TV #39 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 9 And so this 90s sitcom goes out like it came in, as a reliably funny but seldom spectacular viewing experience. (I’m not trying to damn the show with faint praise here, but you can see why it became such a mainstay of network television syndication, where audiences could …
Tag Archives: Seinfeld
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 8
TV #35 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 8 The penultimate year of this 90s sitcom is the first one without the involvement of co-creator Larry David, and the difference is rather immediately felt. Structurally, the show stops using a clip of Jerry’s standup act to launch each episode — reportedly the actor-producer was now too busy …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 7
TV #31 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 7 We have an ongoing plot again! Sort of. This one doesn’t really develop and shift as the year goes on, but it does bookend and provide a distinctive atmosphere to that run. In the first episode, George suddenly decides that it’s time for him to settle down, leading …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 6
TV #15 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 6 I don’t know if this qualifies as a hot take nearly three decades after the fact, but I personally think that Seinfeld is a stronger, funnier, and more distinctive sitcom when it leans away from its instincts for wacky zaniness and into the pedantically mundane (the opposing Kramer …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 5
TV #10 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 5 This season of Seinfeld doesn’t have a major arc like the meta show-within-a-show factor of the previous year, but it’s nevertheless a strong run of episodes made distinctive by the development of George moving back in with his parents, which allows for new kinds of story premises and …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 4
TV #4 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 4 I’ve been fairly lukewarm on this sitcom up till now, so I’m happy to find that this 1992-1993 season is much more my speed. The previous year gets the ball rolling with a little bit of light continuity from week to week, but this run leans fully into …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 3
TV #39 of 2023: Seinfeld, season 3 This 90s sitcom remains just funny enough to keep watching, without really blowing me away. My favorite episodes from this third year are probably The Parking Garage and The Limo (featuring future Six Feet Under star Peter Krause!), with The Stranded (featuring future The Shield star Michael Chiklis!) …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 2
TV #34 of 2023: Seinfeld, season 2 A marginal improvement over the first year of this 90s sitcom, though it retains Jerry’s dreadful stand-up material on the binary differences he sees between men and women. Outside those scenes, the storytelling engine is working a little better now at spinning minutiae into twenty-minute comedy pieces, but …
TV Review: Seinfeld, season 1
TV #28 of 2023: Seinfeld, season 1 This classic 90s sitcom gets off to a bit of a rough start — the first season is made up of only five episodes, the pilot of which feels particularly unfinished, with no Elaine, a misnamed Kramer, and a somewhat backwards George-and-Jerry dynamic. Even after that, these early …