Goodbye Already

By JAMES COLLINS

Over the centuries, many madmen have foretold the precise time that the world would end, only to be disappointed. It happened again just a couple of months ago, when a guru in Texas told his followers that on the evening of March 31, God would announce his arrival on Channel 18. This prediction was ridiculous on many counts--why would God choose cable, for example? This prophet was correct, however, in that TV will be the medium of the apocalypse; he just had the wrong listing. The end of the world will come on May 14, 1998, at 9:59:59 p.m. (E.T.) on NBC, when the last second of the last episode of Seinfeld is broadcast. (On the West Coast, the world will end three hours later.)

This is what you might think, anyway, given all the hysteria surrounding Seinfeld's last episode--the planned mass viewings, the daily "Sein Off" headlines. It's as if none of us will be able to survive past Thursday. Somehow we will have to carry on, though, and to do so it may help to scrutinize exactly what it is we will be losing when Seinfeld goes off the air and whether all this fuss is justified. One way to approach these questions is to look at the show in the historical context of America's signature contribution to Western civilization: the situation comedy. What makes Seinfeld so special compared with sitcoms of the past? Is it better, more popular, more innovative? A careful review of the evidence suggests that while Seinfeld is certainly a very praiseworthy and funny program, it is not necessarily the ne plus ultra of television comedy. It isn't even the sine qua non.

Fortunately for our purposes, television generates a fair amount of data, and they are suggestive. In the half-century in which commercial broadcasting has existed, only 10 sitcoms have ever finished first in the ratings for a season, and Seinfeld has the distinction of being one of them. The others make a curious list: I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, All in the Family, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Cosby Show, Roseanne (which tied one year with Cosby) and Cheers. Seinfeld was No. 1 for a single season, 1994-95. Since then it has finished second to ER, which is where it places so far this year.

It is remarkable that so many of TV's most noted comedies--The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H*--never made it to No. 1, while plenty of junk did ascend to that pinnacle. As fun as it would be to go against the conventional, middlebrow wisdom and say The Beverly Hillbillies possessed a sly, Twain-like wit, recent viewings confirm that it was as crude as everyone has always said. The Happy Days-Laverne and Shirley era is another sorry one. So it could be argued on behalf of Seinfeld that it has combined quality and popularity in a way that is very impressive.

Impressive, but not unique. Some of the No. 1 hits of the past were also pretty good, and perhaps even better than Seinfeld. The Andy Griffith Show, for example, achieved comedic moments of unmatched beauty. These usually came in the loping conversations between Andy and Barney in the sheriff's office, exchanges with a slow pace and subdued hilarity that would be impossible to offer on television today. Others would cite All in the Family or Cheers or Cosby as series that were more skillful and enjoyable than Seinfeld. And while Seinfeld should be credited for going off the air before its ratings decline, it is not alone in that either--both Lucy and Andy Griffith ended their runs at No. 1.

Seinfeld's high ratings give the impression that everyone in America is watching the show and that therefore its departure will create a huge void in popular culture. Actually, by historical standards, Seinfeld does not have a very big audience. As we all know, the ratings for the networks have decreased markedly in the past few years as cable has become more popular, and the effect on even the top shows is startling. In the 1963-64 season, those dread Hillbillies averaged a rating of 39.1--in other words, they were being seen by 39.1% of all households with television sets. Back then, 90% of the nation's households had TVs, so more than a third of America was watching Granny tangle with Mr. Drysdale. In later years, when TV ownership was more widespread, All in the Family scored in the 30s, as did Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days and The Cosby Show.

Compare these figures with those of Seinfeld. So far this year it has a rating of 20.2. This means a smaller proportion of the country watches Seinfeld than watched Who's the Boss in 1988. To put it another way, Tony Danza's place in the nation's consciousness was as big a decade ago as Jerry Seinfeld's is now. Go back further in time, and you'll find that shows like The Rat Patrol and Tony Orlando and Dawn had ratings of about 20. Thus the breadth of Seinfeld's audience is not at all exceptional. By this measure, it would be as logical to treat the end of Night Court as a cultural cataclysm.

Forget the numbers, though. What counts about Seinfeld is its originality, insist its partisans. Here too there may be less than meets the eye. No one would expect any show to arrive without a heritage, and those involved with Seinfeld have always acknowledged its debt to earlier series. Seinfeld has said that the show emulates Abbott and Costello, for example. And Michael Richards' portrayal of Kramer is a frank homage to The Honeymooners' Art Carney. But Seinfeld's fans have always been rather smug when they declare that the show is "about nothing" and that its prime directive is "No hugging. No learning." The idea seems to be that to find humor in trivia and to avoid sentiment is very happening, now, today.

Yet following these principles has long been commonplace. Every week on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney talks about those little pieces of cotton that come in aspirin bottles. And the amount of hugging and learning on I Dream of Jeannie was quite minimal. As a reaction to The Cosby Show, Roseanne and other sitcoms of the 1980s and early '90s, the "about nothing/no hugging, no learning" policy was inspired, but it represented a revival, not an advance. In its weird scale and weave of plot lines, Seinfeld was indeed innovative; its basic premises, though, were old news, which made its whiff of self-congratulatory nihilism annoying. In fact, the authentic nihilists are those who never give a thought to meaning at all--the creators of I Dream of Jeannie, for example.

"Very well," says our Seinfeldite, crushed and whimpering under the force of these arguments, "let's stipulate that all you say is true. You still have to agree that Seinfeld is the best sitcom of its time, right? Right?" Wrong. The Larry Sanders Show (which itself ends a six-year run on May 31) is smarter than Seinfeld. Even though it stars a stand-up comedian, it does not suffer, as Seinfeld does, from being informed entirely by the stand-up's view of the world, which ultimately is not very interesting. How funny, really, are jokes about phone machines or dating or ear hair?

Far more important is another series, the one that should really be regarded as the true classic of our time. We speak, of course, of The Simpsons. For pure play of the imagination, nothing compares. It's the Matisse of sitcoms. Again and again it surprises you as it simultaneously works in several different modes of humor--sophomoric, satiric, emotional, allusive, abstract, to name only a few--while Seinfeld manages only two or three. Seinfeld is very funny; it has produced many classic episodes; it deserves our praise and good wishes. But the sun will come up on May 15. After all, The Simpsons has been renewed for another season.