HISTORY's Moment in Media: "Seinfeld's" Finale

It's also probably the last big everyone-gathered-at-the-same-time series finale in history, before an explosion of channels and then the streaming revolution inalterably changed the TV landscape -- and before on-demand streaming and social media gave us the opportunity to experience these moments, and discuss them, at our convenience.

Initially, Seinfeld took a while to catch on. Its first season debuted as The Seinfeld Chronicles in the middle of the summer, with only a five-episode order. But there was enough response that NBC executives renewed it for a longer second season and soon enough moved it into the prime Thursday night slot after Cheers. That year included classics like "The Chinese Restaurant," a perfect about-nothing episode in which the characters spend an evening in hilarious frustration, unable to get seated for dinner.

Soon, Seinfeld was a sensation, creating catchphrases that we still use today. (This was before memes.) And yada yada, by Season 6 it was America's top-rated show.

At the start of the ninth season, Jerry Seinfeld and his castmates -- Jason Alexander as George, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine, and Michael Richards as Kramer -- agreed they'd make it their last one. The show was still a hit, and they wanted to go out on top. That gave NBC months to hype the big finale. Larry David, Seinfeld's cocreator, who left the show after Season 7, came back to write the finale. By the time the big moment arrived, it felt as big as the Super Bowl.

"According to just about every magazine on every newsstand in the country, we are a nation united in inconsolable grief over the impending demise of Seinfeld," Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote, about a month before the big day.

After the finale finally aired, we were also a nation united, perhaps appropriately, in mild annoyance.

That last episode, titled simply "The Finale," ran for 56 minutes. It opens with Jerry getting a green light from NBC for the show-within-the-show sitcom, called Jerry, that he and George had been developing for years. To toast the good news, NBC loans their new creators the corporate jet, and that gang takes off for Paris to celebrate. But some Kramer hijinks force an emergency landing in a tiny Massachusetts town, and as they wait for the plane to get fixed, they witness a carjacking. Instead of helping the victim, they make typical Seinfeldian jokes, all while Kramer records them with his camcorder. It turns out they're in violation of a Good Samaritan law, and they go on trial. Seemingly every minor character from the past nine years reappears to testify about what terrible people the foursome are. The series ends with them in jail, with Jerry doing stand-up for his fellow prisoners -- and getting heckled.

Viewers found the episode overlong, overstuffed and, for a show with the longtime anti-sitcom-cliché mantra of "no hugging, no learning," bearing an unexpected comeuppance at its end. Critics were unimpressed. In Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker called it "off-key and bloated." The Boston Globe said it was "at times a trial to watch." As Avi Selk recently wrote in The Washington Post, it was "barely recognizable as Seinfeld, with different DNA: cartoon logic, zany plot twists, moral consequences."

It was also watched by 76.3 million people, close to that year's Super Bowl audience of 90 million. It was the most-watched TV broadcast of the previous five years, The New York Times reported soon after, performing better than even Oscars telecasts. Viewership didn't quite reach the 80.4 million who'd watched the last call for Cheers in 1993, but there'd been an explosion of new cable channels dividing the audience in the intervening five years. And it didn't come close to the 105 million who watched M*A*S*H end its run in 1983, destined to remain the most-watched TV episode of all time.

In 2004, 52.5 million would watch the final Friends. And since that year, no other finale even breaks into the Top 20.

That leaves the Seinfeld finale destined to remain among the most watched of all time. It has also earned some reappraisal. Seinfeld and David have long defended the show, noting how tough it is to pull off a successful finale. Many admire how it effectively brought back so many bit players and gave them all meaningful character moments. On the other hand, Julia Louis-Dreyfus appeared in David Letterman's final Top Ten List with a memorable dig: "Thanks for letting me take part in another hugely disappointing series finale." And Sopranos creator David Chase, in discussing how hard it is to close off a beloved TV run, has joked his show and Seinfeld should have swapped endings: his characters belonged in jail, and theirs in a diner.

Larry David is the most committed defender of the ending he wrote. But onCurb Your Enthusiasm, his next hit series, he's also now revised it twice. First, Curb's Season 7 tracked a Seinfeld reunion episode, with all the cast members participating, that gave him a shot at a new take. And then just last month he ended Curb like he'd ended Seinfeld: with his alter ego character on trial and then sentenced to jail. But this judge is ultimately forced to declare a mistrial, and Larry is released.

All these years later, there's no heckling.

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