Former Entertainment Weekly writer Jennifer Keishin Armstrong follows her 2013 history of the beloved sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted) with a breezy and entertaining portrait of Seinfeld. The iconic show defined television comedy in the 1990s and beyond, and became an enduring and influential cultural touchstone.
Armstrong's "Seinfeldia" is a "special dimension of existence, somewhere between the show itself and real life," a place where the show's "characters, settings, jokes, and catchphrases continue to intrude on our daily reality twenty years later." Much of that durability, she suggests, flows from the porous boundaries of the typically trivial daily irritations Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld and their writers used as fodder for the show's comedy. Not to mention the 180 episodes of highly polished comedy they produced. Armstrong relies heavily on interviews with Seinfeld's writers--David and the show's stars did not participate--and those conversations reveal how remarkable it was that Seinfeld maintained such a high standard of originality and quality when the writing staff turned over almost annually.
Readers looking for scandal, intrigue or score settling won't find it in Seinfeldia. Armstrong's admiring account clearly is aimed at the show's vast fan base, old and new, that continues to revel in its "detached, sardonic outlook" as they fuel a syndicated afterlife that's generated $3 billion in revenue since the controversial 1998 network finale. Not bad for a sitcom that started with nothing more than, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, "Two guys talking." --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer