Seinfeld
In my experience, people either love Seinfeld or they hate it. I am one of the lovers. Like with the Brady Bunch, I’ve seen every episode of Seinfeld so many times that I can literally recite the whole show from memory.
While I like Friends and Frasier from the same era, I do not love them. But I love Seinfeld. And I recently figured out why. I like Seinfeld because the characters never change or grow. They are the same, stupid, misguided, and selfish people in the last season that they were in the first. Friends used to be a good show, until… And that’s the problem with most shows, they always have an until. Friends was great when they were six friends, but then they began to grow. Rachel and Ross, Monica and Chandler, and Phoebe all grew leaps and bounds by the last season. But Joey didn’t. He still made the same mistakes and was just as stupid in the last episode as he was on day one and that’s why I love Joey. This is also why his spin-off show had potential.
I guess I like the suspense, the suspension of anything actually happening that Seinfeld milked. I loved Niles in Frasier until he and Daphne actually got together. Then they were different. I liked Ross before he hooked up with Rachel. I liked that he never actually got to tell her how he felt episode after episode. I live for the antci....pation. Once they hooked up, they were different too. And in the case of TV shows anyway, this change always means that the humor dies because all of the dramatic tension is gone. Niles ceased to be funny. Ross lost his goofishness once he bagged the prom queen.
Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer are all like Joey. When we flash back to Jerry and George in high school, they are still the same. They always screw up, and they never learn. They are utterly predictable. And to my way of thinking, most people are this way. Most of us never learn from our mistakes. Most of us are the same person we were last year or the year before. Sure we change, but at a snail’s pace. This is the elemental reason why people continue to stay in abusive relationships, for example: not because they fear for their lives, which does happen, but because people are creatures of habit and routine. Every abused person knows that they are being abused: this is not the shocking news to them. So why do they stay, even when they know exactly what they should do? Because change is very, very hard. Change is anathema to most people.
I like my favorite TV characters to be like my friends: essentially the same people day in and day out. That they are predictable is what makes them so endearing to me. I love Mark, my buddy since we’ve been four years old, because he is essentially the same guy he was back then. Sure he’s changed over the years: we all have. But deep down, he’s the same guy I met in kindergarten.
I’ve got a “former” friend, Doug, who I don’t talk to any more, though I do see him from time to time. But now he is a different person than he used to be. All that he used to be is now gone, and someone else has taken his place. The old Doug was fun and passionate. He was generous. He used to give you the shirt off his back. Now he’s a selfish dick. I can’t say if this new guy is better or worse than the old guy because I don’t really know this new guy, but I know he is not the same guy I grew up with.
This is why I love Seinfeld.
The official sites usually suck, but not in the case of Seinfeld: http://www.sonypictures.com/tv/shows/seinfeld.