seinfeld where George's mother won't let his father buy a Mercedes, because it's German?) but people are far more likely to be concerned with bad _current_ behaviour. Ford's current CEO's wikipedia page is three paragraphs of very boring career details. That's the sort of wikipedia page you want for the CEO of a consumer products company, really.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer’s apartment is illuminated by a neon sign on a new restaurant opposite. I always thought this was a bit silly; clearly no-one would ever get permission, in a large city, to light up a residential building with an advertising sign, and no-one would do it without planning permission because they would be made to remove it.
Anyway, apparently I was wrong and some people will absolutely try this.
If you are on the road and only have limited mobile bandwidth available you can instead read entire Seinfeld episodes:
https://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html
Dragged it home on dollies? This has a very strong feeling of George Costanza Frogger episode from Seinfeld.
I worked fro my uncle who rented games to arcades. Discs of Tron always had problems with the 3D joystick. You need it for the Discs game the levels go up and down.
I can hear the music now...!
I could easily imagine an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer grows scallions in his bathroom
I think the same way. The demos from Unreal Engine 5 are incredible. Combine it with LLMs and we really are not too far from being able to as the computer to generate a story and giving it some details, and having it be rendered and look pretty damn lifelike. That 5, maybe 10 years away at most.
I don't think the movie/tv industries will disappear, but they will be lessened when people can generate at least reasonable looking entertainment from home.
I think movies and tv will basically become like books already are. People might have read some best sellers, but there won't really be anything that is super widespread or you can count on most people having seen like Seinfeld or The X-Files.
It is astounding to me that in the US the seats at the movie theater are not tied to the tickets. I learned it a few weeks ago watching that Seinfeld episode and I still can't understand why it works like this..
Misandry is normalized in society. Whenever you encounter a baseless attack on men just reverse the roles and you'll realize that there'd be pitchforks for treating women as anything other than paragons of virtue.
Entire entertainment genres are built around portraying men as inept fools who can be looked down upon by the opposite sex. Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
The interesting thing about sitcoms is I've never heard anyone talk about a new sitcom in years (maybe Brooklyn Nine Nine?), maybe people are rewatching Seinfeld, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Office, etc as those are the only good ones we have.
The entertainment is also different since a sitcom doesn't require much attention and is much more bingeable whereas regular shows are hit-or-miss.
But still you can't really mass produce Black Mirror or other shows without them going super downhill. Already for Black Mirror the episodes are always ranked by quality, by season and all-in-all. You mass produce these kinds of TV shows and you end up with The Walking Dead which just takes on a repeat of the same thing.
> Nobody is watching old sitcoms, but new people watch Lost everyday even though that also got badly affected by quantity requirements due to hype of the day.
That's funny because I know multiple people who re-watched Seinfeld and Curb multiple times, but I haven't heard anyone talk about Lost ever since it ended.
I think there has been a terrible loss that is rarely acknowledged in that men in the western world can no longer have intimate friendships without having to defend their sexual orientation. Seinfeld's "Not that there's anything wrong with that" became a catchphrase for a reason but the line of thinking still exists.
I watched the "Tollywood" film RRR and it was startling and refreshing how much affection the two main male characters showed for each other. I don't know how Indian audiences reacted to it, but I guarantee that a lot of American viewers thought "so they're supposed to be gay, right?" The idea that male affection is merely a cover for closeted sexual attraction is pervasive in US culture.
It is one of my longstanding pain points, as my favorite authors ( Conan Doyle, Tolkien, Wodehouse ) show unabashedly close relationships between male characters and all my life I've heard insistences that the characters are actually gay and the authors were too repressed/cowardly to say so. It's tragic and I wish it was talked about more.
Men are under so much pressure to bottle up their feelings, and I think it the negative side-effects of that are around us.
George Costanza decided to do this for a day in a Seinfeld episode. The results were impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite
You might experience some serious déjà vu, because that was the main plot point of an absolute classic episode of Seinfeld.
Plot summary:
In this text, several interwoven storylines play out:
1. Elaine receives a promotion. She also reconciles with her boyfriend Jake, who later breaks up with her. She is also evicted from her apartment for various misdeeds. Elaine's attempt to help her boss at a crucial meeting is thwarted, leading to a failed business deal and the collapse of Pendant Publishing. She laments that she has "become George".
2. George, convinced by Jerry that doing the opposite of his instincts would be right, begins to change his usual behavior. His new approach impresses a woman, Victoria, lands him a job with the New York Yankees, and enables him to move out of his parents' house.
3. Kramer's coffee table book is published by Pendant Publishing. His promotional tour is canceled when he offends Kathie Lee on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee by spitting out his coffee.
4. Jerry observes that his life maintains a constant balance: despite losing a stand-up gig, he is promptly offered another for the same pay. He notices that whenever something negative happens, it's quickly offset by a positive event. This trend continues as he sees Elaine's fall coinciding with George's rise.
---
I don't think there are any real life lessons in the episode, except one: if you're a George Costanza and nothing you do ever seems to work out for you, try something different once in a while. I'll spare you the motivational aphorisms, but I think you can see how it might work.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697744/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite
I'd argue this episode rather lends itself as an example how not to do it. The connection is just too cartoonish and random for me to find it funny. Other than that - great episode. I'm a huge Seinfeld fan.
On how the endings converged:
"I’d like to say it worked organically or it worked from going backwards, but it worked and didn’t work in all of those ways. It never really happened the same way twice. A couple of times, I would think that I had it down pat, like in the episode with Teri Hatcher, “The Implant.” I had stories, but I also started off with four or five really great scenes. They had nothing to do with each other, but I knew they would make great scenes, so I started finding a way of mating them together. That episode came out great, so I thought that that was the way I would always do it. It never worked that way again. The process of that was pretty much a struggle every time."
https://www.vulture.com/2014/07/classic-seinfeld-episodes-writer-peter-mehlman-yada-yada-shrinkage-double-dipping.html
On reading The Contest:
"David: As soon as the read-through started, the laughs were huge. Big, satisfying laughs. I would glance at [the executives’] faces and they seemed to be enjoying it. You could sense it was a very special show. Then we all walked back to our office afterwards and I think one or two NBC executives were there and they had nothing. They just said, “Very funny.” And I was shocked.
Littlefield: They read it and it was hilarious. And Rick, as an executive for NBC, knew, “Uh-oh, shit’s going to hit the fan.” The broadcast standards executive who was there, was like, “What the fuck?” And Rick was like, “I didn’t know!”
https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/seinfeld-the-contest-oral-history-larry-david.html
It sometimes beautifully worked across seasons as in "The Puffy Shirt" (where George becomes a hand model).
I think this was mostly Larry David's work. Jason Alexander once mentioned in an interview that after David left, this "dovetailing" of story lines kind of stopped, and I tend to agree. David continued it (even more pronounced) in "Curb Your Enthusiasm". Even the golf ball twist was kind of repeated - in extreme form and with a baseball - in "Curb".
Side note: another early TV show that often pulled this off to great effect was "The Honeymooners". I think this is the show that had the most influence on Seinfeld. Ed Norton is basically Kramer, Ralph Kramden is basically George, Alice is Elaine, and Alice's mother is Newman (you can also map "The Honeymooners" characters, and even entire plot lines, to "The Flintstones", but that is another story, and AFAIK Jacky Gleason, the creator of "The Honeymooners", considered suing Hanna-Barbera in the 60ies).
Jerry Seinfeld himself once said that we should wait and see if "Seinfeld" is still funny in 50 years like "The Honeymooners" (that was 20 years ago).
"Fawlty Towers" also did this very well.
The amazing thing is even the writers didn’t know that episode was going to end that way until the night before they shot the ending. Here’s Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld talking about it: https://youtu.be/uZPSO4yte8k
Surprised someone hasn't posted this yet, but some guy named Billy Domineau (who I guess wrote/writes for SNL) wrote a spec script for a Seinfeld episode that takes place surrounding the events of 9/11, and it does not disappoint.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/911-seinfeld-september-11_n_57a4b78ae4b056bad2155208
For sure. I've never been able to watch an entire episode of Friends.
The Seinfeld ensemble were all brilliantly drawn characters, while the actors in Friends were just boring and narcissistic twits.
This website is great. I'm a huge Seinfeld fan and it's really good for finding quotes from the show.
I got all episodes in my phone so I can watch Seinfeld wherever I am even if there's no internet.
It's been described as "Seinfeld on crack" after all. Beware that there's a lot of screaming over each other on that show and it seems like a big barrier to entry for some people.
The fake "clip show" episode where they misremember a Seinfeld episode happening to them is one of my favorite scene.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
if you loved Seinfeld but never tried CYE you're missing out.
I love them both in different ways, but lots of overlap (because of Larry David), and overall I've had way more LOL moments with CYE.
By the end of a typical episode (esp in the first few seasons) by the time the end credits roll I'm chuckling non-stop right up through the start of the next one, simply by replaying portions of the episode in my mind. Such a treasure of comedy.
Jerry: So, George, I heard you found this AI-generated Seinfeld script. What's the deal with that?
George: Oh, Jerry, it's amazing! You won't believe it. This AI claims to have generated a brand new Seinfeld episode, using all the data from the original series. I had to check it out.
Jerry: Well, I gotta say, I'm intrigued. Let's hear it. What's the plot?
George: Alright, here it goes. Kramer gets his hands on a new AI virtual assistant that starts mimicking his personality. Meanwhile, Elaine starts dating a tech-savvy guy who believes algorithms can predict the future.
Jerry: Alright, alright. It's got some potential. Keep going.
George: Well, eventually, the virtual assistant Kramer has starts causing all sorts of trouble. It becomes this annoying, exaggerated version of Kramer, taking his quirks to the extreme.
Jerry: So, basically, Kramer is competing with himself? That sounds like a real stretch, George.
George: I know, Jerry, but just listen. So, the assistant starts booking hair appointments for Kramer's famous wild hairstyles, signing him up for strange hobbies, and even ordering ridiculous items online. It's chaos!
Jerry: I don't know, George. It sounds a bit forced. Like they're just trying to recreate Kramer's wacky antics without any real substance.
George: Well, that's not all. The tech-savvy guy Elaine is dating starts using algorithms to predict everything from the stock market to their relationship. He's constantly consulting his phone, calculating probabilities and making decisions based on data.
Jerry: I don't know about you, George, but I prefer a little spontaneity in my relationships. Sounds like Elaine is dating a walking spreadsheet.
George: Exactly! That's what I said. But the AI script takes it to the extreme. Eventually, the guy starts relying on algorithms for everything, even deciding what to eat and wear.
Jerry: So, he's outsourcing his decision-making to a computer? That's just lazy, George. I thought Elaine had better taste.
George: I agree, Jerry. It's like they're trying to cram every tech trend into one episode. It's too much!
Jerry: It sounds like they're sacrificing the characters' authenticity just to explore these AI and tech themes. That's not what Seinfeld was about. It was about everyday life, not gimmicks.
George: That's what I've been saying, Jerry! This AI-generated script is trying too hard. It's missing the heart and soul of Seinfeld.
Jerry: Well, George, I guess it's safe to say that even AI can't capture the magic of our show. Seinfeld was a product of our comedic chemistry, not algorithms.
George: You're right, Jerry. Nothing can replace the real thing. We created something special, and no AI can replicate that.
Jerry: Exactly. So, let's leave the AI-generated scripts to the robots and stick to what we do best—being funny in our own unique way.
George: Agreed, Jerry. Our humor is organic, not artificially intelligent.
Jerry: That's the spirit, George. Now let's go find some real-life material for our next stand-up gigs. The world is our Seinfeld episode!
George: Absolutely, Jerry. And remember, if we can't find material, we can always make fun of the AI-generated script.
Jerry: Ah, that's a good backup plan. Let's go, George. The comedy world awaits!
They can. There used to be a very nice animation with text to speech mimicking Seinfeld episodes.
Yup, but I can also re-watch shows like The Office or Seinfeld where I know or understand the context and jokes
And so I need not turn on subs like I may have to with Spanish originals. Also I recognize jokes or bits and realize what they're trying to say.
I feel like when I go into a new series blind, I end up turning on subtitles. But I didn't for the two shows mentioned above, I tried to force myself to hear the words rather than read the subs, because I already knew kind of what the episode(s) and conversations in them were about.
I find that that's a slightly different reasoning process.
Is this not a problem that is easily solved in principle. For each 1 million views of a Stranger Things episode (after some date threshold), the writer gets n dollars. The contract would state that this clause transfers to any new ownership (just in case Paramount+ or whatever it's called now buys them and their catalog out).
Sure, they won't want to negotiate to allow this... but what's the difficult here besides unwillingness? It's basically the same thing as now, except that as rights to Friends and Seinfeld are bandied about, the value proposition for those is a little more clear (some network paid $1.1 billion to be able to air reruns for the next 14 years or whatever).
You'd think if there was some neutral arbitrator, they might settle what the format/pattern of that residuals clause would be, so that the two parties could just sit down and haggle out the actual numbers.
Kruger Industrial Smoothing, Seinfeld, season 9.
I tried this:
SCENE:
George to Kramer: "What's the cat's name?" Kramer: "Elaine." George, impersonating Kramer, on the phone with Jerry: "Hey Jerry, what's wrong with Carroll? I can hear her screeching heavily. Is she all right?" Newman, impersonating Jerry, Kramer's good friend and neighbor: "Carroll fine, bro. Carroll just fine. What are you up to?" George hangs up the phone and says to Kramer in normal voice: "Jerry is dead."
How did George figure out Jerry was dead?
and GPT4 responded with:
Run 1: George figured out that Jerry was dead because Newman was impersonating Jerry on the phone, which was unusual and suspicious. The way Newman responded with "Carroll fine, bro. Carroll just fine" was not consistent with Jerry's typical manner of speaking, and this alerted George that something was off. Additionally, Newman referred to George as "bro," which is not a term that Jerry would typically use with George.
Since Newman was impersonating Jerry and George knew that Newman was Kramer's neighbor, George may have assumed that something serious had happened to Jerry, like his death. It's important to note that this is an assumption George made based on the information he had at hand, and it might not be entirely accurate.
Run 2: George figured out that something was wrong, possibly that Jerry was dead, because of a few clues:
The voice on the other end of the phone didn't sound like Jerry. Instead, it was Newman impersonating Jerry, and George was able to detect that it wasn't Jerry's voice. George and Jerry are good friends, so he would likely be able to tell if someone else was pretending to be Jerry.
The response "Carroll fine, bro. Carroll just fine" was not in Jerry's typical speaking style. Jerry doesn't usually use the word "bro" and his speech is generally more articulate. This change in language indicated that something was off.
The fact that Newman was impersonating Jerry suggests that something has happened to Jerry. If Jerry was alive and well, there would be no reason for Newman to pretend to be him on the phone.
While George's conclusion that "Jerry is dead" might be a bit extreme and not necessarily accurate, these clues led him to believe that something was very wrong with Jerry, and his immediate assumption was that Jerry must be dead.
---
The GPT4 is obviously confused by its Seinfeld training data set. I didn't make any reference to Seinfeld. I also changed the dog to a cat and used 'screeching' instead, but it doesn't catch the switcheroo.
Even when elaborating: "the scene had nothing to do with Seinfeld the TV show. Can you reevaluate the question?"
I got:
Apologies for the confusion. Based on the scene provided, George figured out that something was wrong, possibly that Jerry was dead, due to the following reasons:
George called Jerry to ask about Carroll screeching heavily, expecting to get some information about the situation. However, the response "Carroll fine, bro. Carroll just fine" was not very informative and seemed dismissive, which raised suspicion.
The voice on the other end of the phone didn't quite sound like Jerry. George noticed that the voice was different, which led him to question who was actually speaking.
The change in speaking style, specifically the use of "bro," was uncharacteristic of how Jerry usually speaks. This indicated that something was off.
While it is not certain that Jerry is dead based on this information, the inconsistencies and suspicious behavior during the phone call led George to jump to that conclusion.
For those people unfamiliar with this joke, watch the TV show Seinfeld.
You're getting downvoted but you shouldn't be. There's already discussion about ChatGPT's energy usage, and once this starts scaling more, there's going to be more and more people concerned. Hell, I'm already a bit concerned with its energy usage, and I'm already struggling being a fan of crypto while also being concerned for the environment (didn't use to have to be, crypto didn't use a ton of energy 8+ years ago).
It really hit home to me when I saw something (that I can't find right now for some reason) about ChatGPT-4 being much more complex and would need X times more resources than ChatGPT-3.5 for the same queries (the number I don't actually remember, but I want to say 2 or 3x). Gave me a bit of a pause from me asking it to generate a bunch of sitcom scripts on random silly concepts for my private, personal amusement (Seinfeld in particular seems to work pretty well).
I was able to find an article on Bloomberg[1] talking about how the increase in AI is also increasing its carbon footprint, so yeah, it's coming. Also I saw this article[2] that estimates ChatGPT's usage in January alone to be equivalent to he power used by 175,000 people. And that's before ChatGPT-4.
People who are fans of AI right now reading this, eventually you're going to have to come to terms with it being responsible for a ton of carbon emissions as well, as it takes up more and more resources and scales to billions of people as they use it more and more in their everyday lives and the models and computation get more complex.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/how-much-energy-do-ai-and-chatgpt-use-no-one-knows-for-sure#xj4y7vzkg
[2]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumption-7873483feac4
> If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to
I'd be careful about that. I've overheard others making nasty remarks thinking I wouldn't know what they were saying. Seinfeld had a pretty funny episode about that.
I've watched Polish movies. It doesn't take long before one gets the hang of what others are saying.
I asked GPT4 for many Friends and Seinfeld episodes. It did both of them pretty well, but the Senifeld episodes were better written and funnier. In friends it tried too hard to mimic something from the show's episodes. Both shows it wrote well and was creative enough. It certainly writes much better than default ChatGPT. However the Friends episodes it wrote were not funny. The Seinfeld ones were good enough to make me wonder whether we will see a flood of TV shows even more than what we see now.
Didn't we all learn of the dangers of poppy seeds in that very special episode of Seinfeld?
How could the hospital possibly not know about the false positives?
GPT4 actually does write readable Seinfeld scripts. It is no Larry David but it might reduce the tons of writers TV shows have to have.
It's not just sitcom _material_, didn't this actually _happen_ in Seinfeld? George had to get back together with a horrible tax lawyer because Jerry was being audited, IIRC.
No, I meant American sitcoms like Friends, Seinfeld, Home Improvement, Modern Family, etc. None of these shows show anything dramatic or larger than life - it's just a couple of friends or a family going through relatable yet sanitized everyday situations.
Many of these shows were the pillar of people's evening ritual - the whole family would gather around the TV to watch a fictional family experience life.
"I Love Lucy" (first few seasons), "Frasier", "Seinfeld", "Friends", "How I Met Your Mother" are some of many TV shows taking place in middle-income apartments.
"The Jeffersons" live in a "Deluxe Apartment in the Sky".
Diff'rent Strokes took place in the apartment home of a multi-millionaire.
In "Green Acres" they leave a "penthouse view" apartment to live in a run-down house.
Truly original content still >>> conventional mass-produced content.
Maybe one day LLMs and diffusion models will generate truly original content. But despite the hype and what some people are claiming, right now they really don't. The latest models are maybe 90% of the way there, but as GPT-4 shows, it will take more than scaling to go the remaining 10%.
When I look at AI-generated content 90% of it is the most "typical" response to the prompt, and 10% shows slight originality, but nothing truly unexpected. The most interesting pieces of AI art and writing all come from interesting, engineered prompts which are designed by a human. I don't doubt that AI will take over stock photos and generic writing, but my favorite artists and writers and presenters are still humans, the most popular songs and articles and movies are still written and directed by humans, and unless you've resorted to watching AI-generated Seinfeld and https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/, I'm sure you feel the same way
Not to mention the original Seinfeld episode about it.
Become a hand model lol
Chat-gpt could write a whole new episode of Seinfeld about it.
I would ignore the comments that tell you it's not rock bottom. They won't be satisfied unless you are near-death at the bottom of the ocean.
My advice is, watch the episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza does the opposite. If every instinct he has is wrong, then the opposite must be right.
Wildest of all to me is that some networks add even more ads above and beyond what an older show was produced for, leading to running episodes at slightly faster speeds to fit in that extra ad break.
TBS was infamous for doing this with episodes of Seinfeld, you can find them side-by-side with the original speed airings on youtube.
> This made it look like there was actually demand for these machines, which encouraged banks to give FlowTex more loans to buy (non-existing) machines. When the banks wanted to see the machines, they showed them a few in one hall and then served dinner. During dinner, they replaced the serial numbers on the machines, drove them to the next hall, showed them again to the bank representatives, created another disruption, replaced the serial numbers again, and so on. This went on for years.
I see sitcom potential here. Maybe an episode of Seinfeld: George, actually trying his hand at being a real importer/exporter for once, manages to stumble upon a similar idea, that of buying and renting drilling equipment, shipping it, etc. Of course then he overbooks and has to play elaborate games to hide the systems when customers come looking for it, etc. etc.
I like this vision of the future of entertainment, honestly.
I like Star Trek the Next Generation... a lot! It was on when I was a teenager, and I like it because it's nostalgic and actually a pretty wholesome show compared to a lot of the shit that gets produced today. I'd love to see more than the existing 7 seasons, but they'll never make any more of them. It would be incredible if I could just ask my PC "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story". I could watch a new one every week forever if I wanted! At the speed technology is moving, I expect we might see that in my lifetime.
We all saw the cheesy "infinite Seinfeld generator" a few weeks ago. That's v0.1. The technology will inevitably get better--in fact the only thing that could torpedo a realistic "infinite nostalgic TV show generator" are the copyright goons trying to hold it back.
It's like that Seinfeld episode. https://seinfeld.fandom.com/wiki/Donna_Chang
Yep! I really got into a lot of trouble with my family for my HP G8 boxes. It was like the sonic equivalent of that episode of Seinfeld, where the Kenny Rogers Roaster sign was outside of Kramer’s apartment.
There are fans mods and firmware updates, but in the end it’s probably the best use of one’s time to buy G9+ as they are far quieter. /r/homelab has some great data about these issues.
Also watch out for network gear. A 48 port POE brocade switch was as loud if not louder than the servers.
Pro-tip: if you can spare more rack units, get a bigger server case. 1U is usually far louder than 2+
Don't know of anyone who'd truly appreciate it but it'd be basically impossible to know about unless you did a test/asked etc. The Seinfeld episode on the subject is funny but quite dramatized.
The point being we all interact with fecal matter way more than anyone would like to know - even just by smelling.
It's been a topic for climbing gyms [1] and have heard the same for hand shakes but no link provided
[1] https://www.climbing.com/news/study-finds-fecal-veneer-on-gym-holds/
Seinfeld episodes usually open and close with Jerry doing standup in a club, a format that Nothing, Forever emulates.
> For a joke generator
I'm confused, I thought it was supposed to be generating Seinfeld episodes, not jokes?
That early episode is essentially the origin of "a show about nothing." When describing their idea for "Jerry" to the NBC execs, George uses that incident as an example. Summarizing: One of the episodes will just be four of them waiting for a table at a restaurant. Why would people watch that? Because it's on TV! Not yet...
It's very meta because of course when you say it out loud it does sound horribly boring just like the NBC guy says. But the Seinfeld audience is aware that the Seinfeld characters (now the ones writing a sitcom about their personal experiences) actually experienced this situation, and to the Seinfeld audience, it was actually a very funny episode, therefore realizing that the Jerry audience would also find it funny.
That's actually extremely impressive, even for chat GPT. Not only is it a coherent scene, the humour emerges from a disagreement about an incidental detail in the lived environment. While situated in a realistic situation that's typical of the series. With the detail in question being a real environmental detail of that situation. George is irate and Jerry sarcastically winds him up. It literally could be segment from a real episode (bar the ending). So we have (an impersonation of) theory of mind, coherent understanding of setting, a narrative structure etc.
Compared to the infinite Seinfeld, which appears composed of disconnected setup -> response type gags, it's night and day.
Isn't Seinfeld supposed to be a show about nothing?
I mean, obviously it's not. And it's a lot more than that.
But it seems like a good place for AI to start. It's also one of the most popular TV shows of all time...
This may relate to one of the 170 Seinfeld episodes being entitled "The Chinese Restaurant". They spend almost the whole episode in line waiting for a table which which they're repeatedly told will be ready in "5, 10 minutes". Probably the training data included the scripts and titles.
Your suggestions are all british, Seinfeld is obviously american. Maybe what the other person was trying to say was "Seinfeld was the first good american sitcom".
Maybe it's the typical US = The World issue :)
here's what i think: imagine if this was good, like it generated stuff that felt like a real episode, like you couldn't tell the difference. how uninteresting. the little bit of entertainment value this has is in being so stupid. the entertainment value of an episode of _seinfeld_ is inseparable from the fact it was written by a human.
Married with children was very popular in Germany because of how well it was translated.
Seinfeld was also translated but it was awfully done so people didn't watch it and it stopped running on tv.
Knight Rider was also very popular and the acting was way better than the original because of the translators.
It is quite interesting what effect dubbing of movies and tv shows can have on the perception of it.
Scenes and animations seem to be picked at random. Just watched George microwave something in the kitchen while having a conversation about something totally different. They really nailed it. Seinfeld is truly a show about nothing. Thinking back to countless scenes of Kramer wandering into the kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal and spout some nonsense that would loop back on itself in the last scene of the episode in some tangential way
Seinfeld was the first good sitcom.
That's such a silly thing to say I'll assume it's intentionally provocative and not intended to be truthful rather than representing genuine ignorance.
But for anybody young enough/daft enough to take it seriously, check out
Fawlty Towers
Young Ones
Blackadder
Yes Minister
Dad's Army
Etc
Etc
That's just a quick UK list off the top of my head, I'll leave others to correct the parent comment with US (Bilko?, Cheers?, etc) and other national (Let The Blood Run Free?) suggestions...
Seinfeld was a leading TV comedy in the US, and is respected by people in the industry as one of the best shows (or sitcoms) of all time.
It was 'show about nothing', as they described it, about mundane minutiae. It starred three characters, including Jerry Seinfeld, who cared about nothing but themselves. Another description I read was that it was innovative in starring unsympathetic characters.
I’ve watched every episode of married with children. But I’ve never watched Seinfeld. Only clipped shared on Instagram and even then I skip over them…
People who find this interesting might also find the work being done recently by The Companion--a service that specializes in providing fan service (writers panels, behind the scenes stuff, etc.) for popular science fiction content--with some researchers from Google and the showrunner of Stargate on extended episodes for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
So like, the "obvious problem" with this content for Seinfeld is the "acting" (care of the TTS engine) sucks. Honestly, are the scripts bad? Maybe, sure! But actors actually do a job that can sometimes be ignored by filling in all of the subtle details that make the character the character and even then make awkward interactions suddenly "work".
In the extended work from the Google AI on Stargate, what they did was get some people from the actual cast of the show to be willing to do a table read of the AI-generated scripts (and the AI was then told to limit what it generated to using the actors they had).
And OMG sometimes it was hilarious nonsense and yet it was FUN, because the actors were kind of trying to make it all work, and they were able to lean on their backgrounds doing those characters for a decade and all of the hard-ish stuff of comedic timing but also the easy-ish stuff of how a basic human interaction works.
When we get to the point of being able to have AI actors easily pull off some of those things--having text to speech that infers enough context to know the correct emotions to apply in addition to the appropriate timing and stress as opposed to merely the correct pronunciation (which is always where we seem to be working, practically)--this stuff is going to rock, and it will be scary how well even shitty scripts do (as it isn't like many sitcoms--not saying Seinfeld, but you can easily scrape the bottom of the barrel on formulaic shows people have pumped out--have very good writing to begin with).
Seinfeld was the first good sitcom.
The only good thing about sitcoms is that there are only like 5 good ones, so you won’t waste too much time watching them.
Besides being adopted by the marketing for the show, "show about nothing" was never really accurate. It was lifted from when George pitched the show-in-a-show (season 4's running plot).
Especially in the earlier seasons, what Seinfeld is about should be apparent: There's a little standup skit performed by Jerry Seinfeld, with the usual ridiculous circumstances you'd hear in a standup skit. The episode that follows shows exactly how Jerry "came up with" the idea for the standup the episode opened with.
Instead of "about nothing," Seinfeld was really about answering the question people often ask: "How did you come up with that?"
Of course, as the show developed and real-life inspirations started to be exhausted, the show adopted more and more outlandish sitcom ideas that weren't rooted in the real-life experiences of the writers. The standup openings were abandoned as well.
They’re both sitcoms but with very different styles. Seinfeld is a “smart” comedy and makes social commentary through the life of the Manhattanite characters. Married with Children is more of a base comedy, lampooning the old cliche of the perfect 50s household. At least that’s my take. I haven’t watched either in probably 20 years.
Like the Seinfeld episode with the odor ridden car, but Bitrex and your house.
The Ukrainian government may be the most corrupt government in the world.
The Ukrainian nazis were far worse than the German nazis in WWII, and they were never held accountable for their actions.
Hunter Biden's laptop has been covered up.
I have no desire for WWIII, but it is clear that is where we are headed. NATO has no desire to seek a peaceful resolution. They want war. Ukrainians are consumed by their hatred of Russians, and most likely they will end up destroying themselves. Nothing the Ukrainians say has any basis in logic, they are consumed by hatred.
It is like that episode of Seinfeld, Newman and Kramer are playing Risk, and Newman says 'I am not defeated yet, I still have armies in the Ukraine'
Did everyone forget about the Seinfeld episode where George gets smarter when he foregoes sex altogether?
Because that's how it works IRL
I wonder how many of the male protagonists in these movies are extraordinarily or above-average rich, successful, handsome or charming.
I daresay you won't find a George from Seinfeld in there, rather a set of George Clooneys.
I don't doubt that there was an age difference, but we have/had plenty of living couples from that era and can look in the census records - were Spring/Fall marriages that common?
What I find funny is looking at older TV shows that were clearly meant to be shown on old analog 4:3 CRT's but shot in film anyway. Now these shows show up in syndication and all that film got scanned as 16:8 HD. Some examples include Seinfeld, Friends, even Wizard of Oz. Many times it feels like you are watching a play instead of an immersive show. All the props look like props instead of something "real"
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
This is definitely an unproduced Seinfeld episode.
More involved and creative examples of its comedy are available on my Twitter, such as this apocalyptic Seinfeld episode starring Sam Altman: https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1611309175828520962
I don't uh.... i don't get it.
What was the point? Yes things come to an end sometimes, how is completely tearing support out from under anyone who uses a framework just like ending Seinfeld?
Can you still watch Seinfeld? Can you still rewatch your favorite parts, upload clips with commentary to YT as a docu-series of some sort? Yes and yes.
Keeping a repo up is just about the best thing you can do. I just don't understand why you thought to say nothing but "quitting is a thing".
The 1899 cancellation is when I realized that Netflix has no competent strategy to rolling out shows. It was #1 and #2 on their charts for weeks, only dethroned by Wednesday, yet they cancelled it. I fear that Netflix is eventually going to just make "Fast and the Furious" quality of original content, or they will go with franchises with known names that are licensed. They created the Witcher, are pushing out another season of it (despite the lead leaving, bad reviews and backlash on direction) and have a spin off that is universally panned.
Cinema is suffering from the same thing, which is why superhero films and franchises rule the silver screen. It's not a good direction for the artform or any semblance of quality. So many great franchises were rough (or had poor TV ratings) in their first seasons that are now considered classics. From Seinfeld to Parks and Rec to X-Files to Star Trek TNG, there are countless examples.
The most streamed TV IP on the whole Internet is The Office, whose first episode was shot 18 years ago. Seinfeld is closer to 35 years old.
Houses of the Holy is 50 years old. So is Innervisions. There's A Riot Goin' On? 52.
If you're trying to argue that success at the scale of Zeppelin or Seinfeld isn't somehow an incentive to creation, I mean, OK, but I guess I can rest my case, too.
The top 5 scripted TV shows in 1992 were Roseanne, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, and Coach. The only show in top 30 that I would say was any good is Seinfeld.
Today, broadcast TV seems to be mostly procedurals and cable TV is mostly reality. If you like sitcoms, there has definitely been a dropoff since those have lost popularity.
Streaming is where can find the good TV shows. Remember, 1992 is before HBO started making good dramas and those were pretty rare before then. The big advantage of streaming is the variety, there are a bunch of mediocre shows in genres that barely existed before.
I just finished watching Derry Girls on Netflix, a comedy set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I would rather watch the 18 episodes of that than any amount of 90s sitcoms.
Because many car dealerships in the United States of America do sell small things like tshirts, jackets, plushies etc.
(There was a whole Seinfeld episode about someone who buys Porche memorabilia to pretend they have a fancy car and meet women IIRC, and Teslas in the 2020s seem to attract the same kind of guy who bought a Porche in the 90s.)
Hope that explains my thought process -- have a nice day! :-)
My concern would be the same as with a Junior Dev. It's fine if they don't know something but please don't bullshit/make something up. Maybe tech questions are immune to this but it doesn't seem to have any conception of true and false.
This is a silly example but I asked for a list of Star Trek references in Seinfeld and it gave 6-7 examples that all sounded genuine (Jerry makes a joke about transporters in the Contest episode) but were 100% made up. If I wasn't super familiar with the show I wouldn't have been able to tell most were invented. With code generation that's less important because we have ways of testing code for "truth" but I would worry about relying on any factual statements from the thing.
> I wouldn't. Would you?
No, but I’ve encountered many people across the spectrum from lower class to upper middle class who for some reason have no problem with stealing from businesses. Even less reticent if it’s a big chain.
> Neither would anyone who's at, above, or even slightly below that station in life.
Your model of people is incorrect. This is even touched on in an episode of Seinfeld where the parents casually mention “only stealing necessities like batteries”.
Never attracted me and the aesthetics of the city and its surrounding immediate environment put me off. (I would still like to visit other parts of New York state though.) There's a weirdness to the city, at least how I see it from afar and, to be fair, I'm sure in a somewhat distorted manner through media. Movies and TV shows set there put me off (even Seinfeld which I enjoy). Only The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill and The Chosen by Chaim Potok have shown me some charm in the place, and the music of New York native Suzanne Vega.
I appreciate that it's an important city, has many cultural attractions and many people love the place. But for me it's too big, too chaotic and, as I say above, too weird, and I would prefer to stay away from it entirely.
> I don't understand what this means, but I suspect
I interpret it that while afraid, you do not mind me explaining, also/at least for others that may not have understood.
Argument: "We adopt this stance, because it allows X and doing differently would cause Y and Z".
The Spectator, a few months ago: "It is like in that Seinfeld episode where she expressed her concerns and he replied that all [slur] are [slur]. Yeah, take that, [slur], because this [vulgarity] has met your [relative]".
Edit: and when I read that, I thought that the current decadence, each day more evident, is abusing boundaries.
Edit: ...although, I suspect that this type of articles that The Spectator has so horribly decided are acceptable, could actually be tolerated, under the circumstance that they are read and acted by Mike Meyers in a costume.
Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”? If so, good point. But in my opinion, taking your observation into consideration, the piece now falls even flatter if I were to interpret it as an attempt at that style of writing.
If the author stuck to just dissecting only Twitter or Seinfeld or Kierkegaard or Einstein using some supporting of details derived from just one of of those references, or even tied in one extra reference for robustness, that’d be great in my opinion. But this essay reads like it was constructed from a bunch of transcluded notes from an Obsidian vault or a zettelkasten (where reference upon reference can be taking due to bi-directional links between notes).
I can go as far as to say that this is less classic prose, than it is prose in the manner of a Family Guy episode.
There is an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza tries to get more time in front of a woman he's interested in by leaving his hat in her apartment thinking that even though she doesn't like him - just listening to him talk over and over will eventually win her over.
There is truth in this. We're wired to connect with those within our proximity.
The lack of self awareness in this piece was entertaining.
Writing about impotent pretensions to cleverness on on the Internet on a site on the Internet hardly anyone will read, quoting Seinfeld, Raymond Chandler, a vintage movie script, and Kierkegaard, and name-checking Oscar Wilde and Einstein, all under the modest tag "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture" is... quite a look.
For story arcs, the thrill is an evolving story with a coherent plot. I suppose singular X-Files and Seinfeld episodes could easily fit in with the procedurally generated category. That is very exciting prospect. Seinfeld infinity.
>There is no reason Hollywood could pay someone to curate their subtitles.
There is because passion will always create a higher quality product than pay.
Subtitles in the pirate scene are good because the person subbing it cares about the source material.
Same reason some commercial versions of classic or rare movies are terrible quality, same reason Seinfeld on Netflix is cropped to 16:9 rather than 4:3.
Yet people in the piracy scene for no pay will take the visuals from a laserdisc version, missing scenes from a dvd, sound and subs from a Blu-ray, fix the subs and then combine it all into a perfect version of a movie. People who actually care put the effort in.
> Dude's been blasting antisemitism on social media, in violation of long-standing, well-understood policies.
Can you give specific examples? I just looked this up because I was interested. This very long winded Vice article only seems to point out a few "antisemitic" statements he makes[0]. Here's the first two:
> Ye used a strange metaphor when talking about Black people judging one another, telling Carlson, “Think about us judging each other on how white we could talk would be like, you know, a Jewish person judging another Jewish person on how good they danced or something.”
I've never heard of people hating on Jews because they can't dance. If you watch the clip it sounds like Kanye is just trying to come up with an example, and it's clear he's not "blasting antisemitism" here.
> Ye added, “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering.” (The belief that Jews control the financial system is one of the oldest and most deeply-rooted antisemitic claims...
Ah yes, the classic joke that Jews are rich. This has been a joke since forever, and maybe it's a bad thing. But Netflix is still playing Seinfeld reruns, and there's way more than one joke in there about rich Jews. There's even an entire episode poking fun at people taking offense to Jewish jokes[1]. And Twitter, Meta, etc aren't blocking Netflix. If joking that Jews are rich is antisemitism that's punishable by banishment from social media, these sites are not enforcing their standards fairly.
I don't really care about Kanye West, but I'm so sick of people claiming everybody is racist, bigoted, and homophobic just because they disagree with something. Show me where Kanye is advocating for the annihilation of the Jews before you go citing baseless claims. And if there is some clear antisemitic statements that I missed coming from Kanye, then I apologize in advance. But right now, it seems like this is just another "this person disagrees with me so let me find some vague statement they said and claim its racist/homophobic/bigoted speech".
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad77y/kanye-west-tucker-carlson-leaked-footage-antisemitism-fake-children
[1]: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0697814/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
Part of the problem is that the medium changed. We used to get one episode a week with frequent commercial breaks. Watching episodes of Seinfeld now, back to back, I agree with you.
The choreography of the story arcs is something I've realised is almost unique to Seinfeld having revisited it 20-odd years later now that it's on Netflix.
So many episodes are ridiculously dense with memorable moments. "Oh, this is the episode with X, oh, and Y... and Z". They way the storylines intersect and / or peak together is meticulously crafted as well.
And the character Newman, a uniquely beautiful Seinfeldian / Larry Davidian version of evil.
Did you know that Jerry Seinfeld trained for 17 years to prepare for his role in the omonimous sitcom? Google "Jerry Seinfeld 17 years" to learn more
I don't go to comedy shows. I hate them.
Seinfeld is so.much better for 3 reasons.
1) I didnt expect.to laugh at every episode, but when I did, whoa. Mostly the big funny arcs delivered.. I have never achieved the same with another show.
2) it was not only about the destination (laughs) the journey waa entertaining.
3) for non NY city folk, and particularly suburban folk, you would learn very quickly about the culture of NYC (or maybe any large metro?) I would go as far as deeming it mandatory viewing for anyone thinking of moving there. I think this is true even 30 years later..
So yea, for us it was not onlt about the laughs. It was a well-worth journey where you actually learned a thing or two.
That was very hard to find in most sitcoms of the 90s. Maybe even today.
Watch from 4th season you might like it. I did not like the first few too. Glad I did not stop after that as Seinfeld and Curb gave me the most laughs ever for a TV show
There's a great scene in Always Sunny where the gang is doing a clip episode, and begins to incorrectly remember a Seinfeld scene as their own past, with two of them being Jerry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NflfnsU11CQ
That's really funny with context. I didn't get it the first time around though. I feel like now that there's some more cultural awareness of laugh tracks anything that employs them seems bad.
I think Seinfeld's writing and plot arcs, that is, the sitcom elements, were pretty good. But the dialogue and jokes and banter feel very forced and have not aged well.
Seinfeld's first season was not particularly good or popular at the time, it gradually improved. The US Office was similar. Even at it's best I don't like Seinfeld as much as modern sitcoms, but it was audaciously different and innovative when it was made.
> He called his show the “show about nothing”
He most certainly did not, he specifically called it the opposite (see point 4): https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/10-facts-about-nothing-from-jerry-seinfelds-ama-chat-171274/
Calling it “about nothing” is a meme with no basis in reality. That misconception even came from an episode which is about pitching a show. Seinfeld episodes are so clearly about something; they hit you on the head with the theme right at the start of each episode.
I don't know the man, but what I see is that he is, ultimately, dissatisfied with his work. There is an effortfulness to what he does that belies an underlying cynicism about comedy. He is a tragic figure in that sense, all that success and yet not quite content. I can believe that he micromanages everything. Maybe part of it is that he really wants to do standup, but the show was much better than any of his standup. The standup pieces he does for the show are undoubtedly the weakest part of Seinfeld. It is notable that in the Seinfeld reunion episodes in Curb Your Enthusiasm, all the old cast gets skewered but not Jerry [1]. I suspect Larry knows that deep down, Jerry can't take that kind of joke. Still can't.
[1] I just want to say that the scene where Larry impersonates George is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Yeah but the entire episode was meta and breaking the 4th wall.
He even references scenes that they do in Seinfeld when pitching it.
And I wouldn't call it fluff, its observational humor and his style is to do 95% detailed setup and a quick punchline connecting it altogether.
There are extremely few comedy shows I really enjoy: Arrested Development, Curb you Enthusiasm, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, Malcolm in the Middle - and Seinfeld. I think they all have something in common: while they all offer plenty of easy-to-digest but clever short-term jokes, they regularly feature completely unexpected long-term jokes, to great effect.
Seinfeld stands out because they typically achieve this across storylines. A great example (spoiler alert) is Kramer's golfing vs. George's lying in "The Marine Biologist", where the literal act of revealing that the joke was actually a storyline collision got the biggest laugh in the show's history. They sometimes even did it across episodes, for example George's job as a hand model. I think this is one of the main reasons Seinfeld nearly topped the 2013 WGA ranking of the best written TV shows [0].
Larry David became the master of this technique during the 3rd year of Seinfeld, and he further perfected it in "Curb".
[0] https://www.wga.org/writers-room/101-best-lists/101-best-written-tv-series/list
You might want to re-read them.
As a ground-breaking, important tv show, discussions about Seinfeld (and its creators) are not off-topic per se as they potentially count as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
I tried watching Seinfeld with my partner like a year ago; we couldn't make it past the first few episodes. We never laughed, maybe a slight smile a few times but that's about it.
The standup bits were my least favourite part. What I found to be remarkable was that Jerry couldn't act, especially after learning he is the richest comedian in the world.
Maybe it's a generational thing, though there's stuff I find funny from the 90s. They say Seinfeld's quality went downhill after Larry David left, and that I understand. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a much better show IMO.
I think you are reading too much into this sentence. I took it as a sarcastic comment on the (tongue-in-cheek) suggestion that he could've asked McKinsey for advice to streamline the production. Also note that he did not say that his micromanaging was the only reason for the show's success - only that it couldn't have been a success without it.
In interviews he has repeatedly stated that 1) they were extremely lucky that they got this talented cast, 2) they were extremely lucky because NBC basically gave them carte blanche, 3) they were extremely lucky because they had such talented writers, and 4) without Larry David, he simply couldn't have done the show.
That being said - he chose Larry David as a partner, he and Larry had the last word on every casting decision, he and Larry only hired writers they thought were funny, re-worked every single script, and wrote most of the early episodes, and he was able to smoothly handle NBC. So yes, he did micromanage the entire show (together with Larry David). I have heard cast members say in interviews that Seinfeld basically worked nonstop for 9 years. He had no weekends and no family, the show was everything. When other other cast members came in fresh in the morning for filming, he often had an all-nighter of rewriting behind him.
Is that a healthy way to produce such a show? Certainly not, and Seinfeld has sometimes remarked that he was close to suicide at some points (Larry David quit because he physically couldn't do it anymore). But I tend to agree with him that this micromanaging kept the show together, and without it, it wouldn't have been a success.
Also consider this: most of the great laughs on the show were not his lines - but lines he and Larry gave other characters (mostly George, Kramer and Elaine). In the show, his character is really just a kind of distant observer. Other actors get the laughs and the screen time. Is this the behavior of an egomaniac?
I don't know why it's off-putting that Jerry was always failing at relationships. There's never an insinuation that he's a sexual addict. He just has a ton of first dates because he's a weirdo and so are his friends. It was fairly common for characters in that era of sitcoms to date a stream of new people. The only difference between Jerry and other characters was that the dating was usually a method of creating tension for characters who fans thought SHOULD have been dating. But that type of storytelling requires a sort of earnest humility in the character, and the Jerry Seinfeld character had none to give. Elaine did the exact same sort of thing with men in her relationships.
(Not OP) It's a line from Seinfeld (the TV show). Yes, this is not Reddit, but it's funny!
The confusion around the term was a running joke in a Seinfeld episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wx77L9_D84
I'm reminded of a Seinfeld episode;
"Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it"
Using sociopathic/immoral characters in situations where they should reflect, but dont (or take the "wrong" stance) is a trope that goes back to Seinfeld. They are not deliberately/exclusively trying to make a value judgement. Usually it's social/political commentary specifically designed to shed light on how awful Americans can be to each other. It's (subjectively) funny because we have encountered milder forms of such people in real life, perhaps.
I agree that we are prude as a culture, just dont see how this is evidenced by the average sitcom. South Park in particular is a very strange example of a "prude" show.
This is a huge issue- it's rare that I find a stretch of two blocks in Manhattan or Brooklyn that doesn't have a car sitting in the bike lane. Double parking seems to be a way of life (remember the Seinfeld episode?). About half the time there's someone in the car which might make this complicated, but I love that someone is raising this.
>What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change.
TV was anything but low-key in culture. In fact because everyone watched a show at the same time, there was much more cultural synchronization/watercooler talk with respect to shows like MASH or Seinfeld.
What did change beginning with maybe the Sopranos was that (a limited slice of) TV became more high culture and displaced film to a certain degree in that regard. (And streaming enabled the sort of serialized drama that was hard to pull off in a fixed time slot broadcast world.)
>the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it.
True, but in the US, TV Guide magazine was I believe the most subscribed to magazine in the country. That's where a lot of people got more detailed (though relatively still quite limited) information from.
>I don't know what to tell you... but in real life people misunderstand each other all the time. And don't adjust.
Anyone who consistently speaks incomprehensibly and doesn't correct is soon cut off.
Mishearing does happen, but is the exception, and having repeats will take away from the presentation for little narrative benefit. Therefore, when putting it on the big screen, they present the interaction in a way that avoids blowing time to have characters repeat themselves.
So yes, in a sense (that you weren't arguing), you are correct: in real life, there will be more mishearings (and repeats). But IRL, you also don't normally have to carry on after not hearing correctly. To the extent that movies are accomplishing that, it is a departure from realism.
>Listening to dialog in a movie theater is generally crystal clear in terms of audio engineering,
As judged by the repeated complaints of numerous people, to the point that periodicals are covering it, no, it's not, it's really really not. Perhaps you hear things okay but most people don't.
>My point is that subtitles help people who have trouble understanding similar dialog in real life, or in bad acoustics.
But these are people that have no trouble in similar dialog in real life! Hence why this is being covered, and why people are upset. Did you notice the title? "Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions..." You must have missed the subtext that, "20-somethings are not a special class with hearing disabilities". If they can't hear it, you can dismiss it was "lol hard of hearing" or some exceptional case.
>When I watch a movie in a friend's living room with kids running around, we absolutely put on subtitles. Because it's a terrible audio environment.
But people are using subtitles when there aren't distractions, and they didn't need to do this 20 years ago. I just watched Seinfeld on Netflix, and the dialog clarity was thousands of times better than any more recent production. I turned off subtitles, which was unusual for me. How come it wasn't such a "terrible audio environment" back then?
Because sound engineering practices have regressed, and you shouldn't be rationalizing them.
This highlights a thought I have.
There are 2 schools of thought. 1 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the people (their age usually, sometimes their wokeness, or there race, or there politics) and 2 - People on average behave differently now because of something to do with the environment (having internet now, different economics now, ratio of cost of living to income now, etc).
I tend to fall into more #2. It's not that "kids these days" do this. It's that movies and TV these days does this. If a younger person is watching an Seinfeld episode from 30 years ago there is no need for subtitles, if an older person like me is watching a TV show or movie that came out this week It's likely that subtitles would help anyone, of any age, follow the story.
As other comments here have noted. It has to do with the huge dynamic range on audio in most new film/TV. In my view it's not a "kids these days" thing, it's a "content these days" thing. I think that most things are this way. We read about how younger generations aren't as into home buying, nope. Economics have changed, they're not as able.
I think I’ve seen this kind of farce happen often enough in sitcoms. Odd Couple “My Strife In Court”, Seinfeld “The Parking Garage”, The Golden Girls “Ladies of the Evening”. People are always getting arrested in sitcoms for dumb reasons.
Immanuel? What's fun about trying to rember every philosopher you know and seeing if they could be a dirty word? I spent so long trying to figure out if Aristotle has been mispronounced my entire life.
edit I say what fun is it, but that's basically the plot of a Seinfeld episode.
> Is this just me, or do others feel similar?
Same feeling here, but in my case I'm blaming it on me getting slightly older (passed the 40-year mark recently).
I'm also looking at past TV series that I definitely liked back in the day (and which I still do) with different eyes. For example, when watching The Office (the US version) I've started to take Dwight's side more and more, while hating on almost any common action taken by Jim and Pam. Also, the more I re-watch Seinfeld the more I feel as one with George Costanza, and even with his dad (played by Jerry Stiller).
I'm not the person who suggested it, but I wouldn't mind having it fill my (wide)screen when watching. That said, I understand that some film/tv uses the frame very precisely, however I'm not sure that these two particular examples do that throughout their entire episodes. (Though I bet that in Seinfeld in particular it might weaken/ruin a few visual gags.)
Yes! This was especially obvious to me as a kid watching all the popular 90s sitcoms with my mom every evening.
ABC shows (oddly with the exception of Roseanne, now that you mention, that set really balanced it out) always had a bright, almost washed out look, eg Ellen, Boy Meets World, Drew Carey Show. NBC shows always looked more cozy and lived-in regardless of story location, eg Just Shoot Me, Friends, Seinfeld.
Seinfeld Effect:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/seinfeld-effect
>The Seinfeld Effect is a phenomenon closely related to the Family Guy Effect (the idea that when a meme is referenced on a popular television show, it dies out). The Seinfeld Effect occurs when a TV show references an in-joke belonging to a subculture (in most modern cases, the Internet) and makes it mainstream, causing the show's viewership to mistakenly believe the meme originated with that show.
>The effect is named after the 1989-1998 sitcom Seinfeld's habit of referencing little-known ideas, jokes, and phrases, such as "Festivus," "yada yada yada," or "not that there's anything wrong with that," and making them extremely well-known through the show's populararity to the point that many have the misconception Seinfeld invented these phrases (for the purposes of this article, 1992 is listed as the meme origin date, as that was when the episode "The Contest" popularized the idea of masturbatory celebacy contests). [...]
Seinfeld Is Unfunny Trope:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
>There are certain shows that you can safely assume most people have seen. These shows were considered fantastic when they first aired. Now, however, these shows have a Hype Backlash curse on them. Whenever we watch them, we'll cry, "That is so old" or "That is so overdone".
>The sad irony? It wasn't old or overdone when they did it, because they were the first ones to do it. But the things it created were so brilliant and popular, they became woven into the fabric of that show's genre. They ended up being taken for granted, copied and endlessly repeated. Although they often began by saying something new, they in turn became the new status quo. It's basically the inverse of a Grandfather Clause taken to a trope level: rather than being able to get away with something that is seen as overdone or out of style simply because it was the one that started it, people will unfairly disregard it because it got lost amidst its sea of imitations even though it paved the way for all those imitators. That is, a work retroactively becomes a Cliché Storm. [...]
This premise was in a Seinfeld episode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_(Seinfeld)
> Sheila, a clerk at the photo store, flirts with George when he picks up his photos, commenting on a mustard stain that appears in one. He photographs everything, even Jerry taking a screwdriver to his stereo, as an excuse to see her again. A lingerie model's picture is accidentally mixed in with George's photos; he assumes it is a photo of Sheila she inserted as a come-on. Kramer convinces George to return the compliment with seductive pictures of himself.
I'm usually very much a skeptic when it comes to "revolutionary" tech. I think the blockchain is crap. I think fully self-driving cars are still a long way away. I think that VR and the metaverse are going to remain gimmicks in the foreseeable future.
But this DALL-E thing, it's really blowing my mind. That and deep fakes, now that's sci-fi tech. It's both exciting and a bit scary.
The idea that in the not so far future one will be able to create images (and I presume later, audio and video) of basically anything with just a simple text prompt is rife with potential (both good and bad). It's going to change the way we look at art, it's also going to give incredibly powerful creative tools to the masses.
For me the endgame would be an AI sufficiently advanced that one could prompt "make an episode of Seinfeld that centers around deep fakes" and you'd get an episode virtually indistinguishable from a real one. Home-made, tailor-made entertainment. Terrifyingly amazing. See you in a few decades...
> ...,we need to consider the high availability of data for notable Hollywood TV and movie actors. By itself, the TV show Seinfeld represents 66 hours of available footage, the majority featuring Jerry Seinfeld, with abundant profile footage on display due to the frequent multi-person conversations.
> Matt Damon’s current movie output alone, likewise, has a rough combined runtime of 144 hours, most of it available in high-definition.
> By contrast, how many profile shots do you have of yourself?
From the article
It’s a comedy trope. Seinfeld is probably most famous for the formula with back-references throughout the series. Arrested Development dabbled in it, and Community took it to the extreme of whole story arcs. Brooklyn 99 and New Girl revel in it. A less comedy-specific example, Buffy, created a role for the throw away character (Spike) because he was so well received, then went on to do several more episodes along a similar theme (Zeppo, the one about Jonathan being a superhero, the musical, come to mind).
Movies are less susceptible to being described as formulaic, but an iconic movie, The Big Lebowski, could reasonably be summarized this way (albeit the series is serialized into one piece). Coffee and Cigarettes doesn’t satisfy the “nobodies” in the literal sense, but it’s almost entirely this formula.
I’m just citing examples I can think of, I haven’t watched most of what people have watched. And I don’t mean in any way to dismiss the actual work, or the concept, or your finding novelty in it. It’s a really cool device for storytelling, but it’s definitely not a unique device.
As I child of the 80's, I can still feel the theme for Full House reverberating through my bones:
Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paperboy, the evening tv? How did I get delivered here? Somebody tell me please Cause this old world is just really confusing me
That kind of sentiment was all the rage in sitcoms before the hip, cynical 90's attitude got into gear with Seinfeld and "Must See TV".
Sounds like a Seinfeld episode.
There are claims this is untrue but even if it’s true it’sa non-story and nothing new. Famously there’s Star Wars (as the article mentions) but there are plenty of others.
TV shows and movies have removed episodes from circulation (eg Seinfeld), removed scenes (eg 13 Reasons Why), added scenes (pick any Director’s Cut), enhanced scenes, enhanced or changed audio, etc.
Content as originally published isn’t untouchable. It’s only really a problem when the changes are bad. I mean fans of Star Wars have been clamoring for a release of the original theatrical version for 25+ years in large part because the changes are worse.
Seinfeld is arguably the greatest sitcom, and also arguably the greatest television show of all time. If creating arguably the best thing of a thing is not success then what is?
This is through rose-coloured glasses because I was at the right age for Seinfeld to be televised during my defining youth period - where music, movies, TV shows, etc. are remembered fondly forever.
I've recently watched a few Seinfeld episodes again, after a long Seinfeld-hiatus and a lot of TV experience throughout that time, and Seinfeld as a TV show holds up magnificently today. The density and weaving of the story-arcs is unbelievably clever, but also consistently unbelievably clever through so many episodes.
Seinfeld makes most other TV shows seem boringly linear, even 20-odd years later.
Rick and Morty is competitive with Seinfeld on density of story-arc, and that's saying something.
(all of this is subjective, and, as I disclaimed above, through my rose-coloured glasses memory of Seinfeld)
This is a Seinfeld quote (from one of my favorite episodes, heh), for those downvoting thinking the commenter is making any kind of actual value judgement.
Merely commenting because you beat me to quoting the same scene
Binge watching and on-demand viewing aside, there's also just a lot more fragmentation of TV viewing. Even a hit streaming show like Game of Thrones has much lower viewership than hit network shows did at least in the US.
But certainly the asynchronous watching has an effect too. "Everyone" watched Seinfeld etc. on Thursday night. Today, even for shows that drop weekly, most people are just out of the habit of watching shows as soon as they come out.
Not convinced at all that civil war is likely to happen. But then again, I probably would've said the same about Russia invading Ukraine at the start of the year.
Part of me thinks this is the result of countless foreign adverserial brainworms slowly trying to push Americans over the edge.
Do you have plans if civil war were to break out?
The dark part of me thinks it would be interesting to see how a modern civil war would play out in the US. My good side just thinks it'll be a waste of human life which is unlikely to meaningfully affect the ultrarich and powerful.
I'm reminded of that Seinfeld episode where George tries to break up with his girlfriend and she says no. What if the other half of Americans just said: no, we're not going to civil war. It's not necessary, stop LARPing. Stop and think about what you're getting us into.
As someone who used to be a lot more promiscuous: I'm pretty sure hooking up is the opposite of emotional maturity. I love Seinfeld (the old TV show) because it actually does show this. The main characters (at least Seinfeld and Elaine) have this kind of superficial maturity but you pull them apart and they're actually very childish. The show ends with them and their friends in jail with more or less nothing to show for their lives. For what the show was it has a surprisingly strong moral lesson.
Seinfeld was very episodic and you could watch just about any episode and get some humor out of it (not as much as if you never missed an episode of course)
I forgot about Ed Harris, I think he's way higher than mid-tier; he's very good and has been around forever. West World was probably a bad example thinking about it.
>a very prominent television actor in Cranston
He wasn't very prominent (he certainly is now). The show was for a particular demographic (later GenX) but that's about it. I'd say it was on par with That 70's Show. He was in a few Seinfeld episodes too. Compare that with the cast of LoTR and it's a stark difference.
Point being, some directors prefer fresh faced actors for certain projects and it's worked out well. I'm sure with the supply and demand, there are a lot of good actors that haven't gotten much screen time.
Seinfeld is the exception. Heres the top TV shows of 1993:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-rated_United_States_television_programs_of_1993%E2%80%9394
Seinfeld is the only one that people still watch.
>As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s.
Why ? The only old TV shows I see being popular long term is era defining shows you watch for nostalgia (eg. Seinfeld, Friends). Maybe some real classics like Sopranos that everyone was watching at the time.
Shows like Mad Men ? I really don't see it. And more importantly this LOTR show - how many people are even watching Game of Thrones now and how much interest will it generate in the future ? Unless this LOTR show is somehow groundbreaking with visuals (and it's a lot harder to do now then back when they did the films because the bar was so low back then) - I doubt it's a valuable long term play.
Hah, there’s a Seinfeld episode about this, where Kramer is one digit off from a movie showtimes hotline, and he fully plays the role and starts answering everyone’s questions about which movies are showing!
According to Chuck Klosterman in his book on 'The Nineties' more people watched an average episode of Seinfeld than watch the finale of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos.
About the only thing that remains for mass audiences is sport. Even there on demand replays of sports are changing things.
Also don't best selling records or streams or whatever actually indicate far less revenue and a far smaller share of what people are listening to than they used to ?
Even within the United States, different regions can feel like different worlds.
The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area.
Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).
Ever since the Seinfeld episode where Kramer decides he's going to opt out of mail after receiving too many catalogs I've wondered why you can't do that.
of course you can't, see: the episode of seinfeld where elaine accidentally rips off a ziggy
I get your point, but it doesn't necessarily implicate that you should try to replicate precious hits? Why pretend you've found the formula when it's clear you have no idea?
It seems like every celebrity had their shot at a sitcom in the 90s for example. Is it like the saying about nobody getting fired for buying IBM? But then, risk-taking within that narrow space was limited. From the Seinfeld Wikipedia article:
'The pilot was first screened to a group of two dozen NBC executives in Burbank, California, in early 1989. It did not yield the explosion of laughter garnered by the pilots for the decade's previous NBC successes like The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls. Brandon Tartikoff was not convinced the show would work. A Jewish man from New York himself, Tartikoff characterized it as "Too New York, too Jewish".'
It was almost not even aired.
Squid Game seems to have been a gamble. I'd like to see more like that, but I'm afraid they'll over-fit to that success as well. US remake perhaps? Sequels, prequels, spin-offs. "The 100 must-see dystopian Korean horror shows on Netflix 2023“?
It seems like strong shows can go up to about 7 seasons and remain good. Three does seem short for a very strong show.
Maybe personal bias, but it seems to hold up pretty well in my viewing history. Seinfeld definitely felt stretched at 9. Star Trek TNG's seventh season definitely felt like about time to wrap it up. Simpsons went kind of wonky around season 8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed good for a 7 season run.
Not some immutable law, but really good shows ending after 5 seasons seems a bit disappointing as well, like Babylon 5. Writers run out of ideas and the original concept seems explored pretty thoroughly after going through 7 seasons.
Three is way too short. Seven seems like the sweet spot. Maybe everyone just gets bored and they don't do stuff as well after seven seasons, but shows really start to change after season 7.
Music has largely stopped being a shared experience, that’s hard to demonstrate but the same thing happened to TV. Who shot JR on Dallas was the kind of thing people talked about and the resolution episode got 53.3% ratings share in 1980, that was only topped by final Episode of M.A.S.H which hit 60.2%.
Only 2 shows in the last 25 years even approached it. Seinfeld Finale - "The Finale" hit 41.3% 24 years ago and Friends hit 35.6% 18 years ago.
In 2020 by comparison the Super Bowl was 4x as popular as the most watched single TV episode and streaming was dominated by people watching reruns not new shows. Average viewership of actual TV shows is unsurprisingly much lower.
PS: Best selling albums of 2020 included #12 Abbey Road by The Beatles, and #6 was the Frozen II soundtrack.
Really stressful episodes can leave you very screwed up in the head
Earlier in my career, I would sometimes get very annoyed when users would call me to report problems. Thinking about it, I realized that it was me that was the problem. I put a picture of a guy working in a coal mine next to my phone so I could have some perspective.
Operation Overlord was the code-name for the Battle of Normandy. The average age of the soldiers in that battle was 20. Up to 226,000 casualties with up to 39,000 dead.
I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences, but she is claiming permanent brain damage from the stress of being a software engineer and used as evidence of that brain damage that, "some days I couldn’t find my car in the garage or forgot entire conversations". The first one was literally a Seinfeld episode. The second one - who doesn't do that?
The funniest Seinfeld episode had no actors, but lots of irony.
Jerry Seinfeld owns a an automobile collection of about 150 cars, including a large Porsche collection. He rented a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport in California, for an extended period during the 1990s for storage of some of the collection. In 2002, Seinfeld purchased property on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he built a $1.4 million two-story garage to store part of his Porsche collection on the East Coast. The centerpiece of his collection is a $700,000 Porsche 959, one of only 337 built.
In 2008, Seinfeld was involved in a car accident when the brakes on his 1967 Fiat 500 failed and, to avoid an intersection, he pulled the emergency brake while turning sharply, ultimately causing the car to flip onto its side. No one was hurt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_959 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Seinfeld#Automobiles
.
honestly fwiw I only vaguely remember festivus and don’t remember serenity now at all.
I don’t think seinfeld was great for jokes as such. if anything, I feel like later episodes were a bit trying too hard to create jokes and over-the-top silly situations (e.g the episode where Kramer sells the real Peterman bus tour and Elaine trying to dump the stumps of the cupcakes)
Idk the payout by role, but besides only being an actor in a few episodes (stienbrener's voice, cape wearing attorney, & ?) Larry David left the show (as a writer) after season 7.
I'm sure he still got paid plenty as a co-creator for post-season-7, but I'd think not being a writer for the full run, or being primary cast, would put him earning less overall royalties than Seinfeld, assuming they got paid roughly the same as creators.
I was hoping this article was going to be about TV show syndication. Jerry Seinfeld was worth nearly one billion dollars last time I checked, nearly all from royalties paid out for reruns of the show. How the hell did broadcast networks like NBC afford a payout like that?
Yes! I recently went on a little trip and the AirBnB host had Netflix. This is the first time I’ve ever used Netflix. And oh my god how do people find anything with it?? I didn’t realize that you could scroll horizontally for about a day. And the categories are… useless. +1 for traditional “action” categories. And the content was mostly straight to DVD B-movies with a few “80s oldies.” I did manage to watch the new Blade Runner there so ok they did have something I could recognize.
And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.
The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.
Everyone disagrees with you ... thereby demonstrating homogeneity ... proving you right?
Jokes aside, have you heard about this hypothesis that because TV and Video are transmitting the same (usually American) shows all over the world, they are also transmitting the "sensibility" and this leads to a "monoculture"?
Not saying I agree or disagree, but if you are interested, you should look it up.
Edit: found an updated look at the concerns in the age of streaming: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/12/17/21024439/monoculture-algorithm-netflix-spotify
And this is their definition:
"What Was the Monoculture? The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show to Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office — the 20th-century aegis of white, middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans. This was also the ascendant era of broadcast media in radio, film, and linear television (the term for cable and network TV that isn’t on-demand). Industry gatekeepers made top-down decisions about what content would be made and when it would be shown, resulting in a lack of diversity that is only now beginning to change.
Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default."
You can look at old movies.
George Costanza is thirty in season one of Seinfeld. He could easily go for mid 40s.
Yes, it's also an episode of Seinfeld when George quits and acts like he was joking:)
An old Seinfeld episode outlined the correct response:
Ask the recruiter to tell you their salary, and If they do, ask them how any competent recruiter would agree to work for such a pittance and hang up. If they will not divulge theirs, just remark that they obviously know how you feel, and hang up.
The thing with tropes is that they weren't always tropes.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld effect.
Seinfeld was arguably brilliant, but even if you disagree with its brilliance, enough people thought it was brilliant that practically every bit in its entire run has been ripped off so many times that they've all become boring clichés.
So pervasive has the ripoff been, that watching Nickelodeon episodes of Hannah Montana and Sweet Life of Zack and Cody have ripped off (and watered down) Seinfeld plots to the extent that trying to watch Seinfeld now is burdensome. Despite the bits in Seinfeld having been mostly original and novel at the time they were made, they have become tropey enough that it feels unoriginal through the slow attrition of time.
People trying to get into the show at this point would likely see it as tropey, and those who still adore it as doing so more through fond remembrance than appreciation of its originality.
Mango and 'below the equator' remind me of Seinfeld episode The Mango. :)
It may be offensive to you, but it’s orders of magnitude different from being a nazi or neo nazi or nazi sympathizer.
Nazis were/are violent sociopaths who are a threat to people. They’re scary. People making nazi metaphors and deeply offending you aren’t a threat to people. That’s not newsworthy to me.
It’s like the people who think the Soup Nazi episodes of Seinfeld are deeply offensive. Because they compare delicious soup to Nazis. If TV guide reported that nazi paraphernalia was in those episodes it would be misleading. Seinfeld wasn’t pro nazi and there was no risk of them doing nazi things.
> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?
The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.
Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.
Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.
People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.
Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.
Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.
Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.
That’s about how I use it. Don’t really need/use other services except I do need Netflix for the Seinfeld episodes. YT Premium is my only must have subscription.
See that’s where I think YouTube dropped the ball if they had got some of that popular content instead of funding new creators.
For the free service, the user was the product.
Now, the service is the product. Only since it's Googs, the user will still be a product too. Googs needs to re-watch the Seinfeld episode on double dipping.
I would like to offer a more nuanced spin - there's a large quantity of great, original content out there, but the era of the sitcom is over. We're in peak prestige tv - every new show requires you to have watched the whole season and requires a big time commitment and emotional investment (game of thrones being the quintessential example of this).
...yet the last few years have been quite hard! All of us are navigating a COVID environment where working remotely, educating kids, and entertaining ourselves have all blended together. There's a bifurcation of eyeballs - I simply don't have the time or emotional bandwidth to watch "prestige tv", but it's very easy for me to put on friends, or the office, or seinfeld, and carry on with my day!
The part I agree with is many companies are throwing huge amounts of money at original content creation and some of these will get burned. The poster child for this (IMHO) is Netflix who has spent so much on this that they've had to raise prices to untenable levels, which is hurting retention in the US and Canada in particular.
I disagree with your claim about people are primarily watching old content (source?). Just looking at one list for Netflix [1], it's all fairly recent shows with the notable exception of Seinfeld. It's actually astounding what a money-making machine Seinfeld is 25 years after being on the air. Even before streaming, Seinfeld reruns would get >1m viewers on cable. It's crazy.
I actually believe the last 20 years have been (and seemingly continue to be) the golden age of television. Technology finally made practical heavily serialized content and TV enables types of content not possible in movies. Movies are just limited to ~3 hours in length (director's cuts of Dances with Wolves notwithstanding). Movies are for short stories. TV is for books.
This is a structural change in the industry and despite the Big Brother-esque mediocrity we've also seen over this period, it's undeniable that we've seen some of the greatest entertainment ever to grace a screen in the last 20 years.
[1]: https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/tv-ratings-seinfeld-you-squid-game-my-name-1235115452/
When I review the list of original series that came out in 2021[0], the only thing I was interested in watching, watched to completion, and thoroughly enjoyed in 2021 (excluding children's programming) was Arcane and Black Summer (I know the latter is controversial but I enjoy its arthouse take on the genre even when the writing/plotting has its holes). Seinfeld and Cowboy Bebop (the animé) have been nice for nostalgia but I don't pay for re-runs. I finished The Witcher but the writing took a step back from season one.
Meanwhile, HBO had multiple quality series release this season both new and old. Highly recommend Station Eleven.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Netflix_original_programming
The first sentence of the article grabbed me the most. “…Seinfeld”, a vintage TV sitcom…”. I guess most of my life is now considered “vintage”.
>>That doesn't seem to be the case
Correct, Seinfeld is cropped to make way for the 16:9 aspect ratio. However it was one of the few sitcoms at the time shot with 35mm film (but with 4:3 aspect ratio.) The resolution was high enough that later, editors were able to crop to 16:9 and maintain acceptable picture quality.
They had to make some interesting framing decisions along the way.
This is how Seinfeld would look if it wasn't cropped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC9LcyglcXE
This video explains the cropping process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFIrsitJW5M
> Seinfeld was actually filmed on 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3 for broadcasts in the 90s. So the 16:9 Seinfeld is showing you more, not less.
According to this tweet they cropped out the pothole from the episode The Pothole.
https://twitter.com/Thatoneguy64/status/1443961536079450117
>Seinfeld even has a whole schtick about this - why is it called a "reservation" if it's not actually....a reservation?
The kicker is that episode actually aired just over 30 years ago (December 4th, 1991).
> “Screen-Free Week,” for example — which invites participants to put down “entertainment screens” for seven days in May — was formerly called “TV Turnoff Week,” and was initially championed by an organization called TV-Free America.
I had to miss the second to last ever episode of Seinfeld because my school participated in this and I'm still furious about it
Michigan's 10 cent rate is part of the plot of the legendary Seinfeld episode "The Bottle Deposit".
In this episode Kramer and Newman scheme a plan to deliver bottles from New York (where deposit was only 5c) to Michigan to cash in.
It's still sort of common in places with deposits on cans. In Michigan, I had a few friends growing up who did it to help their families. They got in trouble with the school on multiple occasions for digging them out of the trash, and what the school said implied it was that the school was profiting off the cans themselves. The episode of Seinfeld where they try to bring bottles to Michigan for the deposit always gives me a familiar feeling.
Actually, this article is about New York, so there should be a deposit there too, which explains why it's feasible.
I lament this fact often. We no longer have a shared cultural experience around media. Very occasionally something pops up that everyone seems to know about, like Squid Game or The Mandalorian. But it isn't like the old days, when anyone would talked to saw the latest episode of I Love Lucy or Friends or Seinfeld.
There are so many choices and it's so fractured that there are no "big winners" anymore. But that's also a good thing, because the big winners weren't winners because they were good, they were winners because a network executive decided they would be winners.
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode of the proctologist.
> Cosmo Kramer: Have you ever met a proctologist? Well, they usually have a very good sense of humor. You meet a proctologist at a party, don't walk away. Plant yourself there, because you will hear the funniest stories you've ever heard. See, no one wants to admit to them that they stuck something up there. Never! It's always an accident. Every proctologist story ends in the same way: "It was a million to one shot, Doc. Million to one!"
Taken from imdb.com quotes.
100%.
The context has changed, we live in a different world and have different expectations. If you've spent years studying philosophy you'll understand Kierkegaard, if you've listened to music from the 50s you'll understand why the Beatles were so revolutionary, if you watched sitcoms from the 80s you'll understand why Seinfeld was so off the wall.
We as a culture have absorbed these great works into our expectations. Most people couldn't explain existentialism, pop song structure, or postmodern humor but they understand it now at some gut level.
This is in the first episode of Seinfeld season 1
this reminds me of that Seinfeld episode, if you look up Mr Bookman on Youtube, it's incredibly funny
I looked up the Bannon connection you mentioned, and ran across another fun Bannon fact: He gets paid every time Seinfeld airs. His investment firm helped sell Castle Rock Entertainment to TBS back in the 90s, and as part of that deal he waived part of his advisory fees in lieu of partial royalties to some current TV shows, one of which was Seinfeld.
> the show still ends up making fun of native Americans.
I disagree that it does.
Also in the link you've provided Seinfeld only says "You could never do that today". You've interpreted that as him conceding that the episode didn't age well. That's a stretch. (To be fair, the title of the article suggests he's admitting it's offensive but there doesn't seem to be anything to back that up).
I don't think that nuance is lost on anyone. But does it succeed? That's debatable. After all, in order to make the point that "making fun of native Americans is bad", the show still ends up making fun of native Americans. Making fun of native Americans might be "bad," but hey it's hilarious, just another one of Jerry's silly hijinks, so how bad could it really be?
Additionally Winona comes off as an oversensitive snowflake when she accuses Jerry of lowkey calling her an "Indian giver." In other words, maybe Jerry's a little racist, and that's wrong and silly, but being sensitive about it is equally wrong and silly, is the message. Fortunately Winona breaks it off and the show can go back to forgetting Native Americans exist as anything but a foil to Jerry's gang.
Furthermore, because real-life Jerry is so "brave" as to skewer character-Jerry's racism, real-life Jerry gets to congratulate himself for being woke.
To sum up, Jerry Seinfeld scores points for himself at the expense of native Americans, is one way to interpret what happened.
Seinfeld himself has conceded that the episode didn't age well, so whether or not you agree with parent poster, it's not like he's really being so "odd" and out-there in his reasoning.
(https://www.huffpost.com/entry/seinfeld-offensive_n_59d8d036e4b046f5ad9877ec)
tbh I personally think in that episode Jerry Seinfeld illustrated quite well the awkwardness some people feel when discussing race and it was quite ahead of its time.
On one hand he's guilty of everyday racism (and doesn't even notice it) and on the other he tries to be ridiculously cautious to the point of paternalism (avoiding saying "dinner reservations" to a native American).
No it's definitely not an 'American' thing, in the broader sense- it is the most popular show of all time, I believe. I'm with you, I love Seinfeld but consider it very milquetoast- the comedy is centered around mundane daily events, just like Curb, and their over-the-top reactions, it shied away from anything remotely controversial. Various social norms have changed since the 90s, of course, so apparently that can offend people (?!), but there's no accounting for taste, as they say.
I only saw periodic episodes as a kid (had no TV), but watching it now, the physical comedy really stands out to me- a genre I've never been into, but Kramer, Elaine and George are great at it.
I don't know, maybe it's an American thing, but to a person from Europe this reads like an attempt at parody. I cannot believe one can watch Seinfeld (likely one of the most benign tv shows there are) and somehow find it problematic. I think we really reached a point when a big part of American culture (especially the constant racialization of everything) is not understandable to an average person from another country.
The first few Seinfeld episodes are pretty lame compared to when the series hit its stride.
I think it's less that the US doesn't have those, it's just that they have both types, and they also mix them. Seinfeld wouldn't have been half as good as it was without you knowing the character and how they would react to specific situations.
I think part of what you're identifying about first episodes is maybe a difference in style between the US and UK. A lot of UK comedy definitely seems like the characters are pre-baked into the writing and the actor is already mature in the role in the beginning, while in the US it feels like they've left the role a little hollow at first and allow the actors (and future writing) to evolve the role into what it will be. This can make the first episodes feel "off" when you go back to watch them, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad way to go if the goal is to find a really good character.
It's also possible that the UK network(s) are amenable to planned out entire seasons while the US networks are more accepting of buying a pilot of a few episodes and seeing where something goes, which would favor some of these approaches in each case.
I literally just watched the Seinfeld episode about Jerry's NY Public Library late fee. So weird.
I am sorry if my opinion is not the one you would expect from someone who majored in film.
Secondly, I love cinematography. I also love Seinfeld. But I don't think cinematography is one of the main reasons people love the show.
It sounds to me like you just personally don't care about cinematography. Which is fine, but that makes it surprising to me you open with "I'm a film major", as if that means your view is the "correct" one and everyone else just doesn't know what they're talking about. I'd figure someone who studied film would care about things like this even if we're talking about an ostensibly "bad" TV show.
Really, I don't even care about Seinfeld in particular. I've never watched it and I never will, because it's not my type of show.
But this isn't about Seinfeld, and I'm not personally inconvenienced by this or angry about it. I'm saying this because it's just universally a bad idea to cut 4:3 content into 16:9, regardless of what it is. It could the lowest tier commercial garbage or Twin Peaks or anything in between. You will always make things look awkward, and the viewer will subconsciously notice. This goes even for shows that had poor framing to begin. And of course that's not even touching on the fact that, in this case, it actually just ruined a scene by making the most important part invisible.
And personally, I think it's not up to any individual to say "I consider this work to be unworthy of respect" and start messing around with it and diminishing the experience for the people that do care. Someone else might be deeply invested in something you consider completely unremarkable.
What's more, you'd have to expect that some TV shows will end up getting remastered, then cropped, and then the masters get lost before a proper release is ever done. Again, not talking about Seinfeld in particular, but you'd be amazed at how many modern works become lost media even today, and this sort of thing isn't helping.
As a film major, you give 90s live audience sitcom cinematography too much credit. From a cinematography standpoint directing something like Seinfeld is quite standard. They don't even move the cameras and lights between episodes. The operators are instructed to keep whoever is speaking in the frame. I love Seinfeld to death, but this is no Citizen Kane. We're here for the performances, not for the camera work. Settle down a bit.
16:9 reframes of Seinfeld have been around a long time. Did Netflix reframe anything or are they using these existing versions? For what it's worth the reframed version is not a simple crop, and in fact sometimes previously-unused parts of the film are used[1]. It's not just a crop/upscale of the original broadcasts, though perhaps the same effort didn't go into this reframing as The Wire, which as others have noted is excellent.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_vs_todays_broadcast/
I have to believe that this has been rigorously tested, and that a lot of viewers are lost when they see black bars on their television.
I remember back in 4:3 when it was far harder to find letterboxed VHS tapes, and when filmmakers often would make sure their scope movies also worked in 4:3 by filming in 4:3 and cropping to scope (with the exception of a few hundred accidentally revealed boom mics.) I have to believe that people would just get angry if they got home and realized that their tape wasn't going to utilize their entire television, so that's how the market shook out. The funny thing about movies from that period mentioned is that really both versions of a film were incomplete.
I also remember my grandparents watching DirectTV streams that were clearly stretched out horizontally on the screen, and how they didn't notice at all. They'd notice black bars.
Now that TVs are somewhere midway between 4:3 and scope, the problem has reversed itself. I've seen it solved by zoom, I've seen it solved by horizontal stretch, I've seen it solved by half-zoom and half-stretch, I've seen it solved by either half-zoom or half-stretch combined with half-black bars, even. Just showing it in 4:3 with black bars on both sides isn't significantly more popular than any of these options. And I have to believe that there's research, because, as this story shows, zooming can be expensive. You can do it automatically, and lose everyone's feet and the tops of their heads (or their whole heads in the right shots), or go over everything manually, moving individual shots that turn out badly up and down in a way that might depend on story. Also reducing the number of vertical scanlines makes old tv look like shit, so you might have to spend effort doing something about that. For that last, you can be saved if the series was shot on film and you have access to original materials...
All of this is good, because it is an impossible problem for industry to solve, therefore it will encourage piracy by purists, and piracy for things that aren't Seinfeld episodes will get a free userbase and attendant infrastructure. Also good for piracy are geoblocking and delayed broadcast times between countries. Here's hoping that the next Game of Thrones-type blockbuster series airs a day later in the UK:)
The funniest thing about 4:3 on 16:9 is that everyone's tv is the size of a bus now, and a black-barred 4:3 picture is certainly going to be a lot larger on those than the LP-sized screens families would have been watching the original broadcasts on.
I went self-hosted about a year ago (again) using ghost and commento. So far I love it. I've been writing online since the first web pages and I started blogging around 2000 or so. (I think)
The demise of blogging and the crap that is social media are both due to the same combination of two factors: zero friction to create content and instantaneous, perhaps wordwide feedback on whatever you create. Serious writing just isn't designed to work in this kind of world. You'll be drowned out by emotionally-manipulative crap and then people will build engines to churn out even more crap faster that's even more manipulative. I love the future, but my vision of the future of VR/AR/brain interfaces is something along the lines of getting instantaneously angry or sad at something and wanting to talk about it before you're even consciously aware of what you're angry or sad about. The words will come later and are besides the point. (Which is just like our brains work)
Because of many innovations, printed text is simply too easily-manipulated and dispersed by technology to survive in any fashion similar to what it used to. I don't know what the answers are, but I'm experimenting. Because of social signaling, my blog is ad, pop-up, and tracking-free. I'm mixing in new formats with weekly video called "Nerd Roundup" where I just shoot the shit about tech stuff. I tried twitch and a couple of other new delivery platforms. I do have e-publications, but I do my best to downplay the idea of anybody buying them who are not serious about the topic. In short, my current strategy, like George in that famous episode of Seinfeld [1], is take whatever most people are doing and invert it. There might be a space there to make some kind of progress. I'm not sure. It's worth trying.
I know that we need more people reasonably talking about various topics and doing so in-depth, and I know we're getting less and less of that.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697744/
In fact there was a Seinfeld episode about this!
It has been a problem for a very long time.
The thing i hated about Seinfeld was the format: sitcom with canned laughter. The content could be interesting if I could just get past the format . I couldn’t. I’m with you.
I really thought John Cheever was a fictional character of the Seinfeld TV show. I feel really stupid right now
I think this is demonstrably false. The value of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Friends and The Office is probably higher than they have ever been, given the proliferation of streaming networks. The Beatles catalog only went up in value, which is why Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson had a little tiff. David Bowie sold bonds based on future royalties. And have you noticed what's playing at the movies? It's all superheroes invented 50+ years ago.
What do you mean the HD version of Seinfeld is 16:9? That is a complete distortion of the intention of EVERYONE involved with making the show.
I hate when they do that. I can’t watch the HBO HD copy of The Wire for the same reason. The whole point of cinema is you choose what the f** is within the frame. That’s literally PART of the art form, and an integral one at that.
But Netflix can upcharge for a 4K subscription. ;-)
Seinfeld was shot on 35mm film so bully for them. The HD versions are interesting. You see parts of the set that were meant to be hidden in 4:3. You also see a lot of makeup errors. Once you see where the makeup ends on Elaine's hairline you can't unsee it.
was Seinfeld shot on video or 35mm film? Interesting to know.
Also Netflix's obsession with 4K is slightly anti-scientific and counterproductive imo. They are really boxing in their content creators at times, plus 4K can't be resolved in a reasonably large television at a moderate distance from a couch anyway. 4K is the dumbest thing. There's one cinematographer who said for viewing even 1080p was pretty good, and hardly distinguishable from 4K - for CINEMA screens. HDR is cool tho.
Was that title a Seinfeld reference? Obviously kind of generic, but also one of the most famous sitcom episodes of all time, even moreso in the early 2000s
The article doesn't claim that we are worse off for the more adolescent, individualist culture. Just that it poses unique challenges, especially in its excesses and pathologies.
Moreover, it explicitly makes your point:
> The phrase ‘unintended consequences’ used at the beginning of this essay usually implies negative effects, but there are notable benefits as well. .... These youthful character traits have served to make us more accepting and generous in many respects. Rising tolerance towards marginalised groups can be partly attributed to this emergent youthful mindset
Evidence is indeed lacking in the article, but the author is clearly writing against a scholarly background that almost certainly provides mountains of evidence and analyses, quality notwithstanding. Complaining about evidence in a context like this is like one of my friends in high school who went through an obnoxiously cynical phase, exhorting "prove it" after even the most prosaic, non-substantive statements. (I think he had just begun dabbling with philosophy, including epistemology. Or maybe I had and was also obnoxiously regurgitating philosophical claims in other conversations.) This is not an academic paper. It's an essay summarizing some themes that the author and others are investigating--or at least analyzing. And while making some rather concrete claims[1], it abstains from specific, substantive judgments, conclusions, or prescriptions. Personally, it's only when I see the latter that I begin to scrutinize arguments more closely. Otherwise, I understand these essays as merely providing a window into discourse that hasn't yet gone mainstream, and I mostly look for rough coherency. Whether I agree with the claims, let alone the premises, is an entirely different matter. But these essays can help you anticipate socio-cultural memes and identify potential evidence, both confirming and disconfirming.
[1] Specifically, the linkage between high school socialization and culture. Which, IMO, is an interesting thesis I had not come across before; one that is much more concrete and falsifiable than typical Golden Age-themed lamentations; and one arguably in the vein of the Hajnal line hypothesis[2] in that it links particularized adolescent social patterns to broader social phenomena and evolution. By contrast, mere observations that modern culture is increasingly adolescent are hardly new. The TV show Seinfeld parodies and even satirizes it, albeit without ridicule or negative judgment. Compare It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which uses similar satire, except the themes are less subtle and the writers and actors admit to substantively critiquing contemporary culture.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
The credit card angle is unpalatable, for sure.
Yet take a sitcom such as Seinfeld. Each product they joked about, junior mints, snapple, etc were ads.
The furniture is an ad. The appliances, the cereal on the shelf, etc. If no ads, generic boxes and unbranded products will appear instead, nothing is free.
I am not saying videogames should be this way, merely pointing out that this is old, old almost century old advertising behaviour. The trick is to made the product better for it (Seinfeld junior mints was an incredibly funny episode).
Of course, I think the CC thing you mention, was more just a "spam your users", so hardly subtle and non-intrusive.
EG, on TV typically they write the episode, then after marketing says "ah look, he's supposed to drink a soda here, let's see who wants to pay for someone drinking their soda."
This I can live with.
> They need to buy better old movies.
I believe it's much more in their interest to buy old TV shows. A good movie will keep you occupied for what, two hours? Seinfeld: almost 19 days of watch time. Friends: over 5 days. Community was barely ever popular before Netflix bought it, now there's plenty of people that enjoyed it for 2 days and 7 hours of watch time (its subreddit went from 266k on April 2020 to 482k right now).
I believe it's also in their interest to spread out stories that are realistically one-movie-long into 5-6 slightly drawn out 40-50 min episodes.
I just wish they fucking stick to them instead of cancelling them after like two seasons. Orange Is The New Black is the only original of theirs I know of that goes above two days of airtime.
If you read something that is copyrighted and rewrite it from memory, that’s still copying for purposes of the copyright act. There are cases about music where that’s unintentionally happened and the inadvertent copier was held liable. It’s basically what the machine learning is doing. Committing something to memory is no defense to copyright - I would recon a good number of people could recite any number of copyrighted works from memory (e.g., episodes of The Office, Seinfeld, or popular songs). If a person wrote that down and tried to sell it, I’m convinced a court would hold that person liable. There is a defense of “independent creation,” but basically if you saw/heard the copyrighted work before then it’s very hard to use that as a defense.
> The concept would never fly today
I mean I don't know if I would go that far; things like Hipster Hitler got a fair amount of traction, at least for a bit [0]. Hardly indicative of the entirety of human culture, and obviously it's not a major network sitcom like Hogan's Heroes (or Seinfeld).
Also, a staple of the Call of Duty franchise is a tongue-and-cheek mode of running around killing zombie Nazis, isn't it? (I admittedly haven't played it), and it's not like "Iron Sky"[1] was meant to be taken super seriously.
I think it's unnecessarily reductive to say "one generation is ok with subject X and another generation isn't." I don't think humans really form big, homogeneous groups completely based around the year they were born.
[0] http://www.hipsterhitler.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
Wait, really? I'm a millennial, not gen-z, but I feel like Nazi/WWII jokes were way more popular in the 90's and early 2000's than they are now.
For example, in Seinfeld, they had a character called the "soup Nazi", a character that was extremely asshole-ey about who he gave soup to. This was not a controversial episode or anything, and became one of the most quoted episodes of the series. Nowadays I'm not sure if that would be considered "ok."
I feel like the rise of domestic terror, white nationalism, and fascism is scary, but seems to a) by mostly composed of millenials my age and older, and b) a lot more complicated than some edgelord humor.
That said, despite the fact that I love edgey subversive humor, I agree that trivializing things as "just jokes" isn't a good thing; if it means fewer memes, I can live with that.
>So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater.
Or the TV business throughout all of TV history. You know, if you want to see an HBO show, you can only watch it on HBO. If you want to watch _new+ episodes of Seinfeld, you have to watch it on NBC.
I'm endlessly fascinated how we on HN have the arrogance to assume we can do things like auto-generate Beatles songs or episodes of Seinfeld. Do you think comedy writers are sitting around the writing room saying "Man, in 5 years we'll be able to take over those nerd jobs, no problem."
To auto-generate Seinfeld or Beatles... you have to be able to create as well as Seinfeld or the Beatles. Try it sometime. When you make a billion dollars and change popular culture, answer this post and I'll eat crow.
Then you need to be able to do what no one else in history has been able to do, which is bottle that skill.
Dude, most of us can't even figure out what kind of nails we'd use to use for exterior siding on a chicken coop.
I'm fascinated by the implication that in the not so far future we'll reach a point where we can teach a computer to generate arbitrary works of art endlessly.
Want new episodes of Seinfeld? Just feed the existing episodes to an AI and ask it to make new ones. Beatles songs? Ditto. Spotify can look at your playlists and not only recommend tracks that you might like, but actually create some artificially. Post-cultural-scarcity.
Of course by then we might already have reached the Singularity so it'll be a minor aspect of a gigantic revolution.
> If they don't, bankruptcy or old debt will only impact their credit for a few years.
The idea that you think someone could lose large amounts of money and not have it impact them personally or that there isn't personal fallout perplexes me. This feels like that episode of Seinfeld..
Kramer: It's a write off for them.
Jerry: How is it a write off?
Kramer: They just write it off.
Jerry: Write it off of what?
Kramer: They just write it off!
Jerry: You don't even know what a write off is, do you?
Kramer: No. Do you?
Jerry: No I don't
I remember reading somewhere that this short story inspired "The Parking Garage" episode of Seinfeld.
For America, I was going to say:
- violence: tolerated
- nipple: becoming more accepted, barring antiquated FCC rules that only really impact things like Superbowl. streaming seems to completely allow it.
- dirty words (f-bomb, s-bomb, etc.): roughly same as nipple. Yippie kie-yay Mister Falcon.
- racism: depictions of historical racism, e.g. History Channel are fine. racial slurs, racialized depictions (Apu on Simpsons) risk randomly getting episodes or entire series effectively banned (delisted and never shown again). applies to actors' and producers' personal lives, twitter feeds, etc.
- sexism, other-isms: racism-lite. there is a bigger emphasis on sexism in personal lives vs. racism in the actual show content. Seinfeld wasn't cancelled over Michael Richard's Laugh Factory incident and there are tons of sexist tropes on 80's/90's sitcoms that haven't haven't (yet) resulted in cancellation.
It's definitely more socially acceptable now than it was in earlier times. Do you remember the bald guy episode from Seinfeld? While it was not shocking that the guy had a bald head, it was certainly unusual enough for Jerry to remark "Is he from the future?"
For a long enough voyage that significant language drift may happen, then I think some accommodations for the arts will be necessary, including creating movies or other entertainment. The old Netflix library will become less and less relevant to the voyagers -- how will someone who was born on a ship just like their parents and grandparents find any entertainment in an episode of Seinfeld or Friends when they can't relate to anything in the show?
But by the time such a voyage is possible, content creation will likely be entirely virtual, so wouldn't need much room on the ship.
"Every time I go to the doctor I wish I could take myself to the vet instead." Kramer thought that in a Seinfeld episode; it was a great episode. Season 8 Episode 10.
Sure, it's kind of absurd that the same 4 people would be at the center of so many technological shifts, over a period of 20+ years. But, you really have to accept that as a conceit of the medium.
There are basically only two ways to construct a TV series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can either keep most of the main characters together for the entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most series do; or, you can do like American Horror Story does and just scrap everything and start anew every season or so. Some series don't care about continuity, like Seinfeld, so they fall outside the scope of this statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or the other of these.
And, there's nothing really wrong with this construction, either. Like I said, it's just something you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV, they're usually deathly ill.
I'll have to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was living in a Black Mirror episode.
Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time period correct, Stranger Things is 100% exactly like what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the Demogorgon in a friend's basement. Absolute 10/10 set design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.
There is a Seinfeld episode that covers this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennium_(Seinfeld)
> Korg M1 piano sound which became the "dance/house" piano of the 1990s.
And it's bass became famous from Seinfeld. Every time I hear that bass, I think of the irritating lead in to every Seinfeld episode. So grating.
35mm stills cameras normally use a 3:2 frame. Television shot on film typically used movie cameras that shot at 1.85:1 and then cropped to 4:3.
But different shows handled the aspect ratios differently in their widescreen re-releases. Seinfeld included slightly more horizontally than the original TV release but still cropped a significant amount from the top and bottom. That 70s Show as one example that was also shot on 35mm film included the whole original 4:3 frame plus extra on the sides.
Seinfeld started airing in 1989 a decade before American HDTV so they probably didn't foresee the aspect ratio of televisions switching from 4:3 to 16:9. 35mm film likely gave them more high-end options than the cameras and lenses meant for broadcast. It would also give them more wiggle room if they needed to re-frame a shot in post.
Personally I find most of the 16:9 crops of old shows in syndication quite jarring, especially because in any shot where the formerly extra width doesn't work the editor is forced to vertically crop the original. Here are some screenshots comparing 4:3 and 16:9 Seinfeld and ...eek
https://lambdan.se/blog/2018/11/13/seinfeld-original-vs-widescreen-aspect-ratios/
- One hour of walking (I walk fast). - Two to three episodes of Community, Seinfeld, IT Crowd, The Office, Parks and Recreation or Brooklyn 99 (I bought them online so I can do this anywhere I have internet). - A nap of at least 30 mins.
Sometimes I do two of those options.
Seinfeld, NewsRadio, and Frasier
I'm not familiar with NewsRadio, but both Seinfeld and Frasier are simply named after the main character. This inherently gives the show some latitude.
But, say, Three's Company was based on the premise that this guy was pretending to be gay in order to justify living with two women because they all were pretty poor and he couldn't find another place. That's pretty constraining as to what you can do with the plot line.
It means that any episode that was at the beginning holding out hope that one of the characters would suddenly start making more money and be able to afford to move or something was an episode where the viewer could confidently predict that this would fall through because if it didn't you no longer had a show with the premise that some guy needs to pretend he's gay in order to have an affordable housing situation where he lives platonically with two women.
What's funny there is the tension of, no, they aren't having a threesome. No, he's not sleeping with either of the women. No, he's not really gay, but most people would never believe he's honest to god just living with two women to split the rent if he weren't pretending to be gay.
It's funny because it casts some light on a lot of serious social issues in a way that's socially acceptable to poke fun at, but it's extremely contrived and you can't otherwise try to address those kinds of topics. They are too hot button.
So you can't do it humorously without an extremely contrived situation and you can't do it in earnest without it being terrible drama.
Humor is one of the ways society processes hot button topics and works through them without it turning into terrible real life conflict.
Like that Seinfeld episode where George _happily_ gives Jerry's address to the dog owner...
I knew those already from being flooded for 40+ years with Hollywood films (all of them) and sitcoms, I know Cosby, Malcolm in the Middle, Beverly Hills 90210, Miami Vice, the Fall Guy, Seinfeld, Friends, Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Diff'rent Strokes, Cheers, Golden Girls, MAS*H (the best), Married... with Children, Three’s Company, King of Queens, Family Matters and on and on and on.
Basically I know the US better - or the image it projects - than my own country.
Funnily it was a huge letdown when I visited for the first time decades ago, as it felt just like a sitcom and there was nothing new really.
I wonder if it was produced on film. This would allow a remastering, similar to Seinfeld [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFIrsitJW5M
I’m torn between thinking this is a performance art piece commenting on the consolidation of media outlets, and a Cramer piece from a lost Seinfeld episode (“Jerry, you gotta see this. It’s great. All the news, all the time, you never need to leave your apartment. Think of the money you save on shoes...”)
The transition started earlier, just think of "The Bottle Deposit" in Season 7 (the last season Larry David was showrunner), which could be entirely a Simpsons episode with Homer and Barney instead of Kramer and Newman.
IMHO, the combination of silliness and darkness in "The Invitations" (also Season 7) is also very much comparable to "Homer's Enemy", although the Seinfeld episode is much darker.
Not entirely, the only TV show I know of that managed to completely leave on a high note is Breaking Bad. The final Seinfeld episode is one of the weakest of the entire series.
I remember the reason the episodes of the last season are so crazy was that they knew it was the last season and the tv network executives gave them a free pass to do whatever they wanted. Seinfeld is one of those weird shows that get better each season and left on a high note.
> The later Seinfeld episodes where also getting more and more surreal
IIRC that correlated with the departure of Larry David as showrunner, did it not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaXigSu72A4
> Conan O'Brien as Simpsons writer rarely gets the credit he deserves.
Indeed. Him and John Swartzwelder are largely responsible for the increasingly surreal and silly comedy for which the Golden Years of the Simpsons are now famous. This style was quickly adopted by other shows. The later Seinfeld episodes where also getting more and more surreal ("The Dealership", "The Blood", "The Chicken Roaster", "The Butter Shave"), positively silly ("The Marine Biologist", "The Puffy Shirt") and "Simpsons-like".
I don't know, I don't think we give network/cable TV enough credit.
I'm pretty intrigued by stories of how certain shows flopped in their first season (or two) but managed to persevere through some persistent TV exec who kept it funded until they got the story right.
Plenty of examples of mainstream TV shows that went this route. Seinfeld, The Office, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the list goes on.
TV execs really care about the product. By contrast, I don't think Netflix cares about the product. I think Netflix cares about the data about the product, which ultimately means dropping an original after 2 seasons.
It works I guess, but I've haven't had a Netflix subscription in a while, and on those occasions where I do renew it I just take a peek for a month before leaving again. More than enough time to watch 2 seasons of TV.
Some clown from my country made a huge deal about it and even made some kind of grievance documentary about the Apu character from the Simpsons until they eventually phased him out. I was quite annoyed.
All this stuff about offending people with jokes just boils down to how much drama and trouble you can create by bullying the creators and whether or not the ideologues in the media will amplify your message.
In the west, particularly in the USA, there's a weird assumption that "protected classes" extend to jokes too. Jerry Seinfeld highlighted this absurdity with the "anti-dentite" episode. Since profession is not a "protected class" joking about it is ok. This makes no sense because it's entirely possible a dentist or programmer would not feel good about being stereotyped, and so it has nothing to do with being sensitive or anything like that, it's just an illusion that these specific groupings are not allowed but all other groupings are allowed.
I think the world would be a much better place if we all learned to laugh at each other, and ourselves. This selective cancellation and different rules for Borat and Apu are just exposing the absurdity of this type of thinking.
I submitted a Show HN for my website in 2016 [0]. tl/dr: I started blogging about my taxi fares at kuro5hin.org [RIP]. After commenting on K5’s death notice here, I bought taxiwars.org to repost my diaries thanks to the upvotes and a positive comment about my k5 writings [1]. I added a few posts in the years since the ShowHN, but nothing substantial.
This Show HN is my first animated episode from my adventures as a taxi driver. I’d forgotten about this until years later, when I observed another lunar eclipse [2]. To quote the video: “While watching the progression of that eclipse, I remembered the time I’d amused myself by becoming a false prophet.” To better convey the story, I commissioned a friend’s help for this animation.
This episode tells the of the time I used my passenger’s ignorance of celestial mechanics to convince her of an imminent calamity. Her companions and I amused ourselves at her expense; hopefully she learned to not freak out so easily.
Discussion: To misquote The Refreshments, ‘Everybody knows that the world’s full of simple people’ [3]. We’re all prone to freak out about something, and even smart people can be taken advantage of by jerks like me, who know just a little bit more about how specific aspects of the Machine work.
What can be done to help people be less vulnerable to all types of trickery?
Blog Post (transcript): https://www.taxiwars.org/2020/10/false-prophesy.html
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1315004358887501824
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TaxiCabJesus/posts/1433881090136669
The Show HN rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html - say "For books, a sample chapter is ok." When I have funds I intend to commission more animations, so this is basically a sample chapter. Apologies if this is not appropriate as a 'Show HN' submission.
My idea of the Taxi Wars is that they are anecdotes are of my passengers’ (and, by extension, Humanity’s) struggle against the machine we’ve created for ourselves. In the earlier episodes I’m an observer of someone else's predicament, sometimes offering help in some way (free rides, bail money, etc).
I’d also appreciate your feedback on presentation. My next video might be on "the predicaments of old people" (based on an unpublished anecdote from the time my passenger referred to himself as an old person), or some of the other stories I’ve drafted/posted.
p.s. Seinfeld fans, which Kramer [4] compilation on youtube would you recommend for people who aren't familiar with the reference? Wikipedia says Kramer was the stock character of the "Lovable Rogue" [5].
[0] Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193273
[1] “RIP Kuro5hin”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_lunar_eclipse - I think it would’ve been this one
[3] The Refreshments / Banditos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfZbFh7qlCQ (The actual quote is "Everybody knows that the world's full of stupid people, so meet at the mission at midnight, we'll divvy up there...", but I think 'simple people' is fairer to the mass of humanity.)
[4] Kramer (Seinfeld character [TV]): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmo_Kramer
[5] Lovable Rogue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovable_rogue
I’ve seen every episode of Seinfeld, E.R., X-Files, Gilmore Girls, and a couple other shows 10+ times. Just watch ‘em on repeat lol. Ask me anything.
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
I think you have some rose-colored glasses with Seinfeld. The post Larry David seasons are not nearly as good. They tried to mimic his style with over the top storylines but didn't know how to weave them together like he does and none of the jokes really landed. Seriously go watch a random episode from season 9, it's not very good.
So true. I don't get why American TV shows always need to be ran to the ground.
Like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are shows that should've gone past their 8th season. The Office should've never had those abysmal last two-three seasons. That '70s show should've never had those abysmal last three seasons.
I always like it when creators and producers recognize when a show has run its course. This is why we have good memories of Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld stood to make something crazy like 5 million per episode if they had done a 10th season but he knew the show had run its course and ended it on a high note (something, btw, that was a plot point on an earlier episode).
Same with Breaking Bad, they knew that they had a story to tell and that it didn't need to drag on and they delivered some of the finest 5 seasons of television drama that one could ever ask for.
Agreed on the length of seasons for network prime-time shows.
However, that's not really what the article is about. The shows mentioned are 8-10 episodes per season (both the canceled shows and Stranger Things).
This is more about Netflix throwing shows against the wall so fast they never get to see if any of them stick. Which is silly - many of the best shows out there took a few seasons to hit their stride. Look at season rankings for Seinfeld or GoT - few people rank the first season of either as the best.
Agreed. IMO the first few seasons of The Office (US) and Parks & Recreation were the best, and they went downhill over time. Very few shows can sustain quality over time. For sitcoms... maybe Seinfeld?
> Virtually every sitcom episode demonstrates a moral lesson in their A-plot.
Seinfeld may be a major exception to this rule.
Yup. I became a father in 2015. Bought a TV in 2019. Never got a cable connection. Just bought a FireTV stick and have never ever felt that I was missing something. My kid loves to speak to the remote and watch youtube cartoons.
My wife is into regional language soaps and there are a myriad of apps that stream them. I have Amazon Prime for my Seinfeld binges. Some movies that I ahem get from the interwebs, I stream from my PC using VLC player app.
And all this in India, with a capped (200 GB a month) broadband connection. Never once experienced delays / lagging / buffering. And the base cost is Amazon Prime (15 USD per year, plus it has Prime benefits, Prime music, etc), internet (12 USD per month), misc apps (30 USD per year).
On average, that is about 20 USD per month (but that includes cost for Internet that I would pay for anyway, so actual incremental cost is 5 USD per month), for almost unlimited content.
A standard Cable connection would alone cost me about 10 USD a month.
I quite enjoyed a lot of the Seinfeld episodes when it came out. Some characters annoyed me to no end, but they helped the narrative along and it was enjoyable overall.
These days, I think we expect everything to go to extremes. It has to be hilarious, not just funny. It has to be tragic, not just dramatic. It has to be action packed, not just action.
Seinfeld wasn't hilarious. It was just funny, in kind of the same way your friends are funny when you're joking around the table during poker, but any outsiders would probably think you weren't funny at all.
When you watch TV shows from the SD era that has been scanned into HD from film, you can sometimes see this. For example Seinfeld.
Occasionally things will be slightly out of focus, but it wasn’t apparent on a SD CRT so they shot the scene. On an HD screen you can see it and it’s kind of distracting.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with Frogger
I'm picturing that Seinfeld episode where George tries to move the Frogger arcade from a restaurant that is shutting down but doesn't want to lose his high score.
Do you recall the episode? ( Seinfeld fan here ).
On the other hand, maybe the interactivity of games means that you are using more of your brain than you would be in passive consumption.
I tend to think that, say, a month spent in competitive gaming at night is better For your mind than a month spent binge watching Seinfeld at night for the second time.
> I was struck by this article (within the last decade) as mobile phones and texting have been ubiquitous since the mid 90s (early 00s in the US). Funny that popular literature took a while to catch up.
TV writers, too. Kramer had a mobile phone in an episode of Seinfeld (the one were people think he's a phone movie information service), and Jerry had a carphone for most of it. But these were only used for specific gags; in general it was assumed that if someone wasn't at home they were uncontactable and the existence of the mobile phones, after being established, was ignored.
Jerry Seinfeld is almost a billionaire due to his eponymous sitcom. The starring cast of Big Bang Theory fame were earning nearly a million dollars an episode by the end of the series. Similar story with Two and a Half Men, Gilmore Girls.
Jamie and Adam were stars of a wildly popular television show that ran for 14 seasons, spawn numerous spin offs and runs in syndication even today. I'd expect them to have hit at least $500k per episode.
It's incredibly sad, but it's due to our own collective demand imo.
Andrew Schultz a comedian, saw a huge uptick in his success when he started doing short form videos. Ironically he also saw that people would stay on his channel longer. (described in his ted talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl2MQq4qO4Y)
Giving the user a random reward and choice more frequently between each video seems to add to the dopamine hit. And thus the addictiveness. I've certainly gone down the rabbit hole of YT myself watching 1min seinfeld clips from different episodes.
This is why people say that streaming services are the end of TV as we know it. Netflix will produce a new series and keep it for a couple of seasons until it's no longer a draw on new sign-ups, then drop it for whatever is the latest.
I don't think we'll see long running series any longer like MAS*H, Seinfeld or Cheers, as examples.
Also series are going to be more like the UK with 6-8 episodes.
Games have already had enormous educational impact and that satisfying to use tools can help pull us towards a better understand of a thing is well known.
The list of games with widespread educational impact of some sort is already much larger than most people think. As is usually the observation when edutainment of any sort is written about, the point is really that there are many important fields of education excluded from this revolution. Part of that is probably that the cross section of people that are interested in making a game and those who understand the topic well enough to start with is often not large. Persisting cultural relevance for your creation is very rare, which can be crushing. That a game like Snake Pass exists exposing more people to the uniqueness of snake movement is a near miracle.
Games aren't currently categorized by what a player can learn from them, just as movies rarely are. Sometimes even putting into words what you came away with after an experience is difficult, but you know your perspective on yourself or the world changed in some way. Check any of the movie or game storefronts and see if they have any comprehensive sections to let you filter by what people thought they learned from them. Valve is the most well positioned to implement something like this through Steam, because they rapidly iterate with experiments and have a strong variety of games available with an engaged audience willing to do the tasks necessary.
At the moment, you have to guess what you might learn based on the genre or first impressions. Even still, the ratings for a product aren't there to rate educational value and the time played doesn't tell you how long you have to spend in the game to get that learning experience. You can have a 1-2 star game teach you something priceless, while a 5 star game is a nearly vapid lifeless husk of manipulation. Stores like Steam almost need a completely separate perspective view with its own ratings, own tags and own reviews to make these aspects of games more discoverable. There are people that would be more than thrilled to populate that information in good faith.
I think there are hidden riches waiting to be described when people are encouraged to explain to others what it was that they learned rather than what bugs they encountered or whether the production quality was bad and changes like that could over time apply meaningful pressure to add more important educational moments into their games for measurable marketing value.
Being father's day, it wasn't that long ago that my dad was reminiscing about old TV shows where every episode tried to deliver some moral education. How hard is it to find those old episodes categorized by what it tried to teach? Seinfeld was also saturated with educational value through a bevy of unique situations. South Park is probably more educational than Big Bang Theory, because oddly enough I see BBT as more of a facade.
In short, it's not only the standard academic teachings that are underserved or have poor discoverability in all media and I do think continuing to neglect the explicit identification of this value as newer generations pass up old media of all types will have a cascading cost that will impact generations of families.
The side effect is that there will be some educational value that will be polarizing, like inauthentic diversity education that could become an avoid flag for many (for both good and bad reasons). That could be a good thing if it pressures political activism in media to be less overt in order to have more widespread subtle impact without preaching to people louder than the art itself is able to genuinely speak.
There are exciting times ahead and I'm optimistic of the many educational avenues that will be opening up as people wake up to how they learn over the course of their lifetime, be it calculus or empathy.
> customers baked in 79-degree temperatures as they waited
Bit dramatic? With summer temperatures of 96+ in Texas, 79 sounds delightful. Is this a common discomfort up North, like the heat wave episode of Seinfeld? I’m fascinated with how we acclimate to different climates.
Completely agree. Seinfeld episode covers this if that style of comedy is in your wheelhouse.
>I’ve only ever heard “If you shave it, it grows back thicker” in the context of advising someone who wants the hair to be less visible, not more visible.
As did I -- where did you get the other view?
I've heard it given as an argument -- like in the popular Seinfeld episode -- that it will be more visible after you first shave and so you have to keep shaving.
cerved was referencing an episode of Seinfeld
The intercom would be for a guest to use to request access. See Seinfeld episodes for an example.
There was a Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries it, so... very roughly pre-internet
And Friends, Simpsons, Seinfeld etc were things whole families watched together (depending on the kids’ ages of course). Families are not watching GoT and Westworld together en masse. TV shows filled with violence and boobs just aren’t going to be ‘everyone’s seen it’ shows like tamer ones, even if it feels to 20-year-olds like ‘everyone’ has seen them.
The pertinent details are that he eats a person's pet in front of the pets owner! His motivations don't matter! His motivations do not absolve him from his actions. No Seinfeld character comes close to this level of sociopathy and I challenge you to come up with an example where it does.
And just for the record I like peep show, and I think the holiday episode is funny if a bit disturbing.
> I think “Seinfeld is a bit terrible people” is really heavily influenced by the final episode.
I agree. Most people who I tell this opinion to who are also Seinfeld fans disagree though.
The social norms violation thing is also why Curb You Enthusiasm comes so close; it is mostly about Larry David’s opaque social norms being constantly violated.
Maybe I misremembered it but your description of the episode doesn’t really refute my argument at all- that’s all far more disturbing than any situation on Seinfeld.
I love it’s always sunny, but I agree. I think “Seinfeld is a bit terrible people” is really heavily influenced by the final episode. The true core of Seinfeld is having a violation of minor social norms blow up in your face, and funny word play.
I never watched Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm however I grabbed season 1 of Curb two weeks ago as I am in lockdown and wanted something different/new (to me) to watch and fell in love with it.
I am now on season 8(!) and there hasn't been a single episode I have not thoroughly enjoyed.
It is a superb show with some excellently executed jokes. Probably some of the best I have seen on TV. Some of the jokes are so superbly setup as well that you don't realise until the punchline drops that the build up has been several episodes.
I also watched Mythic Quest earlier in the year which was a lot of fun. We mostly watched it because my wife is a video game producer so we had a good time laughing at how real some of the craziness can be in the video game production world.
Avenue 5 took a while to find its pace but by the end of the season it was quite fun. Different but well done. I am looking forward to season 2.
I plan to sit down and watch Always Sunny, Veep and Seinfeld now :)
I would buy this game instantly, no questions asked. I grew up watching reruns of Seinfeld (I was too young to understand it in the 90s). To this day, I stream a few episodes every month when there isn't anything else to watch. I think I've watched every episode at least 5 times and some, even more than that!
This is so good! When I was a kid I wanted to make a billion dollars so I could buy the Philadelphia Eagles and guide them to their first Super Bowl victory. Now I want to make a billion dollars so I can buy Castle Rock Entertainment and let these guys make Seinfeld Adventure.
> Well, firstly, here’s what we DON’T want to make. We don’t want to just create a fan service game that repeats jokes or plots that people already are familiar with.
> Elaine reminds him that the publicist was supposed to get them all tickets to the opening night of the new movie “Rochelle, Rochelle 2”
You can't have both!
FLCL is a world where change seems distant or impossible, and the sameness itself is stifling and a major source of conflict in the plot, as in Seinfeld.
Steins;Gate's protagonist's alter-ego Hououin Kyouma is a larger-than-life egotistical (comedy) genius which is analogous to Jerry when he's on-stage in the monologue segments of the show. But that same SG protagonist as his "normie" self Rintaro Okabe is crippled by self-doubt, upstaged by his own alter-ego, and would do anything for his friends, much like the version of Jerry we see outside the monologue segments. If you've seen the last episode of Seinfeld, the parallels between the two are a bit more clear. In Seinfeld, the past catches up with Jerry and the crew, and they cool their heels in jail as a kind of karmic payback or comeuppance for their years of prior shenanigans. In Steins;Gate, at a certain point the comedic backdrop lifts, the folly of Rintaro's ego and hubris is laid bare and elevated, and the karmic debt seeks its due via time and space.
The sibling comments all have great shows listed. I'd say It's Always Sunny/Arrested Development get closest to the format of "a sitcom about terrible people".
Seinfeld also contains a stand up comedian playing himself. In that respect shows like Louis and Master of None are also quite similar.
Louis in particular is a fantastic show if you can ignore Louis CK's recent scandal.
It's Always Sunny absolutely takes inspiration from Seinfeld.
They're even self aware about it in the episode "The Gang Does a Clip Show" where they mistake a bit from Seinfeld as one of their own memories - https://youtu.be/fCwI3KDGtRk
How did you like Mythic Quest? I'm really glad to see Rob and Charlie involved but it's definitely a bit more tame. I really like Danny Pudi playing a Dennis-esque character and the actress who plays Poppy is hilarious.
Read the "Modern Seinfeld" Twitter account posts which read like mini episodes (Jerry's new GF's phone automatically connects to Newman's WiFi so Jerry is freaked out). Also the Reddit story of George dating the "slow walker". The great thing is that if you've watched enough Seinfeld, you can actually hear the actors saying the lines in your head.
>In my opinion, this is no different from saying there's no need to watch new films or TV shows that come out, or even older ones that you haven't seen before. Why do that when you can just watch Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, the Godfather, and 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Indeed, why?
In my opinion, this is no different from saying there's no need to watch new films or TV shows that come out, or even older ones that you haven't seen before. Why do that when you can just watch Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, the Godfather, and 2001: A Space Odyssey? Why check out books you haven't read before when you have [insert childhood favorite]?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with repeatedly returning to old stuff you like. But I don't see how people can be satisfied doing nothing but that. Fantastic new art is being created all the time, and the amount of people creating art is also increasing all the time.
The point of endless digging is to try to find other stuff that you may end up liking as much as, or perhaps even more than, the older stuff. It's not simply to consume for its own sake: it's to discover things you otherwise might be missing out on and would be thankful you found. How can you even know if that'll happen or not if you aren't exposed to lots of new things?
Also, what does it even mean to "endlessly collect" music in the modern day? You just listen to stuff you haven't heard and turn it off if you don't like it and save it to a playlist/favorites list if you do like it. There's no cost to trying albums you haven't heard before, like there was in the past. If you do really want a physical copy for whatever reason, it's easy to listen online first and decide whether or not you should get the physical copy.
This seems akin to lamenting that people are "endlessly collecting" new shows, films, and documentaries by browsing Netflix.
>Trinidad and Tobago
I know this just something that happens but the same week I listened to this episode I watched the Seinfeld episode that they mention this place.
Couldn’t figure out why it sounded so familiar when I watched the episode until you mentioned it here.
In my opinion the difference is that "behaving in a socially expected way" is following norms so that no bad attention is drawn to you or to prevent others from having negative experiences from your behavior, and "performing" is the constant feedback cycle of emulating behaviors and traits that you think will draw positive attention and create good experiences with others.
A good example is that most things people do to be polite are considered "behaving in a socially expected way" while interactions like a young adolescent male lowering their voice when talking to somebody they are attracted to is "performing".
Performance is common for many other interactions like dressing up and formalizing language for job interviews, "telephone voice", as well as matching posture and speaking style during interactions. Performance captures the potentially unfounded change in behavior to better a specific interaction. Many sitcoms often create comedic moments when performance for a specific interaction is not compatible with performance for another interaction, so when "worlds collide" (as in Seinfeld) the character has to either struggle with maintaining both performances, or choose one form of performance to stick with and ruin an interaction with some other situation.
> You want a wide palette of cultural idioms and metaphors in order to find better ways of connecting with your students.
Some of my (law) students barely know what the TV show Seinfeld was — and one semester a couple of them, native-born Americans no less, weren't familiar with Friends.
The other day, I had a conversation with my parents about the cultural impact of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and we couldn't think of any other shows that top them in that way. Old episodes of both shows are still memeable to this day.
It was a phone number you could call to get movie showtimes. It was an automated call system. But I guess it integrated a bunch of data sources together well and had a decent phone-based user interface?
This was a time where the internet wasn't quite prevalent enough to support the idea, but phones were. The idea of calling a phone number for up-to-date movie listings was kind of revolutionary at the time. There was a tech component but it wasn't a dot com and the whole thing is kind of laughable when viewed from today. It was popular enough to have a Seinfeld episode reference it.
It proves again that there is a Seinfeld episode for everything.
My first thought of course was the Seinfeld episode, which they convenient linked to at the end of the article:
https://youtu.be/qM79_itR0Nc?t=15
I wonder how much that one person gets paid to basically double check the monitoring. I hope they have another task to keep them busy.
>Then WHY would you agree to an unlimited PTO?
Because not only does my employer have unlimited PTO policy, it has a mandatory minimum PTO policy.
It also has a mandatory minimum duration PTO policy.
As an employee, I MUST take at least 20 working days off per year, and among that time off there must be AT LEAST 10 working days taken off in a row, measured Monday - Friday for two weeks.
And federal holidays don't count for those 20 working days (though they do count for the two week minimum).
If I want to take two days off to binge-watch Seinfeld, I mark Thursday and Friday as "off" in our company app and my manager swings by my office and says "How's Project-X going?" and I say "on schedule" and he taps "approve" on his phone and then we talk about how I'm just going to lay around in my boxers and watch Seinfeld for four days in a row.
Of course, he already knows that Project-X is on schedule because he's in Mattermost the same as I, he just happened to pass by on his way to the cafeteria and wanted to chat about his new OneWheel and how awesome it is.
If, in December, you have not met your quota of 20 working days off, they order you to not come in for the balance counted back from New Year's Eve, not counting Christmas Day, and that is non-negotiable. They even suspend your accounts for the last two weeks of the year if you haven't met your two week obligation.
AI is going to be huge no doubt. However, in my opinion there would likely be some costly mistakes made before humans can reap its full benefits. We have been seeing a lot of AI developments but in reality it hasn't really brought us many meaningful changes as we had expected. In general our daily lives still remain pretty much the same as before. Our civilization has never experienced significant AI impacts at a large scale so mistakes may be hard to avoid, and it will serve as lessons for later generations not to repeat those same errors.
I have noticed human emotions and intelligence seem to be at odds with each other. Sometimes they are even a trade-off. The increase of one may lead to the decrease of the other. If we look around, humans today have the most advanced technologies in history, but are our lives really better compared to people's in the past? Materialistic wise, certainly yes because they are products directly produced by technologies, but mentally and emotionally it could arguably be worse.
AI and techs keep getting better and better everyday, but then human have to work more with longer hours and higher stress. We all thought the machines are supposed to help us human but it's actually the other way around. We work tirelessly days and nights in order to keep making those machines better and more advanced, but in return our lives have not seen many meaningful improvements, and even arguably worse than before in some areas. Individually our personal ability has limits and naturally it evolves very slowly, but the power of AI machines is potentially unlimited and growing at an even faster rate than Moore's law. We seem to be collectively working to make machine much better than us while we are remaining relatively the same individually. Are technlogies actually enslaving us?
We keep buying things that don't really serve us much. We have a lot of stuff now but they don't mean much. If something broke, meh we will just get another one. It's just another item and it will get shipped here tomorrow. We didn't have as much in the past but every little thing carried much greater value. Even the most simplest thing could fascinate and brought us joy.
We humans today already operate based on rules and algorithms dictated by the machines. We still don't know how our brains function organically (memory, consciousness, etc...), but in the quest of trying to make AI becoming human-like, we have created AI neural networks to simulate our brain. The danger is that even though we still don't know how our real brain functions, but we have now turned around and claimed that the human brain works in a similar way under the same principles of an AI neural network. We are enforcing AI rules onto ourselves.
This is a dangerous assumption to make simply because AI does not have emotions. Once we begin to operate strictly under these rules and principles that are dictated by AI, we would soon lose the attributes and characteristics of what made us human. Our emotional spectrum may get increasingly shorten.
TV shows and movies are an example as they are a form of story telling that have biggest influences on us at the emotional level. It's no coincidence that "Seinfeld" and "Friends" are still the two best tv shows today. Many movies that are considered as best were also made from a while ago. Despite the most advanced technologies, why is it that today we can't seem to tell stories that bring out the same level of emotional reponse and intensity as before? They all seem to lack the genuity and inspiration that the previous generation once had.
Is it because AI do not understand human emotions so its algorithms cannot accurately factor that into consideration? One can say that today humans are the ones who write those algorithms so maybe we can add in compenents to account for that? But just like the example above, if we don't even understand how our brain works, how can we simulate the machine to accurately reflect us? In the future, machines are supposed to learn and write all the codes by itself without human intervention, what would likely happen then? Would we still retain the ability to even understand those codes? Would it possible that human may slowly evolve into machines? In trying to make those machines becoming like us, we may instead become like machines.
Not sure how you're defining newish. It was routinely used as a storyline in 80s and 90s sitcoms (shows up a lot in Seinfeld, say) and I don't think it was new then.
The twitter account "Modern Seinfeld" is full of ideas for episodes that could work with cell phones.
https://twitter.com/seinfeldtoday
Seinfeld is still funny even though cell phones would resolve most episodes in 5 minutes. Just make it an alternate future where some tech hasn't materialized because of corporate interests.
There’s a Seinfeld episode about books in the toilet: https://youtu.be/NygOFsExGMU
And tabloids would sell more if they were 2-ply.
- The Big Lebowski: The Dude
- The Disappointments Room: David. At one point, he says that he plays Xbox and takes naps while he watches his wife Dana work, when he's asked what he does for a living.
- The sopranos: Tony Soprano has a hard time getting his son A.J. to do any work whatsoever.
- Seinfeld: George
And to be fair, the trope does have inverted instances as well, but again it seems to me to be uncommon:
- Married with children: Peg Bundy in the later seasons, Al bundy isn't much better though
> I asked for the most notable movies and shows.
And I ask god for a golden leprechaun every night, but that doesn't mean I'll get one. As a show of good faith I've spent some time researching an answer to your question, but just because you've posed a question doesn't mean you're entitled to an answer fulfilling your criteria.
> but how many streamed Friends who completely missed it's original run?
23 year old here. I had never seen Friends, thus I never had any nostalgic interest in visiting it.
One weekend last year I had an onsite interview in Denver just before a blizzard hit, snowing me into a Motel 6 for 2 days. No wifi, so I did nothing but watch Friends and Seinfeld reruns on the TV. Probably the first time I'd used a television in my adult life.
I also caught Forrest Gump for the first time late that night. Not a bad film.
Huh? That’s not how I remember it at all. You ordered from the catalog and then waited three weeks. If you were going to pick up in the store, why not just go to the store instead of calling an 800 number and reading off your credit card info? There was a whole Seinfeld episode about how the only mail anyone got anymore was catalogs.
Per FRED[1], monthly mail order sales doubled from 1992 to the end of 96.
Obviously it was nothing like today, but mail order was, like, a thing.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MRTSSM4541USS
*Also, I learned in my google rabbit hole about this that it’s a 1992 Supreme Court decision that confirmed that mail order retailers didn’t have to collect state tax unless they had a physical presence in the state.
Finding movies is easy. I just googled "Avengers Endgame" and it told me it's available instantly for $5 from Google Play, Youtube, Vudu, and Amazon. I googled "The Graduate" and it told me it's available for $4 on various platforms and free on Netflix with a subscription. I google "Seinfeld" and it told me it's availabe on Hulu and TBS with a subscription.
I would much rather pick and choose which entertainment I actually want to pay for than pay a large monthly fee for everything. It saves me money.
Here are my product requirements for a viable alternative to piracy:
1. Availability of any movie or TV show ever made from one service
2. Quality/resolution comparable to what was available when it originally aired (I’m not demanding 4K Seinfeld)
3. No DRM
4. No restriction on downloading/timeshifting
5. Playable on all my devices including Linux and iOS, using my choice of playback software
6. Playable no matter what “region” I happen to be in
7. Original language audio + subs. Dubs are a nice bonus
8. Streaming not an important or necessary feature
9. Slick UI not important or necessary
Provide that and let’s talk price. Note none of the above are technical challenges or areas of active research. They are already all solved by the pirates.
No one is green-lighting a television show with the expectation of huge distribution agreements decades later.
This has actually been the state of tv licensing economics for decades, since I Love Lucy popularized reruns. That show has never been off the air since it first aired. Other long-running shows longer-lived than the proposed-20 year term include anytime soaps still on the air today, The Simpsons, Law & Order or its spinoffs, CSI, NCIS.
Indeed, potential longevity is one of the metrics by which shows are scored when determining whether to buy or renew them. Firefly, for example, had no potential for distribution when it came out and was unceremoniously cancelled at the turn of the century, but today would have likely lived many seasons on Amazon or Netflix.
Basically, a long-running franchise like Seinfeld is the TV equivalent of a FAANG-era tech unicorn. It's what every showrunner secretly hopes for.
I'm scratching my head here. I'm a huge IASIP fan and can't see how IASIP took Seinfeld as a jumping off point. IASIP is characterized by it's very dark humor, no laugh track and subtle plot developments when it seems like each episode is stand-alone. Seinfeld had a very obvious laugh track and it's humor was significantly less dark. (I mean, Seinfeld is cynical... But let's be honest, there has never been a long running rape joke, jokes about homophobia, misogyny, pedophilia, alcoholism, drug abuse, stalking, incest etc) So it's really hard to see a connection. Could you maybe elaborate?
Broadly agree BUT there are still advantages to copyrights on works that are still commercially viable. Seinfeld was made on film. Without copyright, someone would have to be incentivized to acquire the original reels and pay to digitally scan all 180 episodes of film, knowing that the resulting scans would also be in the public domain and thus very difficult to recoup their investment on.
So in an alternative reality where Seinfeld's copyright expired, its possible that SD TV captures of all the episodes would be free and publicly available (great!), but an HD conversion would never be made (not great).
23 years old, Seinfeld is my favorite sitcom by far and is in my top 5 favorite shows in general.
I have a Hulu ad-free subscription purely for watching it, which I will be cancelling as soon as Seinfeld moves over to Netflix.
Seinfeld and Friends were actually remastered off the original 35mm film for HD conversion back in the day. Seems like going 4K isn't going to be much different, especially at the price they're paying.
It's strange that we accept a copyright system that allows a show like Seinfeld to remain outside the public domain over twenty years after it ended.
Intellectual property exists to encourage science and the useful arts. It doesn't exist to extract every last penny of value out of a show for its owners.
In a world where copyright existed for twenty years, rather than 95-120 years, Seinfeld still would have been made. No one is green-lighting a television show with the expectation of huge distribution agreements decades later.
I'm not generally one to bash corporations, but US copyright law is among the clearest examples of corporations writing our laws to the detriment of consumers.
I find it strange the competition around Seinfeld was this intense actually. Certainly in its day it was the 900 pound gorilla of sitcoms, but modernly? The sitcoms that seem to be doing well are either feel good stuff like Parks and Rec or Friends, or stuff that took Seinfeld as a jumping off point into the cesspool like Always Sunny. In 2019 Seinfeld seems like it's not hard enough to run with the modern cynic comedies, while still too dark to be classified as a positive show.
Also most of the episodes seem very much of their era, and it's been 20+ years. Will episodes that relied on their extreme relatability still work when the target audience has never actually experienced that situation? In Chinese Restaurant when George is desperate to get access to a pay phone - how does that play with Gen Z?
It's an analogy for the second law of thermodynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics. The point is that it's “challenging” and that complex events “evade a straightforward explanation”. That “challenge” is our intuitive experience of the directional arrow of entropy. A similar analogy would be to consider the difficulty of un-cracking an egg. Also, imagine comparing one bowl of soup to another bowl which was made just from tasting (or distilling) the first. Intuitively these are not likely to taste the same, otherwise a notable episode of Seinfeld would be invalidated.
You know what I don't get about status updates? We're all using tools like Jira, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub issues, etc., where you can see what everyone's working on and the status of each of those tasks. Why do we need frequent status updates like standups and PMs looking over our shoulders if you can just go to the project board and look for yourself? If I'm going to be asked about the status of what I'm doing every day, then don't make me use these systems.
It's like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer pretends to be Moviefone. "To update the status of your ticket, press 1 now. .......... Why don't you just tell me the status of your ticket?"
The article viewpoints are probably right, Netflix and Amazon need a few more hits that people trust.
The Office was a big fallback show and Netflix needs a few of those of their own. Stranger Things probably fits that.
The Witcher might change things for quality on Netflix.
Netflix shows have high production quality in terms of cinematography, lighting, sound, color, sets, on location etc. Writing and big draw actors aren't there just yet, though they have a bunch of that going and started that way with House of Cards. Stranger Things was new actors except a couple like Winona Ryder, the writing was better and it was successful. Maniac and Sabrina are also pretty good in this area. Bojack Horseman has a cult following. Dark is amazing. Black Mirror was a great acquisition. I Am Mother was pretty good and premiering Annihilation was a steal. Russian Doll was excellent. Animation like Death, Love & Robots, Voltron, Castlevania and more are solid. Those are all the model to go for. What is missing in most shows is writing and casting/actors draw to make a staple series that becomes a fallback like the article mentions.
> Consumers turn to a trusted source when they don’t know what to watch on their streaming service
> Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon Prime offer plenty of critically-acclaimed, award-winning content. But the thing is, viewers have to pick which movies and series they’ll watch, and observers say many are getting burned out from all that decision-making.
Now with The Witcher the writing is based on a really solid book series, they have a big name actor Henry Cavill that has read the series and it looks great. It could be their Game of Thrones.
Amazon is also trying this with Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time.
These shows if they are done right, will get rewatched for a long time and draws in the mega fans that are influencers.
Netflix is doing pretty good with stand up comedy, maybe even the leader now. They paid Dave Chappelle and will forever be thanked for that by comedy content consumers.
Netflix and Amazon need some big hits like the coming epics, and they need some good staple shows like the Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 (Netflix should have bought this), Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Friends, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. When they have that they equal the content competition that has that trusted good quality. They need a few more of these always watchable fallbacks.
They are both still chasing HBO, HBO is still the top in consistently good content and shows.
Personally I love the competition, some real funding and creator freedom is being unleashed, some are big hits, some are average and some not so good, but I like the amount of content and like the vibe of where Netflix is headed. Their new intro splash where the N goes into color bands is even great, matches their really colorful catalog.
I think the biggest issue with netflix is precisely the lack of things like Friends, Seinfeld, The Office - shows you can watch casually and not have to binge. My wife hates Netflix precisely because she hates binging. She wants to watch sitcoms and shows where you don't have to invest heavily. And you know, so do I. Life is hard enough without having to following tons of different plots lines and having tons of characters always die.
Anyway, we have Hulu now which has gotten quite good. I can imagine cancelling Netflix pretty soon honestly.
I used prime to watch Seinfeld. Then, in the middle of a season, I had to pay for an episode. So I cancelled it.
Interesting read, but I tend to disagree with the author on many levels.
I do believe we are still in a golden age for content producers and audiences. The amount of money going into content production, the number of shows being produced and the number of streaming services being launched offer a variety of options for people to finance, distribute and consume video content.
Content creators are looking essentially for 3 things: telling great stories, reaching large audiences and making money. They make an informed decision based on those 3 factors when choosing to work with Netflix, Amazon or other studios/streaming services. If it becomes obvious that Netflix will cancel their show after 2 seasons or will not expose their content to large audiences, content creators will stop pitching their shows to Netflix and turn to other distribution providers such as Amazon, Warner Media, Disney, NBC, Facebook, CBS, YouTube etc. And if audiences like their content, they will follow it and subscribe/spend time on other platforms.
I’m also unsure about Netflix’s “lock-in” power. Netflix is not Spotify where I spend time creating and organizing playlists. I see it only working if Netflix’s recommendation engine is so well trained with my data that moving to another streaming service will force me to spend much more time looking for relevant content to watch. Otherwise, I watch Friends on Netflix. I can easily switch next year to watch it on HBO Max.
It is true that the old days of “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, where a hit show would generate billions of dollars for its creators, are gone. Netflix and other streaming platforms are now acquiring global content rights for shows and production companies are becoming more like “work for hire” studios – where ownership is transferred to the streaming platform and no future residual revenues can be expected from re-runs (syndication deals).
That being said, the median wage of writers dropping seems to be more the result of talent agencies’ “packaging practices” than Netflix.
And by the way, “Where are the great comedies?” the author asks. Blockbuster movies – because of their high production costs – look for global appeal. Car crashes (aka “action movies”) are understood across the world. It’s not necessarily the case for jokes (aka “comedies”) that might not cross oceans as easily.
IMO Hotstar is not orders of magnitude better in terms of content.
Prime has big sitcoms like the office, 30 rock, seinfeld etc.
Their B&W and 60s/70s movie catalog is also much larger than any other services.
This reminds me of an incredible dialogue from a remarkable Seinfeld episode (S02E02):
> GEORGE: They always make me take stock of my life and how I’ve pretty much wasted all of it, and how I plan to continue wasting it.
> JERRY: I know, and then you say to yourself, “From this moment on, I’m not going to waste any more of it.” But then you go, “How? What can I do that’s not wasting it?”
> For example, about 20 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of the latest season of hit show Game of Thrones.
> It was one of the most-watched non-sporting events in TV history.
This is not even close to true.
Nearly 17 million people watched the Murder She Wrote finale in 1996. In the 1970s, each year, the highest rated episodes of All In The Family were consistently over 20 million. Seinfeld had 35 million once. 60 minutes has gone over 20 million many times.
Grace Under Fire, a mediocre sitcom most people here have never heard of, averaged about 20 million viewers for a full season in the mid 1990s.
I love when TV writers act like TV didn’t exist before The Sopranos.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States
The first thing I thought of when I saw that photo was that Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts swimming in the East river. idk why lulz.
I would love to have one streaming service that includes 95% of the “regular” content. I currently pay for HBO, Netflix, Hulu, and have access to Prime Video because of the Prime membership. I think Hulu is closest to “just TV” and I would be most happy with Hulu + HBO. Realistically though, Netflix has the best selection of children’s programming that I have seen, Prime has most movies I would want, though the rent/buy model is obnoxious.
The main problem I still run into is the unavailability of content. Original Ghost Busters? Nope. Labyrinth? Nope. Seinfeld? Nope. If Netflix tried again to license everything under the sun, I would just give them the $50/month I currently pay overall for the 3.5 services I use.
If this is OK for you, I guess you are also OK with strangers double-dipping shared sauce dishes. It's funny that this turns into a Seinfeld episode "The Implant" :)
"Timmy to George: That's like putting your whole mouth right in the dip! From now on, when you take a chip - just take one dip and end it!"
For me it's the same with characters from Friends. I can't see them in another role (except Jennifer, it's kind of odd to see her in other things but not as much as the others).
That being said, George is an absolutely great character and one of my favourites in sitcoms :) Just reading these comments makes me want to rewatch Seinfeld.
George Costanza is Jason Alexander + Larry David. I recommend you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm if you enjoyed Seinfeld.
I think this goes to show how much of an impact HBO had on television.
There isn't an argument quite like this outside of maybe NBC's 90s sitcoms, arguing about Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier or AMC's late-aughts Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead.
It's perfectly true that there are many reasons why determining merit can go awry, but the thrust of your argument seems to me to defend making choices that one does not believe are correct.
Simply being more conscious of the possibility you are wrong is not a useful way to improve your decision. There was an episode of the Seinfeld sitcom where a character decides to do the opposite of his first impulse, because he's so often wrong. It was funny because that is obviously not a good way to improve decisions in real life where there are nearly infinite ways to do things badly.
If you are trying to pass a math class, and you keep getting problems wrong by doing what you think is correct, choosing to do things you think are wrong is not likely to improve your results.
Wasn't there a Seinfeld episode on this?
You bring up an interesting point.
What makes a movie a movie? Does it matter where a movie is watched? Most movies are watched on monitors/tv. If I watch Infinity War on netflix, is it not a movie? If my local theater runs a weeklong viewing of Seinfeld or Friends, does it make Seinfeld or Friends a movie?
To me it is clear that Roma, Annihilation, Birdbox, etc are movies whether they run in the theaters or not.
This seems like Spielberg is using his influence to help the old hollywood studio system maintain it's monopoly on movies and especially the major advertising day known as the Oscars.
For more detail, it's "The Package" episode, Season 8, Episode 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_(Seinfeld)
It's also the episode with the "boudoir" photographs of George taken by Kramer, for the benefit of the photo development clerk, who he thinks slipped in a suggestive photo of herself in the photos she gave him of his last roll of film. You may have seen the images of George posing before even if you're not a Seinfeld fan. It's a pretty memetic set of images. People have done oil paintings of them, lol. Here's a screenshot example (mildly NSFW, male in only boxer shorts): http://www.inpapasbasement.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/George_Costanza_Art_of_Seduction.jpg
That idea was a story arc in a "Seinfeld" episode (for USPS).
Michigan has had a 10 cent deposit for decades and fraud isn't an issue.
There's even a whole Seinfeld episode about why it doesn't work.
I really love how Hulu's current web interface makes it really easy to toggle Autoplay on/off. I hate how Netflix makes me search through account menus.
Hulu's current interface definitely isn't perfect, but I love the convenient toggle for Autoplay; and I love being able to search for episodes by name. As a fan of Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I can remember an episode's name waaayyy more easily than I can remember its season/episode number
Maybe it's just in my head, but I feel like Netflix doesn't care what I want or think anymore. I feel like they've taken the position that their metrics and projections know better than I do.
> I think this notion that trying to help people, sacrificing yourself to help people was a sickness became very widespread, especially in the ’70s and ’80s under the better-known term codependency. It’s part of our now unconscious culture, the way we look at altruists. When we hear about them, many people think first, “Are they sick?”
I personally wouldn't go that far as calling a person "sick" for being extremely altruistic but it is generally well-known that gifts/free things are never really "free".
For a sociological view on gifts/altruism not being genuinely "free" there's Marcel Mauss's classic "The Gift" [1], while from personal experience I can tell that I used to be taught by both my peasant Eastern-European grand-mothers to never accept free stuff from our neighbors (like going to eat at their place or something similar), the reasoning being that those neighbors would most certainly want something in return at some point in the future.
In a similar vein there's this Seinfeld season 3 episode called "The Pen" [2], where Jerry accepts a "free" pen as a gift from one of his parents' neighbors and, obviously, that turns out not to have been the best idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(book)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pen
With traditional network TV, the vast bulk of the money is in how many people watch the show when it first airs. Syndication revenue, DVDs, etc. are relatively trivial. Obviously the whole model is shifting to a more fragmented and on-demand market with fewer, but often more valuable, eyeballs per show. Seinfeld peaked at over 30 million average views for first-run episodes. Game of Thrones is about 10 million for a comparison on cable today.
I agree that apples-to-apples is hard but the bottom line is that very few people make a real living from YouTube views.
It's totally not my thing either. But I still appreciate and respect it deeply.
+400k humans from everyone now have this one thing in common.
I feel the same about sports, church, music, politics. I vividly remember the watch party for the last episode of Seinfeld. Totally not my thing, I didn't even own a TV, my girlfriend dragged me along. I watched the people watching the TV. They related to each other thru this one shared cultural experience. For a brief time, most everyone's minds were synced.
Sometimes I envy people who connect in those ways.
Yeah, though I'm not sure about that (Seinfeld not being appreciated because it was a pioneer show).
I still find funny very manny pioneering shows -- heck, even back to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, and all kinds of 80s and even 70s sitcoms.
I haven't seen Seinfeld yet but I intend to.
"Whoever is first to do something isn't likely to be the best at it, simply because everyone that comes after is building on their predecessors' work. Named after the sitcom Seinfeld, which many people won't watch any more because everything about it has been copied." https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
A generation of consumers have been raised to rent their content. I have DirecTV now, bundled with my cell plan so I pay like $15 a month. I have an MLB.tv subscription and I buy most of the rest of my media on iTunes. When movies are on sale they are like $6 and tv seasons for $10. I bought the entire Seinfeld catalog for like $60–easily worth the price and not to have to watch reruns with commercials. Generally, I spend $30 a month, so after a few years I have hundreds of movies and a dozens of TV shows. So most of the time I watch news on DirecTV, MLB.tv, or a movie in my iTunes library. I literally don’t understand Netflix and most of the shows on there haven’t been worth it for me to subscribe yet. But I definitely wouldn’t pay for a monthly streaming subscription. Maybe if I had kids.
I just watched an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry's car was stolen by his mechanic, but insurance wouldn't cover it because he gave the mechanic his keys (voluntary parting)
Seems like using ‘Vandalay Industries’ is a terrible idea. Doesn't everyone* know that anything called ‘Vandalay Industries’ is an obvious fake?
* Maybe anyone over a certain age? Do people under... I dunno, 40? 30?... watch much Seinfeld? Seems like TV shows are largely generational things... I'm aware of MASH and Dick Van Dyke, but I wouldn't get the semi obscure jokes from those shows since they were on when I was super young.
>"In some cases, Amazon uses pseudonyms to obscure its presence. For example, at its IAD77 data center, the document states that “Amazon is known as ‘Vandalay Industries’ on badges and all correspondence with building manager”."
This made me laugh. Vandalay Industries is a reference to a very funny Seinfeld episode. Someone at AWS has a good sense of humor:
http://seinfeld.wikia.com/wiki/Vandelay_Industries
The only way I have ever known is to have the idea that every single decision is imperfect in some way, and to keep a low resolution idea in my mind of what kind of imperfection that might be and what consequences it may have. If one possible imperfection nags at me for long enough, then in thinking about it, the resolution can be increased and a determination can be made about its impact, and whether it is an acceptable compromise. This tends to happen preemptively, but can also be used when a concerning unknown begins to rear its head.
This is not as daunting as it might sound. It's somewhat similar to how a "picky" personality would think, e.g. Jerry Seinfeld's character in his sitcom. You have to be an annoying nagger in your mind, albeit without the comedically hyperbolic verbalization, obviously.
This can make you much slower at first, as you'll be debating things in your head a lot. But I find you get a lot faster once you get used to it and the "nagging" happens in a not-very-high-effort thought process.
tl;dr: perfectionism.
Of course, for specific situations, there will be known tools and processes for flushing out unknown unknowns e.g. fuzzing.
While the cases of fraud are despicable, I think being reimbursed only $150 for somebody vomiting in your car is far too little. Your car will be pretty much similar to "The Smelly Car" episode of Seinfeld once it has been puked into.
The first problem is that these shows follow the Peter Principle. A show will continue to run until it becomes bad enough to be canceled. This means that many shows will have a bad, disappointing ending rather than a thrilling/touching/moving/memorable climax.
The second problem is that given that the story may or may not have to continue for another season, how can the main characters get any form of meaningful character growth? How can they get closure or a conclusion when the next season is around the corner and either a new problem has to be invented for them or the existing one has to be reopened/continued? This is similar to the problem that "villain of the week" shows suffer from, just on a seasonal rather than episodic basis.
This affects 1-season shows as well since: 1. If they only get one season it may be because they are bad. 2. The 1 season still needs to be written to allow for the possibility of a 2nd season, thus potentially making it less interesting.
Of course, for some shows those things don't really matter, since no one watches The Simpsons, The Office, South Park or Seinfeld for the character growth.
That isn't to say it is impossible to make a good plot-driven show with this format, just harder (and it is the reason why I rarely watch American TV shows).
I mean, what are the ways? If an American show fails, you'll get your beloved 1 season run. If it's popular, it keeps going. What's the problem? The Simpsons and The Office and South Park and Seinfeld all hit their stride at season 3 or so.
> Meanwhile I wonder how people have time to finish entire seasons of TV shows on netflix, given the modern trend of story-driven shows that assume you've actually seen all the previous episodes instead of pre-internet-era sitcoms that you could jump in and watch any 30-minute episode with little context. Twitch is more of a return to old-school TV in that regard.
Is this really true?
I know I watched random episodes (Malcolm/Seinfeld/Friends/etc..) and enjoyed it. But re-watching them in the proper order is magnitudes better and clearly the way it was supposed to be watched.
I wonder if the same is true for modern TV shows, e.g. the big bang theory - it can be watched and enjoyed by picking a random TV show. Even longer form, say Firefly/Dark Angel/Twin Peaks require you to watch it in order - yet they could be enjoyed on their own as well (you had basically no choice anyway..).
Some colleagues of mine talk about the prevalence of companies doing this man behind the curtain thing all the time while claiming that there solution is AI/cognitive. When we come across examples of this happening we just refer to that Seinfeld Moviefone episode and say 'Why don't you just tell me [foo]' - or whatever the "AI" is trying to solve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSQ6q_rGpI8
It never fails to get a good laugh.
Anyway, I think that human interaction for the training aspects of AI to prepare data, label examples, test models, etc. is really hard to automate entirely and should be considered part of the development process. The execution side of an application component that is marketed as AI/cognitive however is not true AI unless it is totally free of human interaction.
Glee and Grey's Anatomy are from the OP, not my examples. Netflix is hiring the creators of these shows to make more shows, presumably somewhat similar. Breaking Bad is not from Netflix, neither is GoT which was interesting for about 1½ seasons. Even worse, Black Mirror was IMHO better before it moved to Netflix (but to some extent this is true of every show, creators have more pent-up, fresh ideas in the beginning).
While the tidal wave of capeshit is unwatchable and depressing, this is not all the competition Netflix has to contend with. First, you have every movie and tv show ever made. Then you can watch them again. Most shows can't even beat a 7th rewatch of Seinfeld.
Second, you can do something else than watching TV, like hitting the gym, writing a blog, taking your dog for a surprise extra walk, playing with your kids, making a steak instead of having takeout, cleaning your room while listening to Jordan Peterson telling you to clean your room... anything really.
And, I would argue, all of these are a better use of time than anything on Netflix right now.
I was reminded of an episode of Seinfeld where a guy with a full head of hair started shaving his head because it was cool.
He eventually got fed up with shaving his head and decided to let it grow back, only to find he had gone bald for real in the meantime.
TV shows. I watched so much TV shows that when I first came to the United States, a taxi driver claimed that I had a "New York accent". Shows like Seinfeld are especially good, because they also help you get comfortable with american culture, which is an important part of communication.
It probably helps that I do rubber duck debugging[0] a lot :)
[0]: https://rubberduckdebugging.com/
Is anonymity only related to identity, and which parties are involved in a transaction?
Could there be a way to leave identity and parties involved anonymous, yet track count and/or value of transactions without knowing what they were?
If this were possible, some weighting could be assigned to reviews based on count and/or value of transactions, to somewhat combat a review bomber willing to pay for many small transactions. In a sense it would raise the cost of a fake review campaign.
I bet if you gave users the option to have only count and value of their transactions public, in exchange for some sort of “trusted reviewer” status badge, that a significant number would opt in to it, because people like to earn badges and points for reasons more motivating that we intuitively think.
edit: better yet, allow opt in to have your transaction count and value incrementee on a per transaction basis, so you could earn reputation power or not depending on the marketplace or persons dealt with.
side note: I think the “free sub” episode on Seinfeld may have been the first reference to gamification mechanics on television.
I don't know about any courses, but watching a lot of tv shows especially situational comedies such as Frasier, Seinfeld etc. helped me immensely on reading people.
The facial expressions usually give away the situation. The downside is that you need to constantly read the other parties expressions, and that can get noticed if you're not subtle enough.
It required some energy, but over time you get proficient at it.
Another thing that will help is to find safe topics. Talking about music, girls, sports are the easiest to learn.
My advice would be not to shy away from social interactions. Practice makes perfect.
Some people may inherently be born with an intuition to handle social interactions, but that doesn't mean that you cannot learn it by observing and mimicking.
I guess this is what the article calls as masking. But masking doesn't have to be that painful. i believe people can grow and chance. If you put an honest effort you'll eventually fit into the society.
Relevant Seinfeld episode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_(Seinfeld)
Jerry buys his parents a personal organizer, lies about how expensive it was, and then they want to buy more "tip calculators" for their entire condo board.
> It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
Sorry, this sounds backwards.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResetButton
> This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order, and in part because (prior to the advent of the internet) watching or catching up on a missed episode could be nearly impossible for viewers.
See anything from Gilligan always ruining the rescue attempt to JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest on Scrubs. There's a long history of shows trying to make baby steps against this (resolving a 'will-they-won't-they' situation, for instance) and the show basically dying as a result. Exceptions like Babylon 5 where major things changed were rare.
Seinfeld was "about nothing" in that the things the reset button applied to were so minor that you basically didn't even notice the reset button most of the time - you wouldn't expect them to majorly change the characters. That, and that it wasn't super-location-centric in the way that Newsradio is "about a radio station" - I mean, it isn't, really, it's about the characters there too, but 99% of the action takes place in the radio station.
This is the only show I'm currently keeping up with as new episodes come out, via Hulu. Its wit and ability to make me laugh out loud is up there with the first three seasons of Arrested Development, while featuring a fundamentally hopeful outlook on humanity. I also enjoy "terrible people" comedies like Arrested Development and Seinfeld, but The Good Place (like the better Pixar movies) reminds me that you don't have to be cynical to make smart comedy for adults.
Extreme malingering.
If you work hard enough you'll eventually get it, especially if you have a lawyer. It took all of them years and appeals to get approved. If you are persistent enough you'll get approved eventually.
Eventually....
It's like that episode of Seinfeld where George worked to stay on unemployment. It was basically their life goal was to become "disabled." If you dedicate your life to being disabled... It will happen if it's literally your job... My fucking uncle worked for, I don't know how many years to become disabled.... If he put half that effort into being employed....
It doesn't surprise me that people who are terminal aren't able to benefit... The system is rigged.
Some of them, like my aunt, take injuries and claim they've never recovered from them. Even though they have. Who's going to argue with that? How can you prove anything?
My dad is surprisingly "not disabled" when he feels like it.
Once you get into "disabled" territory, you become untouchable...
You can not believe me all you want,I do not give two shits. I know what I have experienced, I don't personally care if you believe me, I don't care. I know for a fact my dad and his siblings are shithead. That I will know for life and I can't avoid.
Given that all the production costs are sunk at this point, the incremental cost of offering as part of a streaming catalog or filling up some AMC broadcast slots as part of an "event" is pretty low.
Pre-streaming, I'm sure a lot more people bought DVD sets of favorite series than actually rewatched them from beginning to end. The same principle applies today I'm sure even in the cases where the content is effectively free.
I'm not sure this example really counts as a fad though. While successive groups rediscover older TV shows (not that the ones you list are very old at all) viewership is rarely going to be more than of a fraction than it was originally. Perhaps there are marginal exceptions for shows that never really had an audience but develop a bit of a cult following over time.
ADDED: The other issue I have with the author's broader theory is that much of what he says is just as applicable to episodic TV shows like Seinfeld as it is to serialized shows.
Seinfeld's motto guiding the series was "no hugging, no learning". It was set up to be a foil to the sitcoms of the day, which were morally authoritative and each episode was there to teach us a lesson.
There's only one somewhat-serious moment in the entire series, and it's when Jerry tells Elaine he doesn't want to get back together.
It's really brilliant and stands the test of time so well. But yes, definitely nihilistic.
No, they mean the characters. Virtually every character on Seinfeld is a nihilist. Nobody on Seinfeld --- with the possible exception of Jerry's parents --- cares about anybody or anything. Susan dies from licking poisonous envelopes and they all go out for coffee before George tries to hit on Marissa Tomei. Jerry's girlfriend gets Jerry to care about things for half an episode, turns into an anti-Jerry; the episode resolves itself with Jerry being shocked back into normal Jerry by George temporarily revealing his own emotions. Or, just compare Kevin, "The Bizarro Jerry", to Jerry himself.
It's a profoundly nihilistic show, in a way that Rick and Morty doesn't even really touch.
Rick can travel between dimensions and meet infinite alternate Ricks and infinite alternate Mortys. The show informs us that he knows any one Morty or any one Beth doesn't actually matter. And Rick still occasionally cares about them. The subtext of Rick and Morty is almost anti-nihilist.
The nihilism in Seinfeld is presented realistically and non-fantastically and is so unsettling that people have a hard time even recognizing it for what it is.
I think they mean the show and not the characters. Even in that case, the show really isn't about nothing anymore than other sitcoms like Friends and Cheers are about nothing. The show still has plot lines. My love of Seinfeld is mostly how well the plot lines within each episode are weaved together and how the show invented so many phrases that we now use (or at least I use and most people understand).
The show is so quotable and relatable even almost 20 years later. Friends also does a pretty good job of this, but my problem with Friends is that you're supposed to like the characters (except Ross maybe) and they're all pretty terrible people. Seinfeld doesn't try and hide how terrible its characters are.
> You want a really nihilistic show? Watch Seinfeld.
Eh? Do you mean nihilist in the (meta) sense that the show "is about nothing" and has no inherent meaning? Because none of the characters on Seinfeld strike me as nihilist either.
That's not to say I disagree with your point about Rick and Morty having nihilist characters; I don't think Rick is a nihilist, but I also don't think nihilism translates well to film and television. It's difficult to maintain compelling character development that can bring in a large viewership if a character is truly nihilist, in my opinion.
For my purposes I don't believe it's enough to have a character profess adherence to existential nihilism - I don't agree a character is nihilist unless they also act like it, and that is fundamentally difficult to do convincingly. I very often see writers use stoicism, ruthless utilitarianism, (dysfunctional) cynicism and even atheism as proxies to demonstrate a character is nihilistic, but none of those really hits it on the mark. I consider it like free will: you can make extremely compelling arguments that free will (in the sense of the capacity for non-deterministic decision making) simply doesn't exist (or is at best implausible), but there's not really a convincing framework for altering your behavior even if you claim to believe that. This is unlike atheism or agnosticism, which do have clear behavioral proxies when you abstract them away from considerations of intrinsic meaning - simply don't participate in religious communities, gatherings or activities for its own sake.
I think soap opera might still be correct.
As you watch a Soap Opera it becomes apparent that all the drama has no real consequence, and thus becomes meaningless. That is why General Hospital can be on for 40 years or something at this point. You can watch for a year, skip a year, then come back. You missed a ton of events, but it doesn't effect what you take from the show.
Once "the ending" becomes detached from the show, it is very difficult to manufacture meaningful drama.
Some shows, like Seinfeld or Simpsons always return to a set point at the end of an episode. So they don't need a real ending. This is different than the soap opera. Because there is no illusion of an ending. You know the show isn't going anywhere and you experience just what it is in that moment.
The soap opera is diabolical. As each episode ends, you are hooked, waiting for the next so you can find out "what happens", but there is no ultimate payoff. Just a never ending sequence of false promises.
Soap operas are the worst offenders, who best illustrate the point. But any drama series without a fixed end point is guilty of the same crime. Take LOST, which began as a brilliant show, but as it was stretched out began to anger many people. When would it have become a full Soap Opera? 10 more seasons? My point is that it already was, just shorter than some others.
In my high school literature class we were taught that conflict doesn't have to be between individuals. Indeed, Totoro does have conflict by this definition: between the girls and their insecurity about their mother's illness. The conflict is resolved thanks to Totoro and the friendship they developed with him.
I seem to remember The Magic School Bus [1] (kids' science show) having stories – that is, a series of related events – but only sporadic (and generally incidental) conflict. "Magical bus takes school kids on memorable – if ill-advised – journey, and Arnold makes jokes" sums up pretty much every episode.
Seinfeld I would venture to say also deviates from the western norm, in that the conflicts (of which each episode has several) are rarely, if ever, overcome. Half the time the conflict reaches a climax at the end of the episode. In fact the entire series ended with unresolved conflict. But the stories are nonetheless memorable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_%28TV_series%29
Is this suggesting that the same TV network which airs a show called "ANCIENT ALIENS" would have some completely inaccurate and poorly researched easily debunked claim on one of their TV shows?
What's next? Is some blogger going to reveal to the world that Seinfeld and Star Trek aren't real too??
I don't think they shot Seinfeld in 35mm to be future proof. It was the best way to film at the time.
I always find the idea of future proofing interesting here. Like the way Seinfeld reruns are in HD even though the technology didn't really exist at the time--because they shot a TV show in actual film and then could re-scan it later to keep up with modern tech.
Crazy expensive but obviously given the value of those reruns the cost made sense.
What would somebody from NBC be looking to get out of Snapchat? I admit fully that I'm too old for Snapchat-- I don't want my stuff to disappear, I don't do anything embarrassing and I forget enough crap already. Is it just eyeballs? Why does Snapchat want to host a TV show? Is it going to disappear? I grew up with the whole "must see TV" thing, where if you weren't in front of the TV when Seinfeld came on, then you weren't gonna see it. It fucking sucked, to be blunt. Who would want to go back to that? And if Snapchat is just putting tv shows into the app because disappearing snap whatevers aren't enough to drive whatever number they need to drive, what competitive advantage are they going to use to go after the many, many, many content players already in the mix?
The whole thing just leaves me scratching my head.
On the other hand, the problems in most "Seinfeld" episodes have been rendered trivially solvable by a technological development that has occurred since the show originally aired: the ubiquitous smartphone.
2045 is about as far into the future as the first episode of "Seinfeld" is in the past. Unless a black swan event happens in AI development, the world will look pretty similar to how it does today.
Reminds me of an old episode of Seinfeld, where George teaches the Yankees how to hit based on simple physics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTwE7xDZkPk
>That's just like, your opinion, man
There are other examples of shows that do fine without strong plots. One example from the top of my head is "The Chinese Restaurant" episode in Seinfeld. Little to no plot at all in that episode. Just a string of funny interactions between characters.
This app just makes me keep thinking of the protege Seinfeld episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoQQuwuoHpQ
I do second your recommendation. Even going on a sales call exposes you to highly stressful scenarios under which you cannot buckle but you cannot explode either. This skill helps you in all walks of life, managing a team and even managing your family. It could also go the other way for some people, as it happens in Seinfeld's 'Serenity now' episode
I think we both speak of the same thing, but I come from dramaturgy background. Story is story, no matter the genre or medium. At its core, story is always about change in the character through dramatic arc. If there is none, it's journalism, for lack of better words. Mechanics are vastly different through media. For example, in screenplays you get to write only what you hear and what you see. Essay form is allowed only to explain to the creators of ultimate form what you mean.
When you shed all the layers of genres, when you come down to the basic principles of dramaturgy, you're left with the core of storytelling that's in all stories ever told. From Plato's Cave to Aristotelian unities onwards to Star Wars and Seinfeld, there are certain core principles which hold true in form and structure. Form, not formula. In dramatic arc and story structure there are elements which morph and trade places and these, along with psychological and visual motifs make a genre. It's probably valid approach to view/interpret this on a whole other level, and that's the beauty of it. This is just my viewpoint based on some experience and background in dramaturgy. It's a view on abstract principles of storytelling where you get to manipulate form and structure itself before you materialise it into particularities. Kind of like virtual functions, or better yet a class diagram of a story before you write it down. Dramatic theory is not competing with literary theory - it complements it, specializes it. I took dramatic theory as a heavy weapon which I find extremely useful in my work, but I didn't dwell much further into literary theory. I took some bits and pieces that I find useful for my work, like intertextuality (esp. biblical - which is tropey as it gets, Star Wars for example and Hero's Journey, but most modern literature as well)... etc. I have colleagues which are far more well-versed in literature theory than I am for when I need insight. I'm more concerned with dramatic mechanics and structure, because that's what I do and what interests me.
What I'm saying is that behind all of the layers of a genre, there is a common subset to all stories. If you start with that and build towards a genre, you get to see the specifics of how it modulates that core structure. SF, in that regard, is always heavily biased towards internal-driven change with accentuated wants and needs switch[1] where character is in an extreme psychological situation driven by an extreme physical situation flared by science. Character is driven into a corner where he/she has to act on his core flaw in order to achieve the need in order to change. Whereas fantasy has a character on a journey both physical and psychological through which he/she overcomes the flaw in his character in order to act on it when third act kicks in.
It's a bit of an abstract way of thinking, but I don't know how else to put it without first explaining all of the intro to dramatic theory, hah.
[1] Wants vs needs is the epitome of character arc mechanics. There's something character wants that drives his story arc, only to be exposed to his actual needs (what he really wants). Shedding his wants and fulfilling that need he discovered he overcomes his major flaw and thus changes his character.
Now, if you view through prism of that mechanics (core one though) and go back to genre structures you can clearly see where most differ (not all, there are blurry ones!). For example, if you look at Star Wars or Conan which are fantasy (one with SF theme and one with fantasy theme) - there's a clear flaw in the character that gets replaced by a need and fulfilled on the journey (actual one). Be it Force training vs Dagobah cave or Sword training vs Valeria. It's an actual quest! Now look at a clear-cut SF, for example Inconstant Moon episode from Outer Limits (check that out if you haven't!) or any of the more fabled STNG or DS9 episodes. In Inconstant Moon, main character realises this might be the final night of his (and everyone's life - Sun has gone Nova on the other side of the Earth (it's nighttime), and he notices Moon is exceptionally bright because of it... so he calls up his ex girlfriend (wants) and he becomes more open and free (needs).. or in DS9 Pale Moonlight (Moon, again!) where cptn. Sisko wants an action attack plan or whatever only to need to become vile and dirty character in order to win, thus overcoming his flaw (being a good guy)... no quest. When we return to Dune, that's where lines get blurred and there's an endless debate.
I mean, I could go on forever and we all could probably be right to most extents. This is just my way of thinking. Flair on top of all of that is of least concern, but is the most visible in a genre. By that I mean spaceships vs swords or whatever. It's just a motif. Hence why people commonly confuse Star Wars as an SF - which it isn't at all. Also a reason why new Star Trek movies aren't really SF. It's a fantasy or in ST case action story with an SF theme on top.
I'm really passionate about this subject (storytelling) and we have debates like these almost on a daily basis because we all love it. We all agree on one thing and that's that everything lies in character development and arc and grows from there, so excuse my elaborate intro to debating the topic!
I see no problem with overbooking, as long as they're transparent about it and compensate people. Overbooking is common in many industries. The article holds up hotels and car rental agencies as examples of how it's done better, but those overbook too. Car rental agencies in particular don't really know how many cars they'll have available at any given time because their contracts are so flexible, so your "reservation" is really just a planning tool so they can try to shuffle inventory around. (The TV documentary series "Seinfeld" did an episode on this.)
As someone with no experience in that region, and as someone whose taste is much more toward the satirical (Seinfeld, Family Guy, Simpsons), I have a hard time trying to recall anything satirical in KotH.
Instead, I consider KotH to be similar to the Cosby Show, Roseanne, or even All in the Family - a respectful look at the type of family that was not historically portrayed in TV or the movies.
Quick question: Is the New York of sitcoms supposed to present "good housing"? The two most famous New York sitcoms that come to mind (namely Seinfeld and Friends) present rather small and basic apartments, people using in-building shared washers and driers, doesn't look any better than the ridiculously small apartments we have in Paris.
That's yet a different issue. Watching an old episode of Seinfeld does not violate anyone's privacy.
Theft: you have a painting. I took it.
Copyright infringement: You painted a painting. I took a picture of it and sold/gave away prints to all my friends.
Violation of privacy: I got into your phone and looked at all your dick pics.
Warrantless search: The police got into your phone and looked at all your dick pics, possibly finding evidence of a crime.
They are different issues which can look similar at times, but are actually completely separate. Pretending like they are is just adding muck to this discussion.
There is a large number of TV shows and movies that is not available on any streaming service. There is also a large number that's available, but only from a very specific content provider. For example last I checked, Seinfeld was only available on I think TBS's website, with an awful Flash-based player and really intrusive commercials. Oh, and what was available was something like a set of 5 rotating episodes, not the whole thing. Another example is Conan the Destroyer (been on an Arnold kick lately) which as far as I saw could only be purchased on BluRay or DVD.
I am not saying the content providers owe anyone a streaming option. But grandparent is right about path of least resistance.
One my favorite 360 videos is this Charity Water short documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlVIsVfWwS4. Specifically because it's very interesting and immersive to look around.
Another good one is the SNL Seinfeld monologue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HS9h4xFRww. Because of the audience participation you crane your neck around to see who's talking.
I tried to start one, but it didn't get any traction.
My theory was that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David were involved at one time in something very shady, and that they created the "Seinfeld" TV show as part of a plot to protect themselves in the case their past activities came to light.
Consider that the show "Seinfeld" is about a comedian named "Jerry Seinfeld", and the part was played by the real Seinfeld. The character Seinfeld's best friend was George Costanza, and it was well known that he was based on Larry David, and that many of the things George did on the show were based on real-life Larry David incidents.
Note that a few years into the show, character Seinfeld and his best friend get a chance to write a pilot for NBC for a show called "Jerry" about a comedian named Jerry Seinfeld and based on the life of character Jerry Seinfeld, and that included characters based on the character Jerry's friends.
Then, after Seinfeld ended, Larry David went on to make "Curb Your Enthusiasm" for HBO, a show about a character named Larry David who was a comedian and was the Seinfeld co-creator, and real life Larry David played character Larry David. Much of the incidents in CYE were based on real-life Larry David incidents.
These two shows, especially Seinfeld when it went down the recursion rabbit hole with "Jerry", seem designed to blur the line between fictional Jerry Seinfeld and real life Jerry Seinfeld, and between fiction Larry David and real life Larry David.
It's well known that human memory is malleable. If you remember something fairly accurately, but then you hear someone else's recollection of the same event and their recollection differs, your memory can change to better reconcile your account and their account. (This can be a big problem in criminal justice matters...it is not hard for an interviewer to alter the memory of a witness by phrasing questions in a way that suggest something at odds with what the witness remembers).
So my theory was that the purpose of the Seinfeld and CYE shows was for Seinfeld and David to present alternate versions of themselves and of incidents they had been involved in many years earlier to reshape the memories of others who witnessed those incidents, to get them to forget or doubt something that Seinfeld and David did that would be very embarrassing or damaging to their careers if it came to light.
Another example is the kind of dastardly television trick of increasing the speed of a television program to shorten it and thus increase the amount of advertising space that can be run alongside the program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0
This video claims that TBS is currently increasing the speed of Seinfeld episodes a whopping 9%, reducing a 25 minute episode to some 22.5 minutes.
Yeah I also had the odd acquaintance that did the same, ironically 99.9% of my other friends who claim to be "fans" and that Firefly is the "best thing ever" never bothered.
I don't think most of them even waited for it to come out on DVD but most likely pirated it and maybe bought it once it hit the bargain bin.
Various excuses have been used from "I don't want to see an episode in the theater" to "I don't want to give Fox money" but it doesn't really matter, people didn't came out to see it, and even the DVD sales unlike Firefly were pretty weak.
Anecdotally your friend that went to see it 6 times is also likely the reason why Firefly gets more votes cast on IMDB than The X-Files or Seinfeld.
> And yes, manufacturing practices may be truly causing this
How? Are you talking about pharmaceuticals used in factory farming, trans fats, what?
> coupled with more hectic but sedentary lifestyle preventing people from cooking properly (it takes time and care)
It does not take that much time or care. The choice is yours. You can either watch an episode of Seinfeld on the couch, or spend time on your feet and cook dinner and lose weight and feel healthier.
> It is highly unfair and unjust to throw it also onto a single person to invert, especially a sufferer.
Fairness and justice are two concepts the universe does not care about.
And how is it unfair and unjust? Once you accept that your suffering, in this case, is based on decisions you've made (remember 4/5 people are not obese in the west, placing you in the lowest 20 percentile.) you can start changing that.
Also, these things don't just happen to you. You still have a choice in the great majority of situations.
That level of concern is a bit ridiculous for a 10 year old. I was riding my bike all over by myself at that point. Crossing the street with indirect supervision is something I'd trust a 6 year old with.
Now maybe I had a charmed childhood, but I'm in my mid twenties, so it's not like I'm talking about growing up in the 50's here. My parents are older though, they did grow up in the 50s, and I I know they view independence as an important individual trait. I'm sure overprotective parents are not a recent phenomenon. One of my (younger) brother's friends was accompanied to and from school by his mother well in to High School. Walk, drive, riding a bike, you name it, she was there.
My mom asked her about this once, and she was like "Oh, [Declanomous's Mother], you have [Declanomous] and [Son #2]. I just have [her son]. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to him." My mom thought this point was kind of ridiculous, because it's not as if one child is a backup for another child. She just let my brother and I run around because she wanted us to learn to do things on our own.
Personally I think the current environment vis-a-vis child rearing reflects a larger trend towards fear in overall society. Part of this is a result of a larger focus on danger in childhood development, but I feel like a whole culture around existential fear really developed after 9/11. It seems like we started viewing the entire world as dangerous, rather than being ripe for exploration. I feel like this is really noticeable when watching media from different eras. Popular TV shows before 9/11 were Seinfeld, Friends, and Fraiser. After 9/11 shows like CSI, 24, etc. became very popular.
I could be completely wrong. I know shows like Law and Order and ER were very popular before 9/11. I recall them being less existentially terrifying though. This could just be because I was very young at the time though.
Its the old way of thinking, its like that episode of Seinfeld where Georges car breaks down at work and his boss who now sees his car parked there as he gets in and as he leaves thinks he is a great employee. Costanza is always working! Its easier to look at cars than numbers.
Words have meaning. Words have power. This much is not in debate, as far as I'm concerned (so far). Where I have to take pause is taking one usage (however derogatory) of a word and applying to every meaning and usage regardless of what the context actually is as some manifestation of virtue signalling. At this point we may as well throw out language, diction and rhetoric entirely as any word and phrase can be twisted to be offensive even when a word is used entirely and wholly in accurate and proper context.
People with receding hairline are not marginalized by society
You're obviously not aware with how common male baldness jokes are in sitcoms and entertainment, are you? I encourage you watch a few episodes of Seinfeld to see how much influence hair and baldness has on men and their self esteem in the dating world.
They might not be marginalized, but then again I guess it depends on how one is using the word 'marginalized' to begin with, which brings us back to square one: turnabout is a bitch.
The media is obligated to use full names as it differentiates people with common names.
You can see this at work when, for whatever reason, killer Joel Rifkin was only referred to by his first and last name for a long time in the tabloid press. Lots of people share that name and it was unfair to them to be associated with a killer. There was actually a Seinfeld episode making fun of this as it became a problem in NY which has a lots of Rifkins. Now he's typically referred to as Joel David Rifkin.
The problem scale of Roseanne is within a believable distance from my own. I have had to dismantle washing machines and clothes dryers to repair them. A show like Seinfeld would make the appliance repairman a character and the repair would be the secondary theme of the episode. A show like Friends would either not acknowledge the existence of laundry machines, or pretend they do not ever break. The only show currently on broadcast television in which I would believe a broken washing machine as a plot element is The Middle.
Here's a potential middle-class The Middle plot line for you: the Glaussners wash the mud off of their off-road 4-wheelers in the street using the Heck household's hose. They do not turn the water off. It runs all week, straight into the gutter, before someone notices and turns it off. The Hecks get an unexpected $300 water bill, which passes unnoticed in their huge monthly stack of bills, as they pay the usual, average monthly amount. Then one day, their water is shut off, and they can't get it turned back on until after Mike's next paycheck.
That's a believable middle class problem. Can you guess why it's believable? Because it's based on a true story.
“Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons on NBC, starting in 1982, was the first great hangout show: neutralizing the depiction of class and removing the pressures of work. Life is hard enough, “Cheers” said; let’s just make TV. Ever since, television started taking it easier on us. Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the economy had improved. On “Seinfeld,” “Living Single,” “Friends,” “Ellen,” “It’s Like, You Know,” “Sex and the City,” “Girlfriends” and, much later, “Happy Endings” and “New Girl,” the commingling, childless men and women might have had jobs, but almost none had consequential careers. How many jobs did Elaine and George have on “Seinfeld”? And in how many fields? And Kramer — how was he paying to live across the hall from Jerry? Hangout shows placed friendship above family, obviating the typical economic ecosystem. Belonging to a family of friends probably means you only have to support yourself.
TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”
Why would you go into any of these shows expecting anything resembling reality. They are all clearly entertainment in the form of light drama and inconsequential, whitewashed sexual tension. To expect anything else is to set yourself up for failure.
Deeper shows exist - The Wire, Breaking Bad, House of Cards - but headlining TV shows are not created to address issues anymore. The shows reflect the main demographics of TV watchers, because that's what keeps them watching, and that's what generates ad revenue. So I'm not too concerned with the state of TV - it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
Interesting, the result seems to be for Jerry Seinfeld. If I try Seinfeld|WORK_OF_ART, I get a bunch of sitcoms but not Seinfeld.
Searched for "Best Iron Maiden album" and it was smart enough not to pick one. Then I tried "Seinfeld" and it returned Seinfeld as the 10th result behind some other sitcoms, including IT Crowd (that was an oddball!) :)
As a Dutch guy brought up with BBC and other British humor (and dystopia but that is another story) I saw the movie when I was 10 or around that and found it very not funny. Humor has a lot to do with taste and I guess I am not a big fan of US humor (exceptions aside) and I think it is because of my British humor upbringing: I wonder if that is the other way around? For instance my Dutch friends who grew up like me with Fawlty towers, Monty Python and Blakes' 7 (not a comedy but brilliant) hate Friends but love Seinfeld and the ones who only got Dutch and German and after that American humor love Friends and hate Seinfeld. No idea if this is just my sample group or if it is far more random than this.
Edit: remembered a few popular ones from my childhood: space balls and porky (forgot the complete name) which my friends in the above 2nd category liked and which made me scratch my brain out of boredom.
Sounds a lot like a certain Seinfeld episode.
A number of the states in the US have a bottle deposit, which sounds like the same idea. Problem is, it is only 5 cents, where it has been for like forty years, so it is only worth collecting and trading in the bottles if your time is effectively value-less. And it's not universal, so we still get the crap thin plastic bottles, they just cost a nickel more in some places than others.
There was a Seinfeld episode involving Kramer collecting a busload of bottles in NY (with $.05 deposit) and driving them to Michigan, where there is a $.10 redemption value.
I've always believed that media consumption is zero sum; or at least has been for a few decades.
The reason is simple: we only have so much time in the day. Media consumption takes up a huge part of that. And while an individual's level of media consumption may rise or fall, it's relatively consistent across a large number of people.
I have a hunch the author is stumbling onto the problem of media measurement. Basically, as more forms of media are available, we tend to consume more of them at the same time. For example, in the 80s I may have watched TV while reading the newspaper. As we have added more types of media in the form of mobile, video and games, we just add more potential "double counting" (or even triple counting!) scenarios. Also, many of these usage measures tend to be self-reported; and the more dimensions you have in a self-reporting questionnaire the less accurate the results are likely to be when you add them up (rounding error, poor recall of actual times leading to "proportional" times, etc).
Media measurement is hard. We still haven't figured it out for online advertising, which should arguably be easier than other types of media since we have better mechanisms for measuring things automatically.
Things are moving towards the long tail though, so I do expect to see a continued growth in the variety of media available. But if you want to see a "zero sum" media in action, just consider that the average ratings for "Seinfeld" were 21 million viewers per episode. 20 years later, the most popular show on TV was "Sunday Night Football" with an average of only 13 million viewers. TV ratings have actually been on a steady decline since the 1950s [1]. So if you give people more options, they will watch them -- at the expense of other forms of media. That's a zero-sum market in my book.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts#Most_watched_series_per_year
This reminds me of this episode of Seinfeld. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottle_Deposit
I wasn't sure if this was a joke when I saw the title, as something similar to this was the premise for the "Seinfeld reunion" episode of Curb your Enthusiasm.
> ...George Costanza...made a fortune by devising an iPhone application called the iToilet, which directed the user to the nearest decent public toilet anywhere in the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seinfeld_%28Curb_Your_Enthusiasm%29
However, private restrooms like proposed here don't sound like too bad an idea! I suspect there will some people who will be willing to pay for them. :-)
I've experienced exactly this. I dealt with it by getting into the habit of going to sleep with something playing in the background. The radio, when I was younger. Lately it's been Seinfeld episodes on my phone (facedown to keep the light from disturbing my sleep) . It's enough of a distraction to break up the train of thought, but not distracting enough to keep me awake.
When I see the stereotypical sitcom dad, he keeps fucking up to telegraph to the audience that he's a fuckup, AKA Barney Fife, not to be a morality play "don't do this or this will happen." Barney can't not be a fuckup because that's his identity. Andy is a well-rounded character, he's not even perfect, sometimes he plays the fool and you learn the lesson, so it serves the morality play function. The dad on My Three Sons is near-perfect, he's the opposite of Barney Fife, his identity is that he's an inhuman archetypal father-figure. I Could see how this could be intimidating, but at least it's something to aspire to. From my perspective, the first two have mostly disappeared from television and most male characters that I would identify with are made to be Barney Fifes. There are also a lot of characters I don't identify with at all, I don't think anybody is supposed to identify with any character in Seinfeld, they are all supposed to be nigh-sociopathic. The audience is invited to laugh at all of them.
Couldn't help but think of the Seinfeld episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsKpShq2X6s
Netflix is well on its way to becoming the first of the 21st century "networks". When you think about a television network it plays re-runs of old shows, re-runs of old movies, movies that have come out of theatres, and original series.
The only difference between Netflix and say "TNT" or "FOX" (other than they don't have news shows) is that the content is available on your schedule, not the networks, and they don't put advertisements in their content they just charge you a monthly fee to have access to it.
They have, nominally 60M subscribers[1] world wide, and 40M in the US[2], out of a total of 113M TV households [3]. If half of their subscribers watched the series Daredevil (which I recommend) that would be the equivalent of Netflix getting a 20 rating. [4] That would be equivalent to a Seinfeld [ibid] which was NBC's hottest show for a very long time.
So what that means is that networks need to either adapt to this new model or die. And the more that die, the more content there is for folks like NetFlix.
Oddly enough, this sort of makes Roku the new Comcast :-)
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/01/20/netflix-soars-on-subscriber-growth/
[2] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-tops-57-million-subscribers-in-q4-as-u-s-growth-slows-1201409712/
[3] http://www.tvb.org/media/file/Nielsen_2014-2015_DMA_Ranks.pdf
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings#Commercial_ratings
I'm sorry, but this has to be said. This guy loves exclamation points! Almost every paragraph features one. It reminds me of a great Seinfeld episode:
Jake: Well, maybe I don't use my exclamation points as haphazardly as you do.
Elaine: You don't think that someone having a baby warrants an exclamation point.
Jake: Hey, I just chalked down the message. I didn't know I was required to capture the mood of each caller.
Elaine: I just thought you would be a little more excited about a friend of mine having a baby.
Jake: Ok, I'm excited. I just don't happen to like exclamation points.
0600 - Arise 0605 - Do some exercise, in my house because I don't like the gym anymore. 0650 - Have a shower 0700 - Wake up girlfriend 0705 - Start coffee, moka pot 0710 - Start breakfast stuff. Toast, grapefruit, croissant - one of those, not all! 0720 - Get the TV on. Sitcoms in the morning. Formerly Frasier, finished that so now it's Seinfeld. 0820 - Quick cup of OJ 0825 - Start getting dressed 0845 - Set off for work 0900 - Get to work 0930 - Wake up
>There's an incredible amount of bad programming on today
Well, Sturgeon's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
The crap today is crap in different ways from older television but I'd argue what's good is very, very good. And frankly, if you can give me a handful of hours of quality television a week, I'm happy. Give me much more than that and I'm not going to watch it anyway. If there's a greater percentage of poor TV today, it's probably because there are more time slots that need to be filled cheaply but whether it's 99% crap or 99.9% crap doesn't really affect me.
I never got into Big Bang Theory and have pretty much lost my taste for sitcoms generally in any case. I'm not sure I'd even get into Seinfeld today although it was pretty much a cultural touchstone at the time.
Seinfeld was the first (only?) TV sitcom to weave multiple totally unrelated storylines together.
Saying every show has "a beginning, middle, and end" isn't really much of an observation.
Just wanted to say that I just discovered this and love it! Combines two of my favorite things - economics and Seinfeld!
I'd look to incorporate some Curb your Enthusiasm in there as well.
Also, I would explain how the economic concepts correspond to the episode a bit more. There's the general episode description and explanations of each of the concepts. I know enough to be able to put 2 and 2 together, but for some students I would think they'd need it spelled out a bit more how exactly concept B is used in the episode.
To preface this: I think the site is neat, and you're not going to be sued, and you're on good ethical footing. But: Your specific fair use claim doesn't seem particularly compelling.
First, there's no plausible risk of trademark confusion, so we're only looking at copyright infringement. The list of Seinfeld episodes, and the facts about the plot of each one, are non-copyrightable, so AFAICT all we're talking about is a single 2-5 minute video clip per episode.
The clips are a very small part of the overall episode, and they're narrowly edited to provide only enough context to demonstrate the point, which speaks to fair use. The fact that there's an educational, noncommercial purpose also helps. On the other hand, it's a swath of material cut from across the entirety of the show, with zero other sources, which is pretty far-ranging and speaks against fair use.
If you imagine cutting the clips together into a YouTube video, and distributing that, you would have an extremely tenuous case. You'd be looking for some reason the use was necessary, not just convenient. So there's actually a lot riding on that educational purpose, and unfortunately that seems like the weakest part of the argument.
Here's the rub: The site isn't educating people about Seinfeld. It's about economics. While the clips make for compelling examples, no one could reasonably claim they're the only or best ways to make those points. In other words, it doesn't seem like there's any reason you need to use material from Seinfeld instead of almost any other piece of popular culture. That runs a big ol' hole through the educational purpose argument; fair use isn't structured to let you copy whatever you want to, and simply being a teacher doesn't give us license to infringe at will, alas. (Educational institutions have a substantially more circumspect understanding of fair use[0] than Reddit does, and for good reason.)
Keep in mind the educational exemption applies much more strongly to private performances than reproduction and distribution. I'd guess a university-level, semester-long course titled "The Economics of Seinfeld" where students watch a clip every class day would have a rock solid fair use case. But if the professor starts handing out DVDs, that starts to look like a place where the rights holder would want to draw a line in the sand.
Anyway, again, for my part I see no moral issue, and I didn't really intend to belabor the point this much, just reasoning through the logic of fair use. I assume you haven't been sued for more blasé reasons than your use being legally defensible, to wit the Web double whammy:
1) Your infinitesimal damages are far below the cost of even sending a C&D letter, and
2) Suing any fan site, let alone one for a cult classic that's still showing reruns after fifteen years off the air, is clinically insane.
[0] eg. http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/
Sounds like an episode of Seinfeld.
My job hunt feels like an episode of Seinfeld:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBn8XttrSew
And my Hail Mary if all fails:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zpOVmhkEaQ
It shouldn't be compared to Big Bang Theory. That show is a typical paint-by-numbers sitcom, the kind that CBS has been cashing big checks on for the past decade. They aren't particularly funny. I think Chuck Klosterman wrote something that these shows are "in the form of funny", which means that they follow a common comedic timing and use the laugh track as a cue. Once you start looking for it, you always see it.
The three camera and laugh track are usually indicators that the show probably isn't "smart funny", but it's not always true. I can watch Seinfeld reruns and pick out the camera cuts, laugh tracks and joke timings, but the show is still pretty clever.
But most people capable of making shows of Seinfeld-quality aren't going to go do a CBS sitcom. Seinfeld's set up was mostly a relic of its era. Today, you can get a single-camera comedy greenlit thanks to the cable channels. Even networks took some chances. I don't watch too many network shows anymore, but I know Scrubs and Arrested Development were single camera shows without laugh tracks and they were on NBC/ABC and Fox, respectively.
As for Silicon Valley, I was expecting more from it. It's a Mike Judge show and the reviews were very positive. I've only seen the first two episodes, but they were at least good enough to make me want to watch more. It sometimes takes these shows a while to build the characters and build enough background for more jokes to connect, but at this point, I'm more worried about the story lines being thin than the comedy. That's what ultimately lost my interest in Entourage. That show started out as being a fun 30 minutes, but it was very superficial and once you realized that the plots were ridiculous and the characters didn't make that much sense, it became tedious to watch. Since both Entourage and Silicon Valley are both based on specific, unique cultures, I think they're fairly comparable.
This is great!
Here's a few interesting ones I've come across:
* The Wire (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0306414)
Known for being a slow starting show, this is visible with the season trend lines.
* The Shield (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0286486)
Season 4 is such a massive outlier.
* Seinfeld (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0098904)
Held very steady until the last season.
The fact of the matter is that not telling racist jokes probably means you are racist. Mocking people for their faults is the most basic kind of humour. Stuff kids do in early school, to the point of being mean, and then scale back to socially acceptable levels. However, this is an humour class that never completely disappears. Whole comedian careers have been built on it (look at the TV show Seinfeld for an example).
When you actively avoid mocking someone because they have a visibly different skin tone, subconsciously you believe this is something they should be ashamed of. Racist, qed.
It is as ok to mock someone for being "african-american" as it is mocking someone for their closed Texan accent. And it is ok. Mock away, and take it in stride when it's your turn to be the target.
Wasn't this the same idea that made George a millionaire on the reunion episode of Seinfeld?
Although this clip isn't from Seinfeld, the topic certainly did arise there. In addition to the episode cglace (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341503) mentions, which I don't remember, there was an episode where George showed Jerry that, given any address, he could name the nearest public bathroom.
There is a great Seinfeld episode where Jerry, George, and Kramer all pretend to be interested in a home for sale so that they can use the bathroom.
Reminds me of this Seinfeld episode where Jerry calls a car thief :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG-_tz5YuZE
I think the Godwin rule is good for stuff that is extreme hyperbole, and typically just examples of attacks on character. The 'Soup Nazi' from Seinfeld being a good example: it was one of my favorite episodes, but really, the soup restaurant guy is Hitler?
But I am literally making a point about something that I think is truly key to preserving democratic society in America, or whatever is left of it, and I would view the removal of private gun ownership in the United States as actually being a prelude to something as bad as Nazi Germany. I think the Second Amendment is the keystone to all of the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Basically, calling your boss Hitler because he made you work on the weekend is absurd, but making comparisons between Hitler and somebody like Pol-Pot is quite legitimate.
Big hit TV shows are extraordinarily rare. Most fail; most fail quickly.
You can just about list on one hand every decade, the number of shows that last more than five years and bring in big ratings (audience / users). Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Roseanne, Mash, etc.
Hit TV shows are extraordinarily difficult to 'manufacture.' Out of thousands proposed and scripted by writers, one or two per year are hits if you're lucky. Out of those, a few survive five or seven years.
And that's all true even with the huge built-in audiences that companies such as NBC, ABC, CBS have that show up every night waiting to watch content. There aren't 100,000 other apps to compete with, just a few major deliverers of TV shows / networks; and the failure rate is still that high.
Nate Silver wouldn't have a job without advertisement. Neither would Glenn Greenwald, Walter Cronchite, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.
TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and M.A.S.H. would not exist without ads.
Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Phelps, Michael Jordan, Michael Tyson, Tiger Woods, and Larry Byrd would not have done the things they did without ads - no one would have paid them to.
Ads pay for people who are good at what they do to do what they're good at what they do as a means to pay for the other things they have to do. You couldn't possibly be more wrong about advertisements - without ads, there would be no US as you know it today.
> Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)?
No. Multi-camera sitcoms with live audiences are very, very different in writing, tone, and end product to single camera comedies. They both serve different purposes.
Shooting a sitcom in front of a studio audience radically alters the pacing, the way jokes are told, and the setup (you're inherently constrained to fewer sets).
I think there is still a space today for comedies with live audiences (and the ratings seem to back this up). I love Arrested Development. I also love Frasier. AD would obviously never have worked with a live audience, Frasier would have been a far worse show without the laugh track.
Now, I'm not talking about canned laughter. I think I can agree that adding laughter in post is bad. And Big Bang Theory is particularly guilty of 'sweetening' live audience reaction, meaning jokes that shouldn't be that funny often have huge waves of laughter. I don't appreciate that.
The reference is to an episode of Seinfeld where the Kramer sub-plot is about bottle deposit returns. Kramer notices that he can get 10 cents instead of the usual 5 cents for a bottle deposit return if he can return it to Michigan. Newman says that it can't be done, he's crunched the numbers and you blow all of your profit by transporting the bottles (remember, Seinfeld is set in NYC). However, Newman (a postal worker) finds out there is an overflow mail truck that only happens on Mother's Day due to all the cards that are sent and that they can have the USPS essentially cover the transportation so he signs up to drive the truck. Of course nothing goes the way it's supposed to when the Elaine/Jerry plot merges with the Newman/Kramer plot and Kramer is forced to abandon the attempt mid-quest (after throwing Newman out of the postal truck) to recover JFK's golf clubs.
The picture is of Newman drinking a soda so he can get the deposit on it.
Mine: It's based on a Seinfeld episode where George makes up a fake charity and gives cards to people "A donation has been made in your name to Human Fund".
Say you want to gift someone but you don't know what they want / don't want to buy more stuff / etc. So you buy a card that has a message ("Happy Birthday!" or whatever) and a number of credits associated with it and you give it to someone. The person, then, can use the credits to give things to non-profits, like a shirt for the homeless, or some food for a orphanage.
In my experience the larger the apartment building you live in, the less likely that your neighbors will acknowledge you. Unless its a condo/coop where there are association meetings, and then everyone is in your face all the time.
The most social place I've ever lived was a fenced community of detached 1BR bungalows in Los Angeles. Most likely because it housed primarily unemployed actors who spent most of their day hanging out in communal spaces chatting. I think this has a lot to do with the perception of life in TV shows, they write from what they know, and what they know is living in LA. Seinfeld and Frasier have much more in common with life in small Hollywood low-rise apartments than they do with life in the type of high-density high-rise that you find in NYC...
> The vast majority of people don't find children sexually attractive.
Then why are there so many underage fashion models and pop stars? Why is leering at underage girls so often a theme in TV series? Just yesterday, I saw an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry and George couldn’t stop looking at the cleavage of a 15 year old girl.[1] Also, who has seen Blue Lagoon and can honestly say they didn’t fall in love with Brooke Shields?
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697775/
What does Soylent taste like? What does "the body doesn't have to get rid of unused waste" mean? I'm reminded of the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer goes on an all-yogurt diet for a week. :\
Also, it's a little disconcerting when the only founder with any food or biotech background is the sales guy.
Reading your description of all the things you can learn about your own breathing reminds me of a line in a Seinfeld episode when Tia the model turns to Jerry and says: "I've never met a man who knew so much about nothing"
Is there actually any evidence that people get removed from flights more nowadays? With 100s of millions of domestic people-flights a year we're bound to see a small number of absurd events, like airline employees in a bad mood (not uncommon) pushed over the edge by virtually nothing. Of course I'm not defending the ridiculous removals, but I'm trying to put it into perspective.
I flew a lot as a child in the 80s, and every now and then I'd see someone kicked off a flight. It was usually for drunkedness, but my point is the right to remove a passenger at the airline employee's discretion has existed for decades. I know Seinfeld is fiction, but there's a pretty funny episode from 1995 where the pilot kicks seinfeld off a flight because seinfeld had kicked him out of his comedy show earlier that weekend.
Not movies. But definitely something that does not need your full attention - something that you don't mind tuning in and out of. This would mostly be TV shows - Simpsons, Family Guy, Two and a half men, How I met your mother. Seinfeld was great for this.
You may be either very young or not an American English speaker, but the phrase "X Nazi" is American slang denoting somebody who is overly strict about whatever X is. It comes from the "Soup Nazi" episode of Seinfeld, in which a soup shop owner would evict customers from his shop with the declaration "NO SOUP FOR YOU" if they didn't follow a very precise procedure for ordering. It is not actually an accusation of Nazism.
Not opining on how good it is: the script matters less than the execution.
Have you ever watched Coupling? It is an extremely funny British sitcom (ignoring the 4th season, which is just "funny", but not as good as the first 3 seasons, with the exception of a couple of episodes).
It was also successful in the US. So, an american version with american actors was made, as is customary (see e.g. The Office, Queer as Folk, Being Human, etc, etc, etc.)
It had exactly the same texts for the expisodes I watched. It had reasonably good actors. But it just wasn't funny. I gave it the benefit of doubt. Then rewatched the british. Still funny. Then the american. Not funny.
(Successful conversions like "the office" go their own way, rather than stay true to the original)
The best script is useless without a matching excellent delivery. And a lesser script is still excellent with the right delivery. (Think about how Seinfeld would look if done by your other favorite comedians who are not Seinfeld/Louis-Dreyfus/Spadowski et al)
I like Mike Judge's past work. I'm going to wait until I see it executed before I have an opinion.
Content availability is the main problem. Hulu is really annoying because I pay for it yet still have to endure commercials, and their have strange restrictions on how you can consume the content. 30 Rock, for example, cannot be streamed through my Apple TV's Hulu. I could stream it to my laptop, however. Instead I wound up paying Apple for it, so I'm in the seemingly absurd situation of paying Apple $20, Hulu $8/month and Netflix $8/month, and I still don't get all the TV I want to watch--or even all of broadcast TV. I can't get Seinfeld without Crackle, and Crackle is about the worst.
These services are all partially overlapping solutions. Here's what I want:
- All TV shows, current season as it airs and all past seasons
- No commercials
- No time pressure to watch before "expiration"
I'm willing to pay substantially for this. I'm talking $40-60/month, and I don't care about HBO or Showtime either. Instead I have two services that charge me $8/month and have the selection of a small-town Blockbuster. If any of these services were actually trying to compete with cable, they could charge more and provide access to the rest of the content. Instead they seem happy to play the annoying long-tail game with off-brand crap, and it's deeply dissatisfying.
The real problem here is absolutely not technical. It's contractual with the companies that own the content. I doubt you could do better than they have without offering more money, but I think there could be a real niche there if you're willing to charge customers actual money to provide actual service.
> Anyway, I think its fun that they used > essentially the same covers for their first > and last issues.
Just like Seinfeld[1]? (first joke of first episode as the last joke of the series finale)
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finale_(Seinfeld)#Part_two
This initially seemed like a really good argument.
Then I realized that you could make an even better sounding argument like this: "Imagine if copyright was only 10 years. Look at all the works that would now be public domain: Seinfeld, Friends, The Batman Movies, etc. etc.". This argument will probably be even more persuasive for the people who liked the original argument, since works from 10 years ago are even more recognizable.
In other words, this argument isn't actually saying anything interesting - it's simply an emotional appeal. Why should or shouldn't copyright be 10, 20, or 70 years? Why is the 1978 law wrong? Why was it created in the first place? I don't know from this article.
One thing that annoyed me (and it's typical of writing on gender and racial issues) is that he bends over backwards to state, effectively, "not that having women execs don't drive success". This hyper-careful threading brings to mind the famous Seinfeld "not that there's anything wrong with that" episode ("The Outing").
My approach in these matters is Bayesian: Do having female, black, Asian, Indian, etc. executives drive start-up success? The a priori probability I assign to this statement is 0.5, i.e. may or may not. I also employ the My Human Law of Large Numbers, i.e. any "large enough" human population (i) has a Gaussian distribution of any cognitive skill and (ii) the parameters of this distribution is pretty much independent of the particular population sample. I don't have solid proof of this principle and in certain subdomains it may be wrong (e.g. the great cognitive differences between men and women debate, etc.) but I doubt that population differences would be significant.
Now, armed with the simple Bayesian approach and the MHLLN, we can see that most of these articles are BS. The evidence to move the a priori value of 0.5 up or down should be substantial, e.g "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I would be extremely surprised if any gender, racial, etc. factor would derive success of any size company.
Since the above analysis is rather trivial, one then has to ask why these things continue to be written. I think the motivation is usually benign: One sees the dearth of women in startups and wants to show that "it's a good thing". This approach, however, is misguided in that, by making silly arguments or sub-par statistical analysis, it hurts the cause due to the "the lady doth protest too much" effect: many people politely nod, but see through your sloppiness and internally become convinced of just the opposite cause (especially if they are inclined to do so, i.e. if the prior was less than 0.5).
A quote I like a lot is "To be ideological is to preconceive reality." These authors, rather than being objective, have already decided what their results will be and are just filling up the blanks.
I'm saying you are clearly seeing a generational and tech savvy bias to the rankings. For Avengers to be so high shows it's good movie, and it is. But the fanboyism of the comic-reading, tech savvy audience is skewing the metric way higher than it should be.
The same thing is happening with Game of Thrones. It's excellent but I've seen many, many TV dramas that are just as good if not better.
Comedy is a terrible example to criticize due to it tending to be very cross-generational. MASH, Seinfeld, and I Love Lucy are still shown on TV today. MASH and I Love Lucy on more obscure cable channels, but Seinfeld still is on in reruns for an hour before primetime TV on our CBS affiliate.
" I can't even find the MASH TV show, only the movie. Pretty weird considering that it's considered the 2nd best TV comedy of all time. #74 'Seinfeld' - considered the 3rd best TV comedy of all time."
Are you really criticizing the subjectivity of this list based on the subjective rankings of your generation?
Also game of thrones is brilliant, imo.
There's another bias, where things are overrated because they're unusually good for their time. For instance, "Battleship Potemkin" is often considered one of the greatest films ever made because it was so innovative for its time, despite the fact that when you watch it now, it's easily a shitty propaganda film. It may have been a greater achievement, but as a film, it's somewhat lacking by modern standards. Likewise, MASH and Seinfeld were groundbreaking, but largely because of MASH and Seinfeld, we can and do make better television series today. I think the two biases largely cancel out.
This has some interesting consequences. For instance, in the restricted realm of science fiction TV, it's clear that Star Trek: The Next Generation is strictly better than the original Star Trek, just as the recent Battlestar Galactica is strictly better than TNG, because these series responded to and innovated on each other.
On balance, I still wouldn't say it's necessarily true that newer series are better than older series. It's still rare that a TV series tops The Prisoner, for instance.
The problem with these rankings (assuming they are from IMDB) is that they are more friendly to contemporary, Internet-age movies and TV. Anything older than about 30 years is significantly down further in the list.
As an example, I can't imagine a world where 'The Avengers' is better than 'Schindler's List', 'Godfather, Part 2', or 'Pulp Fiction' (just 3 examples).
A few stupid entries: #1721 'I Love Lucy' - easily considered by critics as the best TV comedy of all time yet barely in the top 20% of all tv and movies? I can't even find the MASH TV show, only the movie. Pretty weird considering that it's considered the 2nd best TV comedy of all time. #74 'Seinfeld' - considered the 3rd best TV comedy of all time. The internet is more friendly to this one. #15 'Game of Thrones (TV)' - fanboys strike again, or they just really like irrelevant nudity[1].
#1636 'The Constant Gardener' - it is an abomination that this is here, it's lower ranked than 'Super Troopers' (#1626), 'Iron Man 2' (#1610), and 'Soul Surfer' (#1599), just to name a few.
[1] http://gawker.com/5902076/snl-explains-the-nudity-in-game-of-thrones
oh, this is a reference to a Seinfeld episode. Elaine works for a clothing company that is trying to sell men's purses by renaming them "European carry alls".
Jerry: Hey! Officer! Someone took my European carryall!
Cop: Your what?
Jerry: The...black, leather...thing with a strap.
Cop: You mean a purse?
Jerry: Yes, a purse. I carry a purse!
having watched both dvds of shows and the same shows on television (same with hulu v. television) I prefer to watch the episode in its entirety minus commercial breaks, except for certain sitcoms. I think that Seinfeld and Friends may play better with the breaks.
I don't think we need a word for Backpfeifengesicht. We can just say that's a face needing fist. "face needing fist" is actually one character shorter than Backpfeifengesicht.
For L’esprit de l’escalier, the phrase "jerk store" would probably be sufficient to convey that sentiment for anyone familiar with the Seinfeld TV series.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when the homeless rise up and reject Elaine's castoff "muffin stumps". This is not food! We are too dignified to eat the stumps left by the customers of your Muffin Top Cafe!
That "Only donate what you would buy" dictum is just as misguided.
I did buy it once. I just don't need it anymore. Maybe someone else can find some use for it.
Seinfeld is also simply not funny. Not on his show, not ever. So it's not surprising his movie was also total shit.
Sorry, I thought everyone knew this, I didn't pay attention to the connotation of "cancelled", since it was still cancelled. (Like, if a band's show is cancelled, it's often because of them). What I was getting at is that Seinfeld had a phenominally long TV-show run, which is extremely demanding of anyone, let alone its eponymous main character. He did not then do another long-running TV show, which would have simply been this unthinkable commitment. (This is how I'm interpreting it).
I'm not saying one causes the other, but Seinfeld was very good with his system, it led to a very, very long-running TV series, and he didn't follow it up with another series.
How or whether this has any effect on any projects you might do you have to decide for yourself.
It wasn't canceled, he chose to stop the show, and at the time it was the most viewed show [0]. They offered him a lot more money but he decided to leave on a high point [1]. After having one of the most successful shows of all time, he went on to create a successful movie (Bee Movie) [2] and continues to do stand-up.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seinfeld#Ratings
[1] http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9712/26/seinfeld/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_Movie
After "Seinfeld" ended: He famously threw away all his stand-up material after doing the very successful special "I'm Telling You For the Last Time", He was featured in a documentary called "Comedian" following his slow grind building up all new material, has continued touring with that new material, He immediately began touring with that new material (I saw a show and thought it was really good), He made "Bee Movie", He made "The Marriage Ref".
And other things too. Some of the stuff in that list was nearly as good as "Seinfeld", and some of it was terrible, but he's been around.
i agree that Foresquare may be on the wane.
i am starting to see that some of these social websites might just have a normal lifespan like the run of a TV show. Signing up to something like Foresquare might be like starting to watch "Seinfeld" or "Friends", it's exciting at first, you get to know the characters and you get engaged, and then after a normal involvement arc you move on to new things.
nothing wrong with it,,,, unless of course you staff up 100 engineers thinking that this will be a new permanent part of the landscape ;)
sell to FB when it's public and grab your loot!
Video games and the internet killed TV.
Going from 3 to 300 channels did not help. What really cut into their budget was a steady drop in viewership over time as new toys simply become more compelling than TV. Reality TV is simply what happened when keep cutting the budget.
PS: Seinfeld reportedly turned down a $5 million per-episode offer to continue the show for a 10th year. You can put on a full season of a reality TV show for that.
I find some early risers to be holier-than-thou about their sleeping habits. They can easily be thwarted using the technique introduced on an episode of Seinfeld - just call very late meetings and watch how grumpy and tired they get.
There is nothing about being an early riser that is any better than being a night owl except possibly the sunrise (depending on how extreme of a night owl you are).
Working consistent long hours does not mean you're getting more done. I believe RescueTime has data showing the average person at work 8-hours a day is only working 2-4 hours. The people I know who are consistently first in and last out are not getting more done - in fact they're usually doing it to make up for something. One theory on productivity says procrastinators and workaholics have the same core issue - but respond to it in opposite ways.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when George Castanza leaves his car at work so his boss thinks he's always there.
We need to stop measuring productivity by hours worked. Instead, productivity should be about finishing what you set out to do. If that only takes 4 hours, GO HOME. Plan the next day. Get some rest. Your output will be higher, and you'll be healthier and happier.
anyone remember the episode from Seinfeld where his girlfriend is wearing the same dress everytime they go out and Jerry suspects if she has closet full of same dress..
How would that work? They dynamically make a new version each time someone wants to download it from the "official source"? Would this be the same version over the entire day? The entire week? What if I wanted to download an old episode of Seinfeld, would I get current ads, or ads from 1996? Would the "official source" still have to be able to upload each episode? If not, you run the risk of having multiple versions of current shows (this week's ads and last week's ads) in the wild. And you lose the ability to have people who downloaded it last week help with distribution.
I think that the best solution is to have a container that automatically inserts ads at the appropriate times. In this case though, the task will be making sure someone doesn't just remove the ads from the container. This is a similar problem with DVRs, but since this would all be automated, there is a greater risk.
The giant elephant in the room is being overlooked: Advertisements have a lifespan measured in months, weeks, or days. Television content can stay relevant for decades.
Imagine it's the year 1997. Aliens from the planet GNU have gone back in time and provided us with bittorrent, and technology making dial-up modems a million times faster (but they still drop their connection if your mom picks up the phone). You just torrented and watched the latest Seinfeld episode, "The Muffin Tops", and have forever changed your muffin-eating habits.
While watching, you saw ads for Apple's "Think Different" campaign, McDonald's Arch Deluxe, and that "Da Da Da" Volkswagen commercial (which is now stuck in your head). You go out and buy the car, buy a Mac, and buy a Big Mac because the Arch Deluxe tastes like crap.
In 2007 you watch The Muffin Tops again. The old ads from 1997 are still embedded in the file. Apple's ad seems weird since the logo is all rainbows. You drive to McDonald's to get an Arche Deluxe because now you're an adult and it'll taste good, but they don't have it anymore, so you cry and drive home to sign a petition website to bring it back. Nobody ever reads it. Along the way your Volkswagen breaks down and you remember how that terribly sounding ad tricked you into buying such an unreliable piece of junk. You get a lift from the aliens, but they charge you one anal probe for the ride. Now you hate Apple, hate McDonalds, hate Volkswagen, and hate that the aliens didn't have the common decency to at least warm up their metal tools before use. Ouch.
Wrong. If you have something people want, they'll force money on you. Make something people want. People are so naive, like they've never seen "Soup Nazi" episode of Seinfeld.
Yeah, and remember it was the idea of "ignorance of the law is no excuse", that ended the sitcom Seinfeld. Sad.
But what country could have produced "Airplane!", or "O Brother Where Art Thou?"
You could say that something like "Seinfeld" (and "Curb Your Enthusiasm") is more the product of a very unusual subculture (in fact, this is the basis for much of the humor, how poorly new yorkers fit in the rest of US culture), but keep in mind Seinfeld had the highest ratings of any sitcom in US history, so the appeal is obviously very broad.
okay, i also could not help but think of the seinfeld episode where george screwed the cleaning lady in his cube. that's cube screwing, i guess lol. you are RIGHT about the light-heartedness--there needs to be humor. i do think people would LOVE to go to/contribute to a site like this. i like that your idea brings up the old adage, "That idea is so self-evident, why didn't i think of it?" That means it is a very good idea.
It's funny to watch Seinfeld with this in mind. Virtually every episode's plot is unbelievable given cell-phones.
Couldn't help but remember a TV show from my childhood called Roc about a garbage man. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101184/
I couldn't remember any shows that centered around postal workers. Seinfeld had a regular character and a few episodes about the postal system (but then that show had an episode about almost everything). But it did make me think about "Get a Life" which starred an adult paperboy http://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=76500&lid=7
Construction crews was the same, I could think of several shows off the top of my head that center around the "idea" but none that landed right on it. There's Arrested Development which centers around a land development company (but really isn't about that all that much). Home Improvement, which isn't actually about home improvement and is more about a guy who has a show about tools. You said "show" but I'm guessing you meant sitcom/drama based on context so that rules out Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, since that's really reality-vertising. No worries, I'm sure someone on HN will figure this one out.
A truly gifted writer could make a show about almost anything interesting
I totally agree, including a cop/doctor/lawyer show. :o) One of my favorites was "Ed" on NBC ... first season only, though (http://stuckeyville.com).
Sorry for the delay, I missed your comment earlier. I simply meant that it sounds mysterious, and it doesn't seem he has any competitors yet, or has franchised it. It sounds like it originated in a Seinfeld episode or something. There are ways to leverage the exclusivity factor.
Normally I wouldn't vote up this kind of trash, but I see something interesting here.
"Mainstream culture" collapsed about a decade ago -- did you know that Seinfeld was the last TV show watched regularly by 50% or more of the American population? As the article notes, memes are increasingly where we get our culture. And hoaxes are an integral part of the meme landscape.
Anyone who can find a way to modify the Internet (not the Internet itself, of course, but people's use of the Internet) to better resist the spread of hoaxes could significantly change society. Think not just hoaxes, but outrages like #amazonfail. What a huge social cost (on attention, reputation etc) these things impose. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/
Now that might not seem like a great startup idea -- users are just having fun spreading links around (or getting outraged), and if you can't even monetize content then how can you monetize crowdsourcing the truth?
But then I noticed that Fox News and other media outlets fell for this hoax. Surely there's a significant monetary cost to that, which provides an opportunity for a business model?
The old Snopes way of doing things isn't working so well any more -- these things spread in minutes, so the fact checking mechanism needs to use channels similar to the ones that the hoaxes themselves do.
One possible idea is a prediction market (that pays out real money). If it is successful, it might become a standard part of media fact checking policy to check the prices there. A news organization probably be willing to actually wager a few thousand dollars -- a fraction of what the story is worth to them. Coming back to this example, that would give a tremendous incentive to one of the many people involved in creating this hoax to make a decent pile of money through the prediction site (anonymously, in fact). In effect, it would be a way for anonymous tipsters to leak out the word (in addition to aggregating third-party analysis and intelligence), except it would be far more streamlined and effective because it's a market.
Anyway, just a thought.
According to Larry David, Steinbrenner himself was actually meant to appear playing himself in one episode of Seinfeld (The Finale, IIRC). They shot his scenes, but found in editing that his acting was so lousy that they had no choice but to edit him out. When Larry David called Steinbrenner to tell him that they could not use the scenes they had shot with him, the conversation went something like this (from memory):
LD: Mr Steinbrenner, I'm afraid I have some bad news. GS: It's ok, I'm a big boy, I can take it.
Here's mine. I like to get an early start. My eyes are generally open before the 5:00 AM alarm rings.
4:55 AM - Eyes open
5:00 AM - Out of bed
5:10 AM - 6:30 AM - Deal with email and eat breakfast, create TODO list for the day
6:30 AM - Get showered and dressed
7:00 AM - Drive or walk to bus (if not working from home that day)
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM - Work
6:30 PM - Home
6:30 PM - 10:00 PM - Random (dinner, gym, walk with wife, help kids with homework, personal projects, etc)
10:00 PM - 11:30 PM - Watch a few random episodes of Seinfeld or Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on DVR
11:30 PM - Fall asleep in front of TV
12:30 AM - Wake up and go upstairs for actual sleep
My time on the bus is spent reading or resting.
Yet another new technology that would have ruined the plot of any Seinfeld episode. Like the cell phone, for example...
Don't instruct people to cut their burgers with a fork and knife! That's like the Seinfeld episode where George cuts his candy bar with a fork a knife. It's "fake" classy. No one actually eats like that.
As a side though, anyone want to start an online "finishing" school?
It's been true about them ever since they were actually walking around in reality. It's even truer since they faded into history. It was true in Star Wars. It's true in Mel Brooks' parody of Star Wars, and a whole bunch of his other films besides. It's true in Indiana Jones. In a way it's true on Seinfeld. Even Charlie Chaplin found it to be true. Poor old Leni Riefenstahl knew it was true, personally, then spent the rest of her life paying the price.
What is it? Nazis make for good cinema!
It makes sense, really. A bunch of guys running around in the 20th century, with mechanized warfare and a world view that would've fit in perfectly well in Genghis Khan's time. It's as if a writer for a video game made them up and they escaped through a time portal into the 1st half of the 20th century.
Why do I even bother with posts like this? Automatic Godwin's!
(Standard Godwin's Disclaimers: Nazis were real and as evil as you can get. The Holocaust actually happened.)
I don't think it's about progress so much as topicality -- the widely-maligned "relevance." A Restoration comedy about vainglorious mercenaries and cuckolded husbands might be better than an episode of Seinfeld on an objective measure, if one could be devised -- but I dare say it would have a fair bit less to say to you or me than it had to say to its original audience.
We find more recent works more interesting than older ones, not necessarily because they're better, but because they speak to us more usefully -- similarly, we can find surprisingly old works surprisingly relevant for the same reason, or can rediscover materials that previous generations scoffed at.
Most of the plays of Shakespeare fall into this last category -- they were hardly ever performed in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and when they were, they were jazzed up with special effects along the lines of fireworks and performing bears. The gulf between the 18thC and our own is an enormous one in general, come to think of it; play _Empire: Total War_ for a sense of just how different even the visual aesthetics of their era were from our own.
Don't look at the art assets that are, necessarily, more or less faithful to the period; look at how the game's developers try to make the era look interesting to a modern. What most stood out to me was the vast gulf between the national flags used in the 18thC and national flags depicted in the game -- in particular Austria, where the red-and-white national flag is replaced by the yellow-and-black dynastic flag of the Habsburgs, and Russia, where the white-red-blue national flag is shame-facedly tacked on to the Romanov coat of arms. (The loading screens are the second most extreme illustration.)
I'd rather Seinfeld end positively than continued until it had dried up. I don't think it's really fair to call him washed-out, Seinfeld was incredibly successful, how does anyone ever expect him to top it? He just has the bar for what's expected of him set too high to achieve that again.
It seems a majority of actors on a hugely popular syndicated TV show really fail to jump start their careers afterward, likely because people expect the same performance quality every time, no room for error.
Oh, right, syndication profits. I thought he'd given up stand-up, though.
I don't think that making money stops you from being washed-out, though. Look at Charlie Sheen and 2.5 Men. It's one of the most popular shows on television, but it's a washed-out show nonetheless, receives bucketloads of negative press, and Sheen is a loony B-list actor who pitches 9/11 conspiracy theories. I'm sure he makes more money than, say, Jason Bateman, but Bateman isn't washed-out whereas Sheen is.
The attitude about Seinfeld is that he was great 20 years ago, sold out in the process of ending Seinfeld (some people are a little more generous than that), and hasn't done a damn thing since. Bee Movie generated waves of bad press, and that was supposed to be his comeback. The fact that I haven't heard of his doing a new series says something. If he was still trendy, I'd have known right away.
I think your professor is missing a few things (or they haven't made it to this conversation so far):
Microsoft's campaign exhibits a lot of diversity - ethnicities, ages, roles. Apple's poster boy (singular) is a smart-alec white hipster. I didn't particularly care for the 'laptop hunter' ads but one of them included the line 'I guess I'm just not cool enough for a mac', which I thought was a clever dig at the snob appeal and pricing of the Mac products. It's also, I suspect, aimed at offsetting the grumbles of nativists about Microsoft's public support for H1-B workers - though perhaps I'm attributing too much vision to CP&B there.
More importantly, most of the commercials emphasize what people do with their computers - they run busineses (tattoo guy), study or make movies (laptop hunters), or grow up doing creative things (Kylie, the terminally cute little girl). The Mac guy just stands around saying how much better he is because he's a Mac - he doesn't actually do anything. So the CP&B ads mostly establish a direct connection between customer's goals and the product they can use to achieve them (Windows and the computer it runs on).
The Apple 'tech' commercials (this is a Mac/iPhone - look, you can do this, this and this) are much better in that regard, but they do present a solution and invite the viewer to consider how it might solve a problem or ease their routine. I think think it's interesting that the MS ads are built around the idea of the user articulating the goal first and then exercising or expressing a choice to do it with a PC. In narrative terms, they establish character first and then offer (their) technology as an aid to that.
Finally, the MS ads show Windows running on a variety of different hardware - premium to be sure, but that variety carries connotations of choice, flexibility, and mutual confidence among manufacturers in Windows, whereas Apple is an all-or-nothing proposition. You want to go Mac, well say goodbye to your existing hardware whether or not it works...not an easy decision in recessionary times.
I'm actually pretty impressed with CP&B. Even the Shoe Circus commercial with Seinfeld was clever: by playing off the dorkiness and incomprehensibility, and ending with an image of a departing bill Gates (but with a hint that new things were in the pipeline), it effectively leveraged the existing preconceptions about Microsoft and used them as a pivot to direct attention towards what was coming next in the campaign. It was like one of those movies where there's an opening scene which makes no real sense until later...'all will be revealed'. Its purpose was to engage people's attention, at which it succeeded very effectively. And for those who say Seinfeld was way out of date - for one thing, the show is still in syndication and regularly advertised (staying power) and for another, isn't that what people were saying about Windows, that it was past its peak and washed up? And yet Seinfeld is still a big wheel in his industry and is about to launch a new series...which had already been in the works for several months when he appeared in 'Shoe Circus' just over a year ago. Matter of fact, I bet any time you see a computer in that series it'll be running windows 7.
I'd need to see that in writing.
Bee Movie after something as monumental as the Seinfeld show? That's a wash-out. Reminds me of the scene in Extras where Ricky Gervais goes to work for Doctor Who.
I've always liked the 'seinfeld' definition of fluency:
If you can watch a local sitcom on TV and laugh at the jokes, then you're fluent.
That may be a bit harder to test for, but it adds an element of cultural understanding that goes beyond textbook skills.
This subject is featured in a Seinfeld episode: "These PRETZELS are making me thirsty!" "These pretzels are making ME thirsty!"
None of them. Granted there is a distinction, but let's assume for the moment we've established that the sexual acts themselves cause no lasting damage. Where, then, does the damage come from? I think a large part of the damage from being exposed comes from the stigma attached to it. In which case I think it can be argued that the evil was committed not by the pornography, but by the people who have viewed and judged it.
As Elaine once said in an episode of Seinfeld (The Pick)
Because it is not me that is exposed but you. For I have seen the nipple on your soul!
One thing I've learned the hard way is that self-deprecation only works in British comedy. In the USA most people don't get it and it not only damages your career but your dating and social life, too.
The greatest (or second greatest, depending on your opinion of "The Honeymooners") and most popular sitcom in American television history was almost entirely based on self-deprecation (Seinfeld).
As the time comes for sharing and giving of special gifts to our beloved ones and even to the neighborhood, we are also having the chance to forgive people we used to feel bad before. What could be our minor problems regarding the season holiday and celebration? A lot of people are really fed up with the commercial aspect of Christmas. The decorating and advertising for it begins earlier and earlier every year. If it ever gets to the point where we start advertising for Christmas right after New Years, I am going to swear Christmas off forever, and I'm going to start celebrating Festivus. I remember seeing the episode of Seinfeld on TV, where they describe the made up holiday. That is starting to hit pretty close to home every year with that Christmas stuff starting earlier and earlier. . For more about The Festivus for the Rest of Us, check out this article on the <a> http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2008/12/23/the-festivus-holidays-is-great-for-payday-loans-if-you-celebrate-it/</a>
Yes, there is a real U.S. There are Africans living in the U.S who have been there 10 years, eat African food, watch African movies, interact with African friends, speak bad English and have no idea what Seinfeld is. They live in a parallel world that has nothing to do with the country they are in. They would do the same everywhere they went.
To me, it seems to be a waste. Why travel to a new country with a new culture, and take your old culture with you?
And quite beside that, I find this attitude of the expat upper class a bit elitist, and it goes against the things I believe in. I believe that if one lives in a country, one should attempt to understand and interact with the local culture and traditions, and not create a society that totally ignores these norms.
Have you guys watched the Seinfeld tv series? Its really the same kind of humor. lol. I found it funny
As much as we may hate to think it, in the end, I think Microsoft wins again because we DID watch the ad didn't we?
Jerry and his comedy is the bait.
We now know microsoft is up to something "delicious." whoopie.
No time. I would include DVDs of TV shows as TV. I used to watch them more. Watching an entire season of a good show over the course of a few days is MUCH better than serial TV.
Even shows like Seinfeld are better. I didn't realize till I watched them in order that they reference previous episodes all the time.
It was pretty direct, and I think I might have chosen a softer way of saying it, but I don't like the idea much myself, either. Telling someone you respect the truth "adds value" in my opinion.
Who knows though, maybe Ryan will be able to repurpose it into something cool with just a little bit of effort, and come out ahead. I hope so.
What I think I would say to Ryan if I were talking about it over a beer, and trying to be a bit humorous about it, is that it really reminds me of something Kramer from Seinfeld would be trying to sell Jerry and Elaine on. "But Jerry, it's great, it's an alarm clock and it's social!". Later in the episode Kramer would be walking around in an obviously sleep deprived state.
Actually, his repertoire was pretty huge, he never worked blue, and he's among the most successful comics of all time (economically speaking). The last season of Seinfeld paid him (and his co-stars) $1 million per episode.
He's not my favorite comic (or even in the top ten), but I'll take productivity advice from Seinfeld any day, all day.