Seinfeld Explained.
Michael Richards went in to audition for Al Bundy on Married...with Children in 1986,
the network wanted someone very specific,
and Ed O'Neill got the part.
That show ran for over a decade.
Which means Kramer almost became an iconic TV dad figure of the era.
Completely different universes in tone and ambition,
you can't picture Richards in that role,
which tells you how close things can be to going another direction entirely.
Before that audition, Richards had spent two years on ABC's Fridays,
the late-night sketch show,
essentially ABC's answer to SNL, ran 1980 to 1982.
He was in the middle of the Andy Kaufman incident:
Kaufman refused to deliver his scripted lines during a live sketch,
Richards brought the cue cards on stage to him,
Kaufman threw his drink in Richards' face,
and it nearly turned into a riot in the studio.
Richards later claimed he was in on the joke the whole time.
But that instinct, physical escalation in a live moment,
committed to whatever extreme the scene demands,
is exactly what he brought to Kramer for nine seasons.
The character is built on that same willingness to go wherever the impulse takes you.
His first national television exposure was in Billy Crystal's first cable special back in 1979,
Crystal brought him in as a featured performer.
From there, guest spots on Cheers, Miami Vice,
St. Elsewhere. In 1989, the same year the pilot filmed,
he had a part in UHF, Weird Al Yankovic's film,
playing a janitor named Stanley Spadowski.
Larry David was also a cast member and writer on Fridays,
he and Richards were colleagues on that show.
That's roughly nine years before Seinfeld.
David then went to SNL as a writer in 1984–85,
one year only, and reportedly got exactly one sketch on the air,
which aired at 12:50 in the morning.
That SNL year is where it connects to Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
She was a cast member at the same time,
joined the show in 1982 at 21,
which made her the youngest female cast member in the show's history at that point.
She came up through Second City in Chicago,
then the Practical Theatre Company.
It was a performance at the Practical Theatre Company's Golden 50th Anniversary Jubilee that caught the attention of the SNL producers.
So when Seinfeld was being put together,
David already had prior professional relationships with both Richards and Louis-Dreyfus from completely separate contexts,
years apart. And she wasn't in the original pilot at all.
NBC screened it and said the show was too male-centric.
Adding a female lead was the explicit condition NBC placed on commissioning the full series.
She landed the role over Patricia Heaton,
who later anchored Everybody Loves Raymond for nine seasons,
and Megan Mullally, who later anchored Will and Grace.
That one audition room had three future series leads in it.
Louis-Dreyfus came in from the second episode onward as Elaine and appeared in all but three of the 180 episodes.
After the show: The New Adventures of Old Christine on CBS,
five seasons, and then Veep on HBO.
The kind of career that looks like a straight line in retrospect.
Jason Alexander's background makes almost no sense for a sitcom.
He spent the entire 1980s on Broadway.
Merrily We Roll Along in 1981, that's Sondheim.
The Rink in 1984, Kander and Ebb.
Broadway Bound in 1986, Neil Simon.
These are serious, demanding stage productions.
Nothing casual about any of them.
Then Jerome Robbins' Broadway in 1989 was the peak of that run,
a revue that pulled together scenes from Jerome Robbins's landmark productions.
Alexander was the lead.
That ran on Broadway for well over a year.
He walked out of it almost directly into Seinfeld.
His film debut, for the record,
was The Burning in 1981,
a slasher film set at a summer camp.
From slasher film to Sondheim to playing George Costanza,
not a path anyone would have designed in advance.
All through the 1980s he was also running major commercial campaigns:
McDonald's, Miller Lite, Levi's. Working theater actor with a strong commercial presence and essentially no television footprint at all.
In 1990, while Seinfeld's first season was still running,
he was also in Pretty Woman,
playing Philip Stuckey, the antagonist,
the cold corporate lawyer who drives the film's central conflict.
Working in a completely different register,
doing both at the same time.
Jerry Seinfeld's pre-show career has one detour that tends to get lost in the story.
He had a recurring part on the NBC sitcom Benson in 1980,
playing Frankie, a mail-delivery boy whose comedy material nobody on the show wanted to hear.
He was fired mid-season.
Arrived for a scheduled read-through and discovered there was no script for him.
That was how he found out.
Went back to the clubs,
which is where the real work was happening anyway.
He'd started doing open-mic nights while at Queens College,
after graduating, clubs like Catch a Rising Star became his stages.
May 1981, the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,
Carson responded visibly on air, not just politely,
and that opened regular spots on Carson and then Letterman.
He spent about fifteen years building observational material out of everyday life before sitting down with Larry David to develop what became the show.
The show he co-creates is one where he plays a version of himself as a working stand-up comedian.
There's a direct line from where he started:
gets fired from the one sitcom he'd tried,
returns to the clubs for fifteen years,
then builds a show from exactly that experience.
The setup was already lived.
George Costanza is based directly on Larry David,
David has said so explicitly and repeatedly.
He co-created the show with Seinfeld,
ran it as the primary showrunner through Season 7,
wrote 62 episodes in total.
He voiced George Steinbrenner throughout the entire run and returned specifically to write the series finale in 1998.
The Kramer character came directly out of David's actual life.
His real neighbor across the hall in Manhattan Plaza,
the subsidized housing complex in Hell's Kitchen where David lived,
was named Kenny Kramer.
Genuine person, genuine inspiration.
Kenny Kramer has since built a career running Seinfeld-themed tours of New York.
Tom Cherones directed 81 of the 86 episodes across the first five seasons,
essentially the entire formative run of the show under one person's eye.
His visual approach is the baseline Seinfeld look:
unhurried pacing, flat style that holds on actors and lets the scene work without editorial intervention.
Applied consistently across nearly 90 consecutive episodes,
it becomes the show's sensibility.
Liz Sheridan, who plays Helen Seinfeld,
came in with the second episode in 1990 and stayed through all nine seasons to the finale.
Before Seinfeld: four years playing the nosy neighbor on ALF.
Before television: she was doing Broadway,
a 1977 production called Happy End that put her on stage alongside Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd.
Barney Martin, who plays Morty from Season 2,
had a background unlike almost anyone else in the cast.
He was a working New York City police detective before he became an actor,
a genuine career change.
Then originated the role of Amos Hart,
the husband who gets shot in the opening scene,
in the original 1975 Broadway production of Chicago,
directed by Bob Fosse.
The first Morty in Season 1 was Philip Bruns,
who was known from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
What keeps surfacing in this cast is how non-accidental all the central connections are.
David and Richards worked together on Fridays.
David and Louis-Dreyfus crossed paths at SNL.
The Kramer character came from David's real neighbor.
There's a web of prior history running underneath almost all of it.
The pilot nearly ended everything before any of that could develop.
It tested terribly with NBC focus groups.
One line from the report:
you can't get too excited about two guys going to the laundromat.
The network ordered exactly four more episodes,
reportedly the smallest sitcom order in television history.
Castle Rock tried to sell it to other networks and found no takers.
David and Seinfeld eventually got their hands on the NBC research memo and hung it in a bathroom on the set.
That detail, hanging the worst possible institutional verdict on your work and putting it in the bathroom,
is about as good a summary of the founding sensibility of this show as anything you're going to find.
Nine seasons came out of it.