What if ‘Seinfeld’ Aired Today?

This week marks
the 25th anniversary of the debut of Seinfeld. Popular
wisdom holds that Seinfeld was “a show about
nothing.” And of course this isn’t exactly true—the show was
about relationships, social niceties, narcissism, and modernity.
More specifically, it was a show about the conflation of these
things.

Unlike the characters on Friends—our other 1990s
über-sitcom—the Seinfeldian gang wasn’t so much a
makeshift urban family as a group of people who found each other’s
company varying degrees of advantageous and esteem-boosting. These
were not good people, to put it mildly. “Seinfeld
was defiantly not lovable,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz in New
York, describing the world they inhabited as “a kind of
open-air prison of social ritual”. 

But Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine dissected, in minute and
unflinching detail, all the quirks and agitations of daily life
that generally went unremarked upon. They pointed out the absurdity
of situations we’d all found mildly flabbergasting. They said the
things we all wished we could (or someone would, at any rate) say,
before the Internet came along to satisfy these sort of
wish-fulfillment needs. 

In reruns, Seinfeld works best when its central
conundrums hinge more on interpersonal dynamics than technology. I
now find it delightful how many issues could apparently arise from
answering machines. At the time, though, these types of things were
surely novel dilemmas. Which is why, right now, the best tweets
from the “Modern Seinfeld” Twitter account are the ones
about technology (“Kramer creates an app that gives you ideas for
other apps”).

Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) isn’t
affiliated with Jerry Seinfeld or NBC (and Larry David apparently

isn’t a fan). It’s a parody account, based on the simple
premise: “What if Seinfeld were still on the air?” The
account—launched in
2012—is run by comedian, playwright, and TV writer Jack Moore,
who currently writes for a new ABC show called Manhattan Love
Story and was an editor for Buzzfeed, and Josh
Gondelman, a web producer for John Oliver’s Last Week
Tonight and writer for New York
magazine. The @SeinfeldToday tweets that seem the most spot on
and clever to me are probably the ones that best typify the
answering machine phenomenon—in 15 to 25 years, our star-crossed
text messages and Instagram issues will seem quaint, it not
completely unrecognizable: 

Jerry gets paranoid about his girlfriend’s past when her iPhone
automatically connects to the wi-fi at Newman’s apartment.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) June
3, 2014

Elaine’s BF notices she has no Instagrams with black people. She
awkwardly tries to take pics w/ black co-workers to prove she’s not
racist.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) April
28, 2014

Jerry’s GF always smokes an e-cig in bed. GF:”But it’s vapor.”
J:”You say that like vapor’s something I want. I don’t want vapor!
No vapor!”

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) April
16, 2014

Jerry’s girlfriend won’t stop saying that she “literally can’t.”
“What?! Can’t what?! Finish your sentence!”

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) March
18, 2014

George swipes right for every woman on Tinder. E:”What if you’re
not attracted to her?” G:”If she’s attracted to me, I might
be!”

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) December
21, 2013

Jerry’s Twitter’s hacked. People like “Hacked Jerry” better.
George tries to get trampled on Black Friday so he can sue.
Everyone is polite.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) November
30, 2013

Kramer and Newman search Brooklyn for a McDonald’s rumored to
carry the McRib year-round. A Twitter troll slowly drives Jerry
crazy.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) April
25, 2013

A Twitter troll slowly drives Jerry crazy… There’s
something immensely sad about this (entirely plausible) plot point.
In New York, Seitz mentions how Seinfeld catchphrases
today would be made into ample memes and gifs.
Seinfeld was—in its time, at least—saved from the
gif. Which brings us to a much shorter-lived show that also debuted
in 1989, in August: Saved by the Bell.

To younger members of Gen X and older millennials, this is part
of the childhood canon. I think we all died a little inside
yesterday in the Reason D.C. office when we realized that none of
our interns and a few of our youngest staffers had no idea who
Jessie Spano was. By a quick show of birth years, we pipointed 1990
as the crack in this generational divide. I shudder to ask them
about the Soup Nazi—though I suppose Seinfeld is a
show you’re more prone to watch in reruns as an adult than
Saved by the Bell. (Another show launched in
1989, The Simpsons, is still airing after all these
years.)   

Since I’m just digressing at this point, I’ll point you to some
of Reason’s Seinfeld coverage from way back (#TBT!).
Here’s Charles Oliver in
2000, smacking down the idea that “Homer Simpson and Jerry
Seinfeld (are) symbols of a spiritual rot in American popular
culture.” And here’s Nick
Gillespie writing about the show in 1995, back when it was
still “difficult to think of (TV) as a possessing an aesthetic
dimension.” If Seinfeld aired today, it’s hard to imagine
it even making the top 10 or 20 indicators of cultural rot list;
but I can see Alyssa Rosennberg writing think pieces about its
gender dynamics and Salon’s contrarian takes on George’s
hairline. The biggest differences for a modern Seinfeld probably
wouldn’t be the technology or types of problems our characters
confronted but the cultural conversation around it.