SEINFELD - Season 3, Episode 23 - The Keys

 "The Keys"

Aired: 9:00 pm, Wednesday, May 6, 1992

Nielsen rating: 11.4

Audience share: 18

Directed: Tom Cherones

Writer: Larry Charles

Lurking beneath Jerry's sarcasm, George's neurosis, and Elaine's toughened shell is an existential desperation. These characters are not happy. They are not at peace with their existence. They are searching for something, but they certainly do not know what it is. The closest they come to contentment is in their relationships with each other, but even this often seems to fall short. Kramer, of course, recognizes this. In one of the greatest exchanges in Seinfeld history, he tries to bring it to George's attention:

KRAMER: Because you see, George, having the keys to Jerry's apartment - that kept me in a fantasy world. Every time I went over to his house it was like I was on vacation. Better food, better view, better TV. And cleaner? Oh, much cleaner. That became my reality. I ignored the squalor in my own life because I'm looking at life, you see, through Jerry's eyes. I was living in twilight, George. Living in the shadows. Living in the darkness...like you.

GEORGE: Me?

KRAMER: Oh, yeah. I can barely see you, George.

GEORGE: Alright, stop it Kramer, you're freaking me out.

WAITRESS: Hi, are you ready to order? [George tries to order, but Kramer waves her away.]

KRAMER [moves over and sits next to George]: Do you ever yearn?

GEORGE: Yearn? Do I yearn?

KRAMER: I yearn.

GEORGE: You yearn.

KRAMER: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I-I sit, and yearn. Have you yearned?

GEORGE: Well, not recently. I crave. I crave all the time, constant craving, but I haven't yearned.

KRAMER: Look at you.

GEORGE: Aw, Kramer, don't start...

KRAMER [moving back to the other side of the booth]: You're wasting your life.

GEORGE: I am not! What you call wasting, I call living! I'm living my life!

KRAMER: O.K., like what? No, tell me! Do you have a job?

GEORGE: No.

KRAMER: You got money?

GEORGE: No.

KRAMER: Do you have a woman?

GEORGE: No.

KRAMER: Do you have any prospects?

GEORGE: No.

KRAMER: You got anything on the horizon?

GEORGE: Uh...no.

KRAMER: Do you have any action at all?

GEORGE: No.

KRAMER: Do you have any conceivable reason for even getting up in the morning?

GEORGE: I like to get the Daily News!

KRAMER: George, it's time for us to grow up, and be men. Not little boys.

GEORGE: Why?

KRAMER: I'm going to California. You know, I got the bug.

It's the acting bug, explains Kramer, awakened by his ill-fated chance to act in the Woody Allen movie shot on his block. But it is clearly more than that. Kramer loves his friends. But it seems he senses Jerry et al are holding him back, in some indefinable way. He tries to warn George, but his questions are misdirected. Jerry does have money, prospects, action, and quite often women. But Jerry, too, must be yearning. He does not wear his discontentment on his sleeve like George does. Humor is his defense mechanism. Certainly, his mental and emotional health is better than George. But occasionally it slips through in the series that Jerry is not happy either. After all, he understands George and sympathizes with him. They, like their real life counterparts Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, differ in their worldviews only by degrees.

Season three ends on a cliffhanger, with Kramer leaving it all behind and trying to heal his yearning on the other side of the country. This blog will pause on a cliffhanger, then, too. We know he eventually comes back. The question I will be asking when I put the next DVD in is, why does he come back? Why reason does the show provide, explicitly or implicitly, for Kramer's return? The answer will provide insight into the soul of Seinfeld, its hilarious, yearning soul.

SEINFELD - Season 3, Episode 22 - The Parking Space

“The Parking Space”

First Script Read: Sat, March 21, 1992

Filmed: Tue-Wed, March 24-25, 1992

Aired: 9:00 pm, Wednesday, April 22, 1992

Nielsen rating: 12

Audience share: 19

Directed: Tom Cherones

Writer: Larry David and Greg Daniels (Yes, the same Greg Daniels who wrote for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before going on to create King of the Hill, The Office (American version), and Parks and Recreation. This was his only Seinfeld script.)

Award: Writers Guild Award Nomination for Larry David and Greg Daniels

Season two's famous "The Chinese Restaurant" was Larry David's first experiment with a "bottle episode" - a show set entirely in one location, where the characters are trapped or otherwise fixed for the duration. Earlier this season, David brought us "The Parking Garage," another bottle episode although one that didn't take place in real-time. Larry Charles got into the act with "The Subway." It's not technically a bottle episode, because the characters go on their own adventures that take them above ground, but the writing challenge was to tell four stories with the essential setting being the subway.

"The Parking Space" is more of a bottle episode than "The Subway," actually. Once George gets locked in his battle of wills for the parking space with Kramer's friend Mike, the action of the episode is fixed to the street outside Jerry's apartment, with some interaction into the apartment via Jerry's window. I love this episode; trapping the characters on the street outside Jerry's building creates the comedic tension of a bottle episode while at the same time allowing other recurring characters show up. Wayne Knight had by now appeared as Newman in two episodes, "The Suicide" and "The Boyfriend," both times serving as an important piece of the plot. This time he just happens upon the parking space dispute, and offers his own assessment of the scene, just as other characters who we would never see again have offered their opinions. Sid, the guy who moves cars from one side of the road to the other, and who we met in "The Alternate Side," also appears to berate George. It was his last appearance in the series, but we didn't know it at the time. And we meet, for the first time, Matthew and his mother, Maryedith, who would play a key role in the season five classic, "The Non-Fat Yogurt." The casual inclusion of people we had met in previous shows, as well as characters who would appear again, makes this episode a milestone in the importance of recurring characters for the feel of the show.

The world of Seinfeld is a place where mere acquaintances can pop up at any moment. (I discussed this a bit in my post on "The Suicide.") It is New York City. The setting is important for this episode, established through the work of Seinfeld's second unit and the shots they capture in New York City, as well as director Tom Cherone's use of Tom Azzari's production design. Cherones and Azzari (who provide the commentary track for this episode on the DVD) wisely decided to film this episode outside. In conceiving of a deadlock over a parking space, David veers towards a silly side of Seinfeld that not everyone might have loved (I did!), but the insanity fits with the setting. Again, it is New York City.

SEINFELD - Season 3, Episode 21 - The Letter

“The Letter”

First Script Read: Wed, February 26, 1992

Filmed: Tue, March 4, 1992

Aired: 9:00 pm, Wednesday, March 25, 1992

Nielsen rating: 15

Audience share: 24

Directed: Tom Cherones

Writer: Larry David

If there is a common theme in this episode it is "self-representation." Nina (Hey! That's Catherine Keener!) misrepresents her feelings for Jerry by using lines from Neil Simons' Chapter Two. It works, at least for a while. Jerry gets back together with Nina until he discovers she stole the lines.

Elaine represents herself truthfully at a Yankee game, wearing a Baltimore Orioles hat. The tickets were a gift from Nina via her father, who works for the Yankees. He comes down to visit them in the second row, eventually asking Elaine to take her Orioles hat off. Elaine refuses angrily, and eventually they are asked to leave. Worse, their picture is taken and published the Sunday New York Times. Elaine has skipped her boss's son's bris for the game, and is worried the photo will reveal her misrepresentation; she claimed her father was sick. She does manage to get away with the lie though, until her boss invites her to another Yankee game in the exact same seats, and encourages her to wear her Orioles hat. Jerry and George watch that game as the announcers describe her getting thrown out of the game for the second time.

Finally, Kramer is represented in a painting, leading to the memorable description of his character by the Armstrongs, would-be purchasers of the painting:

MRS.ARMSTRONG: I sense great vulnerability. A man-child crying out for love. An innocent orphan in the post-modern world.
MR. ARMSTRONG: I see a parasite. A sexually-depraved miscreant who is seeking to gratify only his most basest and most immediate urges.
[...]
MRS.ARMSTRONG: His struggle is man's struggle. He lifts my spirit!
MR. ARMSTRONG: He is a loathsome, offensive brute, yet I can't look away.
[...]
MRS.ARMSTRONG: He transcends time and space.
MR. ARMSTRONG: He sickens me.
MRS.ARMSTRONG: I love it.
MR. ARMSTRONG: Me too.

That is not an unfair representation of Kramer, and it leads to an invitation to dinner at the Armstrongs. There Kramer dutifully entrances them with stories about his own life. They are enthralled.

Kramer is one character willing to honestly represent himself to the world all the time. Often this leads him into awkward situations, but frequently it pays off for him.

SEINFELD - Season 3, Episode 20 - The Good Samaritan

“The Good Samaritan”

First Script Read: Saturday, February 15, 1992

Filmed: Wednesday, February 19, 1992

Aired: 9:00 pm, Wednesday, March 4, 1992

Nielsen rating: 11.5 (Three subsequent weeks of re-runs received higher ratings)

Audience share: 18 (16 million)

Directed: Jason Alexander

Writer: Peter Mehlman

Awards: Directors Guild Awards nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series. (The award went to Tom Cherones for “The Contest.")

An episode after George developed a crush on a neo-Nazi, he finds himself contemplating an affair with a married woman, Robin, all because he said "God bless you" and noted her husband's failure to utter the phrase. He is conflicted, though not in the ways that might be expected. He is intimidated by the idea that he, timid George Costanza, could pull off the affair, but excited about the presumptive low cost of the endeavor:

GEORGE: Oh my God, an affair. That's so adult. It's like with stockings and martinis, and William Holden. On the other hand it probably wouldn't cost me any money.

After sleeping with the woman in his apartment, Robin consoles his guilt:

GEORGE: Oh my God. I must be crazy. What have I done?
ROBIN: Oh no, what's wrong?

GEORGE: What's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong. I just committed adultery!
ROBIN: You didn't commit adultery, I did.

GEORGE: Oh yeah.
ROBIN: If I didn't do it with you, I would have done it with someone else.
GEORGE: Well, I wouldn't want you to do that. You know there's a lot of losers out there. [That line is SO Woody Allen.]

ROBIN: Maybe even someone who didn't say 'God bless you'.
GEORGE: Well, that's a given.
ROBIN: In three years with Michael, not one 'God bless you'.
GEORGE: Must be hell living in that house.

George is consoled, until he finds out from Elaine that Michael is suspicious and threatening violence. This sends George into a panic. Jerry, too, can tolerate his own conscience when he dates a hit-and-run perpetrator rather than turn her in, but he doesn't want Elaine to know about it. In this way, the characters are able to compartmentalize their unethical behavior, rationalizing away the moral ambiguities to serve their individual desires (frequently sexual). In this episode, as it was throughout the series, it is Jerry and George who deny their moral obligation to society in order to pursue sex, while Elaine and Kramer serve as the moral authorities, the voices who force Jerry and George to confront their own consciences.

Unfortunately, Elaine and Kramer are ignored. George goes through with the affair and risks the wrath of the husband. Jerry only confronts Angela, his new girlfriend, when he learns the car she hit belongs to a beautiful neighbor, Becky Gelke; he sees an opportunity to trade his immoral girlfriend for an apparently better option. This backfires. Angela threatens him with violence, and Becky Gelke suspects Jerry is the one who hit her car but is too embarrassed to admit it. The relatively good Samaritan, Kramer, ends up getting a date with her.

As the series progressed, Elaine's behavior began to match that of Jerry and George. In this episode Jerry jumps on an example of her own dishonesty, teasing her mercilessly when he hears from George that she made up a story about dating a Spanish matador. Even Kramer does not have a blameless record of morality. In Seinfeld as in The Psalms "Everyone has turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one."

SEINFELD - Season 3, Episode 19 - The Limo

“The Limo”

First Script Read: Thr, February 5, 1992

Filmed: Mon-Wed, February 9-11, 1992

Aired: 9:00 pm, Wednesday, February 26, 1992

Nielsen rating: 13.6

Audience share: 21 (19.5 million)

Directed: Tom Cherones

Writer: Larry Charles (teleplay) & Marc Jaffe (story) (A program consultant in 1991, Jaffe, a stand-up comedian, also received story credits for season 4’s “The Pick” and season 9’s “The Bookstore.”)

According to Larry Charles on the DVD commentary, Marc Jaffe's idea of having the show's characters get in a limo that wasn't meant for them was hanging around for a while before Charles came up with the neo-Nazi angle. It was a timely reference, with former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke entering the Presidential race for the second time. "Even David Duke has denounced [Aryan Union leader, O'Brien] as a dangerous extremist," says the news reporter in the episode.

But the characters in Seinfeld have only a passing awareness of the news. They reference the Three Stooges or Superman about as often as they reference current events. Even Elaine, who demonstrates some environmental consciousness here and there, doesn't know Donald O'Brien is coming to town until she bumps into a friend on the street who is headed to the gathering protest.

It's no surprise, then, that George is able to entertain a vague idea of romance with Eva, the pretty neo-Nazi woman who fawns over O'Brien's ideas. 

GEORGE: Did you see the way she was looking at me?
JERRY: She's a Nazi, George. A Nazi!
GEORGE: I know, I know. Kind of a cute Nazi though.

So it is in Seinfeld - the events of the world only matter when they overlap or interfere with the characters' own individual pursuits of sex, employment, or contentment.