Best ever episodes of Seinfeld: Ten to watch out for on Netflix
Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards); George Costanza (Jason Alexander); Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld).
The last joke in the final instalment of Seinfeld is a throwback to its very first in the pilot, some 179 shows earlier, so it’s worth paying attention from the off as every episode of the classic comedy comes to Netflix.
Reports suggest the deal is worth $500m - money well spent for a ‘show about nothing’ that ran for nine seasons, from 1989 to 1998, and introduced the world to Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, not to mention a ridiculous cast of supporting characters - even Newman! - and writer Larry ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ David!
George, Elaine, and Jerry are waiting for a table - in real time - at a restaurant. And that’s the story! Seinfeld took a while (nearly two seasons) to find its feet, but despite the absence of Kramer, this is one of its defining early episodes.
The last episode in season two proved a turning point for Larry David as writer, with multiple storylines literally colliding on the show - something that soon came to define Seinfeld, and subsequently, of course, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Elaine and Jerry go to his parents’ house in Florida, leading to neighbour Jack Klompus offering/forcing his astronaut pen (it writes upside down!) on Jerry when he asks about it. Elaine gets high on muscle relaxants (“Stella! Stella!”) and Jerry gets black eyes from scuba diving. A tour de force of an episode that saw Jason Alexander threaten Larry David about never leaving his character, George, out of the series again. He didn’t.
Jerry learns he has had Tropic of Cancer out from the library since 1971, leading ‘library cop’ Mr Bookman to investigate - Philip Baker Hall’s guest role steals the show. Take your pick of his best lines: “What’s my problem? Punks like you, that’s my problem!”
Jerry and George pitch an idea to NBC for a show called ‘Jerry’. What’s it about? Nothing! Sets a meta storyline in motion that lasts for the whole fourth season and saw Seinfeld, the real series, reach new heights, both creatively and critically.
“My mother caught me,” George explains to Kramer, Jerry, and Elaine, at Tom’s Diner. “Caught you? Doing what?” asks Jerry. “Y’know - I was alone… ” One of the best episodes of any sitcom as the four characters bet each other as to who will last longest as, ahem, master of their domain.
Another great innuendo storyline as Jerry dumps his girlfriend, played by Terri Hatcher, after Elaine tells him “you know they’re fake?” Up-close-and-personal sauna encounters precede one of the most explosive final lines: “They’re real - and they’re spectacular!”
Alexander shows his acting chops with a one-take, page-long monologue at the end of this episode. “The sea was angry that day, my friends,” he begins, the gang and audience hanging on his every word - which leads to a laugh akin to what Hatcher got in The Implant.
As the years went on, the series got wackier, going up another notch after Larry David left as writer at the end of season seven, though he continued to provide the voice of George’s boss and returned to pen the oft-derided finale. The Rye is as zany as they come, featuring a flatulent horse and the glorious visual of Jerry robbing an old lady of a marble rye and trying to toss the bread up a couple floors to George.
Named after Elaine’s angular dancing style (“I had to give in to making a fool of myself in order to get the joke... make myself so bad that I was being laughed at, so it was sort of humiliating in a real way,” admitted Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), the episode is good, but the outtakes are amazing, as George’s father Frank, played by the late Jerry Stiller, clashes with Elaine. “You want a piece of me!? Come and get it!”)
