`Seinfeld': Much Ado About Nothing

We have reached the end of a historical epoch: the interim (not quite a decade long) between the collapse of communism and the final deepening of millennial twilight. And the closing date of this era is tonight, when the last episode of "Seinfeld" airs.

Do I exaggerate? Well, when Jerry Seinfeld decided that the gang's days at the coffee shop were numbered, The New York Times announced it on the front page. That was late last year. Today, go into any chain bookstore and you will find at least two instant books and three "collector's edition" magazines about the show - plus any number of periodicals bearing cover stories about this most momentous of occasions. Whether by force of the Zeitgeist or through sheer hype (if that's such a big difference nowadays), it's the biggest event since, roughly, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.

"And good riddance!" say a lot of people. Not me, though. "Seinfeld" used to be a favorite show, until declining quality and syndication-overload undermined my devotion. Better that it die now than meet the fate of "The Simpsons" (another once-inspired show now deserving a mercy killing). While mulling over the world-historical implications of the end of "Seinfeld," I have been puzzled at the vehement attitude some of my friends have toward the show.

Particularly striking is that people who love the show agree on several points with those who loathe it. This may be the best point to begin unraveling its curious status as the consummate artifact (or symptom) of '90s pop culture.

"Seinfeld," everyone agrees, is a "show about nothing." The characters sit around talking - complaining at, and making fun of, each other - but seldom do much else, except for having sex with an improbably large number of people.

But is this an innovation? Or is it a matter of pushing to extremes the nihilism at the heart of the situation comedy?

It is, after all, a genre almost as static as sculpture: Any given episode of any given sitcom relies on a small number of well-defined personalities and settings. Into this tableau drops the week's "situation" - Lucy gets a job, Fonzie grows a mustache, whatever - giving everyone something to do. There are complications, and hi-jinks aplenty. Triumph over chaos may bring the characters closer together: the Fresh Prince and his uncle are reconciled. By the end of the half-hour, everything is back to point zero.

"Seinfeld" transcended this status quo through a few tinkerings with the formula. Instead of one problem for the ensemble to solve, there were four peculiar and complexly interlocking "situations" for Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer to maneuver through.

Traditional sitcom closure (warm, fuzzy, phony) was ruled out by co-creator Larry David: "No hugging," he said, "no learning."

And on "Seinfeld" the hoariest cliche of the genre kicked into overdrive: Not only did a wacky neighbor constantly drop in, but the door to Jerry's apartment seems never to have had a lock. Playing these variations on familiar themes, "Seinfeld" stood in relation to other half-hour comedies like a cubist painting beside a Norman Rockwell canvas.

Now, the prime law of the entertainment industry (as surrealist TV genius Ernie Kovacs once explained) is to find something that works, then just beat it to death. By the mid-1990s, there were countless bunch-of-friends-hanging-around shows. Yet "Seinfeld" was not exactly what you would call a dream of the beloved community. And this brings us to another point frequently voiced by people who hate the show: The main characters are vain, shallow and completely self-absorbed. Both George and Kramer are lazy, while Jerry and Elaine treat them with a kind of smugness that certainly cannot be justified on the basis of any admirable quality in their own conduct.

A fan of "Seinfeld" listens to this complaint and thinks: Yes, exactly, that's why the show is funny. They are low characters in low conditions. Which, after all, is how Aristotle defined comedy in the "Poetics" some while back.

But they are low characters of a (relatively) new kind - a very contemporary species, all too familiar perhaps, and either disgusting or ridiculous, depending on how you look at it. The major characters in the show all exhibit, with different degrees of emphasis, the personality type described by the late Christopher Lasch in his best-selling 1979 book, "The Culture of Narcissism." On "Seinfeld," the tendencies Lasch saw developing in American culture, 20 years ago, have triumphed.

A narcissist doesn't just seek his or her own gratification. (Such characters have populated comedy for about 2,500 years). Narcissists also want, desperately, to control the image they present to the world. They need to feel superior to others, and manipulate them to get what they want. This renders them incapable of deep emotional connection; they suffer from a pervasive and recurrent feeling of emptiness. They don't hug and they don't learn. They are "about nothing."

The narcissistic personality, Lasch argues, is fostered by a consumer society utterly permeated by mass media and market relations, built on an economy in which labor is devalued and (for most workers) stultifying and meaningless.

And what could be more appropriate to such a system than a show in which people devote most of their time to consuming, dating, going to the gym and putting each other down? The core characters on "Seinfeld" routinely manipulate others, while obsessing about how they themselves are perceived. Indeed, George Costanza seldom thinks of anything else. And he is constantly humiliated by his parents - who rant and rave, oblivious to how they look to others. In the culture of narcissism, the only thing funnier than the failure to manipulate appearances successfully is someone too lacking in self-consciousness even to try.

Dipping back into Aristotle: Comic characters exemplify "the Ridiculous . . . defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain."

In an interview with Newsweek, Seinfeld said, "We didn't change the culture. We just reflected it a little more intimately." Love the show or hate it, you have to concede his point.

Scott McLemee is a contributing editor of LinguaFranca and a frequent contributor to the online magazine Salon.