"You can't just beat a team, you have to leave a lasting impression in their minds so they never want to see you again."
No, this is not the last issue of Daily Dispatch despite the title. Do you really think I’d end on a number like 48? However, I find myself at a crossroads. “Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything,” they say. I’ve been a flagship in the crusade against parking attendants for many years. Back in the Business Briefing days (the original Daily Dispatch in 2019 before the rebrand and relaunch) I wrote rants about parking tickets and the similarities between current parking attendants and the tax collectors of olden times. How can you, in good faith, make a career by ruining other people’s days? How can you look in the mirror, see someone who is a professional tattle tale, and walk proud? However…
However, I have also found the Cart Narc and other martyrs fighting the fight against arrogance and entitlement in parking lots and on highways to be inspirational. How can these ideas coexist in my heart? On one hand, I say freedom over everything. Why do I need to pay to park, and why are you enforcing that? On the other hand, people who leave their carts in the parking lot or take up multiple spaces deserve punishment. I came to a realization, this is the side that wins out. If I’m being honest with myself, and you, I would rat on someone I thought was parking poorly for a fee. I am ashamed to write that, but it’s the truth.
You see, in the end I had to come face to face with who I really am, and it was a bit unpleasant – but it was honest. That is part of what I want to talk about today. The bravery of honesty. In Issue 46, we discussed how everything isn’t five stars and that’s ok. There was a line in there I want to revisit, “We are no longer content with good and it is insulting to say something is merely acceptable.“ I’ve seen a similar phenomenon when comparing two good things. If I say one good thing is better than another good thing, I’ve found people who prefer the other get defensive and act as if I said their good thing was terrible. Here is an example: Seinfeld and Friends. When talking with people who are big fans of the show Friends, I’ve found that even if I say, “Friends is a good show and I enjoyed watching it, but I prefer Seinfeld,” most of the Friends fans then respond as if I said, “Friends is absolute garbage.” What I have found especially interesting is people will talk about how much better Friends is than Seinfeld then, when I ask if they’ve watched Seinfeld, they say no. I then say, “As someone who has seen both all the way through, I prefer Seinfeld though both are good.” It doesn’t help. There are still arguments. I get the same thing as an Android user by the way. I have had both an Android and an iPhone simultaneously in recent years and compared them over the course of months. But people who have only had one or the other still treat their opinion as equally valid though having no experience with half the options? I digress.
Getting back to the main point, “You see, in the end I had to come face to face with who I really am, and it was a bit unpleasant – but it was honest.” This was my concluding statement in analyzing my own cognitive dissonance. It is also why I love the finale episode of Seinfeld. It has taken me years to come to this conclusion. Finales are important. Ask any Game of Thrones fan. Hence our title this week: the last impression is the lasting impression. Seinfeld genuinely changed the way I look at the world around me. I used to run home after school and watch the dvd set my parents had. I remember learning it was ok to question things people say are normal and to enjoy noticing and laughing at the idiosyncrasies in life. If it weren’t for Seinfeld, there would be no Daily Dispatch.
Senfeld’s finale, however, left many conflicted. America was angry that day, my friends, says Seinfeld executive producer David Mandel. The last episode, Mandel says, “distilled the characters to their most basic form. Much of the audience did not want to be confronted by that.” In the two-part finale, which aired in 1998 (sorry if I’m spoiling a 26 year old episode), Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer watch, and laugh at, a man getting carjacked in a small town. They’re then arrested for breaking a good Samaritan law and put on trial. The prosecutor on the case calls witnesses, who are all former guest stars, who have one thing in common: they’ve all been mistreated by the hilariously cold-hearted main characters. The jury convicts them. The judge, in his final statements and sentencing says, “Your callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent has rocked the very foundation upon which our society is built,” before sentencing all four to a year in prison.
Up to this point, Larry David’s foundational mantra of “no hugging, no learning” had generated thousands of laughs. The show had always followed the rule that there wouldn’t be a bow at the end of an episode or a lesson learned. It is part of the genius and relatability of Seinfeld. But the final episode was harsh enough to throw off more than a few fans and critics. It threw me off when I first watched it as a kid. “Returning cocreator David turns spiteful, unforgiving moralist,” Ken Tucker wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “This crew led miserable lives, and we relished their exceptional pettiness. That they should be punished for all the vicarious fun we had at their expense is David’s way of saying we never should have made these cruel losers Must See-worthy.”
Though there was never any sign of it happening, people still hoped for a redemption arc. It would have been natural. It would have been easy. “They expected Jerry and Elaine to get married and for Kramer to do a wacky ceremony,” Mandel says. “And I don’t know, George and Marisa Tomei to hook up at the reception.”
If we’ve learned anything about Seinfeld cocreator Larry David over the past 30-something years, it’s that he’s deeply and hilariously committed to his shtick. Which isn’t really shtick at all. At its shriveled heart, Larry David’s current show Curb Your Enthusiasm is a look into the mind of the kind of guy who’d make a show about nothing. The kind of guy who’ll always double down on what he would laugh at, no matter what anyone else thinks. The kind of guy who would, in a Season 7 episode of Curb, push back on Jason Alexander, who played George in Seinfeld, for framing a Seinfeld cast reunion as a chance to make up for the sins of the finale. “What does that mean, make up for the finale?” Larry asks. “There’s nothing to make up for.”
Most people around my age and younger can’t really understand how much Larry David and Seinfeld were risking by sticking to their guns and ending the show like this. Seinfeld was bigger than most of my readers realize. The show was a national obsession. There is the ubiquitous idea of “water cooler conversations.” The conversation around Seinfeld wasn’t confined to water coolers and it wasn’t confined to offices. “People just don’t understand that Seinfeld aired 9 o’clock on Thursday, and starting Friday, the morning DJs started talking about Seinfeld at 6 a.m. on the commute, and it went on all day,” Mandel says. “And when you got in line at a movie theater Friday night for a new release, people were talking about it.”
Nielsen estimated that 76.3 million viewers tuned in to the last episode of Seinfeld, making it the fourth most watched television finale since 1960. (because I can’t help but throw a jab as I’ve been on the receiving end too many times, Friends had 52.5 million viewers). In a world where the NFL and almost nothing else consistently pulls in huge audiences, there are barely any truly widely watched scripted shows left. “There’s only the Super Bowl,” Mandel says. “Once a year. And we can all just kind of go, ‘We were all watching it.’ People don’t understand that that used to exist with TV shows, and it happened more frequently than you would think.”
The last gasp of “we’re all watching” may have been in 2019, when 19.3 million people watched the Game of Thrones finale. Four years later, the Succession finale, the TV event of the year, drew only 2.9 million. I want you to think about how big Game of Thrones and Succession were. They dominated conversation and the two finales’ viewerships combined were less than a third of what Seinfeld drew.
Everyone was watching the finale. On the night the episode aired, Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack at 82 years old. According to the New York Daily News, Beverly Hills fire chief Mike Stollen said the ambulance transporting Sinatra reportedly made it from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to his Los Angeles home in “four minutes flat.” He claimed to know why the streets were so wide open: Everyone was busy watching the end of Seinfeld.
I spent the last 400 words discussing how popular Seinfeld was not just because it’s important to remember, but also to remind how big of a risk it was to stick to what Larry David and Seinfeld believed. Mandel says he believes that fans just couldn’t quite get over what the finale said about the characters they loved. He’d seen similar reactions once before, after the Season 7 finale. In “The Invitations,” the last episode Larry David wrote before the series finale, George’s fiancée, Susan, licks about 200 envelopes, not realizing that the adhesive on them is toxic. After she abruptly dies, neither George nor anyone else seems too upset about it.
Mandel says he remembers angry letters pouring into the network. “‘How dare they?!’ All of a sudden, the retired grandma in Boca who loves the show was sort of like, ‘Oh, George is a sweetheart!’” he says. “No, he’s not. And all of a sudden, you’re confronted that they’re not super nice.”
It was only natural that Larry David would end Seinfeld with the four main characters getting their comeuppance. It was his over-the-top way of pointing out something that he always knew: People, even buddies, tend to be horrible to one another. “Larry’s comedy, at least from my perspective, is what it’s like when I’m sitting at 2 o’clock in the morning in an actual deli or coffee shop with my idiot friends who I’ve known forever,” Mandel says. “And they are my best friends in the world, but at no point do we stop for me to remind them that they are my best friends. At no point, as we’re getting up, do I hug them. If they tried to shake my hand, I’d push them away. [The finale] was the closest representation I’d ever seen to actual real life.”
Safe isn’t always honest and honest isn’t always safe. That was true for the Seinfeld finale, but also true in life. There are two lessons this week I guess. Something about the value and risk of honesty but also in the power of a last impression. People fixate on a show’s ending, whether it’s ambiguous, uplifting, shocking, sweet, sour, or like Seinfeld, a little mean. Love it or hate it, it’s what they remember. The last impression is the lasting impression.
