So... I've been watching my share of Seinfeld clips on YT, lately. Somehow, 20+ years after the show's ending, I'm still trying to make up my mind what I think about it. Certainly I don't hate it, but I'm not in love with it, either. Watching the clips is mostly a fun experience, but I'm not sure I'd actually be able to sit through a full episode.
I think one of the problems for me is that the show takes a concept or an event, then frequently spends the rest of the episode completely wallowing in it. For example, if... let's say Tim the Dentist (Bryan Cranston) makes an early appearance and exits off-screen, then it's pretty much guaranteed that for the rest of the ep, every other character that appears is going to have some kind of attachment to Tim or an anecdote or experience about dentistry. What I'm saying is, humorous coincidences and cosmic synchronicity is a fine schtick, but Seinfeld the show kind of takes that wagon and drives it off the side of a cliff, sometimes.
Another example of wallowing: George's father (Jerry Stiller) gets himself a pool table, and for whatever reason, installs it in the smallest room in his house. Kramer comes over to play, and we get five minutes or whatever depicting the two spending hours awkwardly trying to shoot pool, relentlessly bumping the cue on the walls and the table. Evidently the pair fail to have the lightbulb come on above their heads that the room's just too damn small. Besides the immediate problem of the joke being overplayed, the larger point here is that the characters in Seinfeld are expressly designed never to learn anything or grow. This is actually one of the show's internal doctrines.
So you have a really clever show concept (i.e. shining a spotlight on life's little absurdities) and a humorous character rule (that these people never grow), but when you overplay these things so endlessly, the show becomes... actually not as interesting, less funny, and even kind of depressing. Now that may sound like unnecessary overanalysis, but when you have a show that ran almost 200 episodes, well... I guess some things tend to be boiled down at the bottom of the cauldron, and you can't help but notice. Again, I think the clips work better for me than the actual episodes, for reasons such as these.
Btw, unlike a show such as The Simpsons, I understand this show doesn't translate well around the world due to culture and language differences. Does it even get played in Oz, Wales, or other English-speaking countries around the world? I'm not sure of that, either.
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