There was a running joke throughout the run of Seinfeld that series co-creator Larry David would threaten to quit at the end of every season, fearing that he wouldn’t be able to come up with enough material for the next season, and Jerry Seinfeld would have to talk him into sticking around. It’s unclear how true that rumor is, but David did eventually leave the show after the final season —eventually returning to write the controversial series finale.
The reason why the final two seasons don’t have any stand-up segments is that Seinfeld didn’t have time to write new jokes on top of handling his showrunner duties alone following his cohort’s departure. David’s absence is definitely felt in those last seasons, but that doesn’t mean they’re a complete disaster.
David Leaving Hurt The Show: Less Naturalistic Tone
Seinfeld was never supposed to take place in the real world. The comedy of the show came from exaggerating a painful relatable reality. But after Larry David left, the show disappeared into its surreal patches and its connection to reality became much more tenuous.
Jerry Seinfeld placed a stronger emphasis on absurdist humor when he became the show’s sole head writer, and as a result, the tone felt off-balance.
Love The Final Seasons: Experimental Episodes
A combination of Larry David leaving the writers’ room and Seinfeld’s audience becoming more familiar with the characters’ personalities than the back of their own hand led to experimentations with the formula in seasons 8 and 9.
Episodes like “The Bizarro Jerry” and “The Betrayal” rely on the audience’s familiarity with the characters and their world to work, but with 30 million weekly viewers, that was a safe bet, and the experiments worked spectacularly.
David Leaving Hurt The Show: It Stopped Being A “Show About Nothing”
Jerry Seinfeld has always rejected the idea that Seinfeld branded itself a “show about nothing,” claiming that the label was just a joke for the story arc in which Jerry and George sold a sitcom pilot to NBC. But the label is somewhat applicable because the show explores the minutiae of daily life. It overthinks what society considers to be insignificant to the point where it feels surprisingly significant.
However, that label became a lot less applicable when Seinfeld took full creative control of the show and delivered storylines about gang warfare and faked deaths and cooking people and desecrating pet graves.
Love The Final Seasons: More Screen Time For Supporting Characters
By the time Seinfeld was on its eighth season, it was pretty clear to the writers what fans were enjoying about the show. Fans loved seeing supporting characters like Newman, David Puddy, and of course, Jerry and George’s crazy parents.
So in the final two seasons, those supporting characters were included in as many episodes as possible, and it was always a delight to see them.
David Leaving Hurt The Show: The Basis For George Was Gone
It’s widely known that George Costanza was based on Larry David. Jerry Seinfeld based a character on himself – the aptly named Jerry Seinfeld, a New York-based comedian – so his co-writer did the same.
When David left the show, so did the basis for the George character. TV writers don’t need to have a character sitting in the room with them to write them effectively, but it can’t hurt if that is a possibility.
Love The Final Seasons: Surreal Humor
The surreal turn that Seinfeld took in its eighth and ninth seasons was a huge left turn from the tone that the show had developed up to that point, but there are a lot of fun moments in the surreal spots.
Jerry and Newman’s Mission: Impossible-spoofing chase through the building is just silly, but from the elderly crime ring in “The Bookstore” to the Superman pastiche in “The Bizarro Jerry,” some of the absurdist humor in these episodes was great.
David Leaving Hurt The Show: Over-The-Top Jokes
Where most sitcoms try and fail to be relatable, Seinfeld always managed to have some grounding in reality that felt identifiable. But after Larry David left the show, the jokes were suddenly over-the-top and alienatingly ridiculous.
In “The Little Jerry,” the gang gets involved in a cockfighting ring. In “The Muffin Tops,” Jerry shaves his chest, which could’ve been a funny premise, but the episode takes it way too far until Jerry howls at the moon like a werewolf.
Love The Final Seasons: The Cast Was Still Great
Larry David’s departure didn’t affect the cast in any way. Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards continued to nail their characters’ personalities and line deliveries, not to mention their unparalleled on-screen chemistry, right until the end.
From Louis-Dreyfus’ “full-body dry heave set to music” dancing in “The Little Kicks” to Alexander’s egg-on-George’s-face reactions in “The Comeback,” the final seasons of Seinfeld are filled with hilarious performances.
David Leaving Hurt The Show: What Made Seinfeld Work Was Seinfeld And David’s Chemistry
When NBC executives approached Jerry Seinfeld about doing a sitcom, the resulting show would’ve been a lot different if he hadn’t asked fellow comic Larry David to write it with him. What made the show work was the clash of Seinfeld and David’s very different brands of cynicism. The two writers had the perfect combination of personality quirks and fundamental similarities and differences to make a collaboration work as well as Seinfeld did.
When Seinfeld was running the show on his own, that chemistry was gone. David running the show on his own would’ve equally been a detriment to what made it work... because it was all about his relationship with Seinfeld.
Love The Final Seasons: They Have Some Of The Show’s Best Episodes
If any given Seinfeld fan was to rank their 10 favorite episodes, or any given publication was to attempt to objectively rank the show’s best episodes, then a couple of the choices would be from seasons 8 and 9.
There are plenty of iconic episodes to enjoy in the final seasons of Seinfeld — “The Bizarro Jerry,” “The Summer of George,” “The Little Kicks,” etc. — so they shouldn’t be disregarded entirely.