What happens when you ask the two men who made Seinfeld to name the four greatest episodes of their own show? You get an argument, a side bet, and about an hour of stories that even die-hard fans have probably never heard.
Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David sat down for a live episode of the Rushmore podcast, where hosts Ari Emanuel and Ben make their guests carve out a “Mount Rushmore” of four picks. The episodes were the excuse. The real treat was hearing how close the show came to never existing at all.
The Show Nobody Wanted
It is hard to believe now, but Seinfeld tested terribly. NBC’s research memo on the pilot, back when it was still called The Seinfeld Chronicles, said viewers didn’t care about the characters and had no interest in seeing the show again. Jerry and Larry joked that they each ended up hanging a copy in their bathrooms.
Larry, true to form, was relieved when NBC first passed. The show only survived because NBC executive Rick Ludwin moved money out of a Bob Hope special to pay for four more episodes, the smallest series order in TV history.
Every time another order came in, Larry insisted he had run out of stories. It became a ritual, and he admits he kept saying the same thing every season of Curb Your Enthusiasm too. He also fought the network’s decision to move the show to Thursday nights, reasoning that if nobody watched on Wednesday, nobody would watch on Thursday either. NBC moved it anyway, and in season 4 the show exploded.
Why Elaine Was an Ex-Girlfriend
Elaine exists because NBC asked for a woman in the cast. Jerry and Larry didn’t trust themselves to write a romance, so they made her Jerry’s ex, which neatly killed off any “will they, won’t they” storyline. The idea came from real life: Jerry had stayed friends with a woman he once dated.
Casting was easy. Larry knew Julia Louis-Dreyfus from their time at Saturday Night Live, and after one read with her Jerry was sold. He compared her to a basketball player who nails every move.
The partnership itself goes back to 1970s New York, where the two were young stand-ups working clubs like Catch a Rising Star and the Improv. They swapped notes on each other’s jokes in Central Park, and by their own account their bar conversations already sounded like Seinfeld dialogue.
Larry vs. the Network
Larry threatened to quit more than once. After one notes meeting in season 2, he announced in the parking lot that he wasn’t doing any of them. His position was simple: the show is what it is, and they weren’t changing it. Alan Horn at Castle Rock quietly smoothed things over.
Over time the pair settled on a smarter tactic for network notes. Any note that was easy to do, they treated as if it were brilliant.
The best example is “The Contest.” Larry kept the idea in his notebook for two years without pitching it, convinced Jerry would say no. Instead Jerry loved it instantly, and Larry says the look on his face was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Larry then left the episode off the planning board so NBC wouldn’t ask questions, and walked into the table read fully prepared to quit. The network didn’t object at all.
Where the Famous Bits Came From
- The Soup Nazi started with writer Spike Feresten describing a real, famously hostile soup man in New York. Jerry and Larry marveled at how often writers were sitting on a great episode without realizing it.
- “Master of my domain” came from the challenge of never saying “masturbation” on network TV and building the whole episode around the missing word.
- The Puffy Shirt began when Larry nodded along at dinner to a woman he couldn’t hear and later wondered what he’d agreed to. That connected to a pirate-style shirt he had bought secondhand on Melrose Avenue.
- The Pen came from Jerry’s manager offering Larry a space pen, and Larry wondering afterward whether he should have accepted it.
Jerry also confessed his biggest regret of the entire series: a Yiddish pun on “the vault” that Larry vetoed for being too Jewish.
The Secret Formula
For Jerry, the whole point of Seinfeld was taking something tiny and blowing it up. His favorite example is “The Red Dot,” an entire episode built on a stain on a sweater. He also described what he calls a “switch piece”: taking the logic of one situation, like dating, and applying it to something else, like making a new friend.
The show’s signature trick of tying every storyline together at the end started back in season 1 with “The Busboy,” when two plots collided in an off-camera fistfight. After that, they chased it every week. Jerry believes “The Marine Biologist” has the best ending of any episode, and the payoff, Kramer’s golf ball turning up in the whale’s blowhole, was only added the night before filming.
Jerry said his biggest thrill in show business is the multi-camera sitcom itself: getting laughs from a live studio audience while the episode reaches millions of people at once. His favorite moment of that kind was his long speech in “The Boyfriend.” Larry, though, argued against that episode making the list, since it parodies the JFK assassination rather than starting from an original idea of its own. Jerry fired back by arguing that “The Pen” shouldn’t count because not all four main characters appear in it.
The Picks
Before revealing their lists, the two made a side bet. Jerry guessed they would share two episodes; Larry guessed just one. Larry won.
| Jerry’s Four | Larry’s Four |
|---|---|
| The Contest | The Contest |
| The Soup Nazi | The Opposite |
| The Merv Griffin Show | The Puffy Shirt |
| The Marine Biologist | The Pen |
After plenty of back-and-forth, the final Mount Rushmore landed on:
- The Contest
- The Opposite
- The Marine Biologist
- The Puffy Shirt
Honorable mention goes to co-host Ben, who made the case that the scene in “The Note” debating whether a massage “moved” might be the funniest bit in the whole series.
Stumped by Their Own Show
The night ended with a team of Seinfeld trivia champions, featured in a Wall Street Journal story, coming on stage to quiz the show’s creators. Jerry and Larry mostly didn’t know the answers.
Ari Emanuel closed the show by admitting that while rewatching the series to prepare, he had been calling Larry several times a day just to laugh down the phone. More than three decades after a test audience said nobody wanted to see these characters again, that might be the best review Seinfeld could ask for.