The cast of Seinfeld always had an affinity for doom. Sure, their hair was kept trimmed, their apartments well lit, and they wore more primary colors than black, but “the show about nothing” understood the philosophy of existential dread on a fundamental level.
Once upon a time—back before the show’s dedication to documenting minor human evils was quite so widely known—fans trying to describe It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia to other people were often forced to resort to comparisons to that last great sitcom about mostly awful semi-humans living largely meaningless lives: …
This week’s question is in honor of 1998 Week here at The A.V. Club:
In the Seinfeld episode appropriately titled The Muffin Tops, Elaine decided to open a store that would just sell the top parts of muffins. When her old boss steals the idea and opens a business called Top Of The Muffin To You!, Elaine explains that it would be more cost-effective to bake full muffins and then just…
The 20th anniversary of Seinfeld’s divisive finale has inspired no shortage of essays and analyses, with authors examining the show’s impact through any number of subjective means. Enter writer Andrew Thompson and designer Tri Vo, who instead sought to see what we could learn from the hard data. The duo scooped up all…
You know Cyrano de Bergerac even if you don’t know Cyrano De Bergerac. The protagonist of Edmond Rostand’s century-old play—based loosely on the life of an actual French polymath—is a canonical figure, his romantic plight, panache, and prodigious proboscis immortalized in countless stagings, adaptations, and lit-class…
Melody Cheng, Helen Wu, and Janet Wang get together every week to discuss their careers, personal lives, and everything else modern Asian-American women experience. This week is all about first dates: dos and don’ts, dealbreakers, the best and worst places to meet, and more. The trio share real-life stories about…
The success of the Will & Grace and Roseanne revivals has stirred up talk of revisiting virtually every successful sitcom, including The Office (but in that case, only for a holiday special), as well as many dramas. But NBC is actually showing some restraint in that regard—at a recent Hollywood Reporter event, network…
Over the weekend, much of the world’s population dutifully set its clocks one hour ahead in adherence with daylight saving time, that mandatory act of “springing forward” in order to... something about farmers. Or coal. Or whatever. As a popular Last Week Tonight With John Oliver segment pointed out, most of us don’t…
Bowing to the pressure of Hollywood’s most relentless journalistic interrogator—Ellen host (and unconfirmed Deep State operative) Ellen DeGeneres—comedian Jerry Seinfeld has acknowledged that a potential revival of his landmark ’90s sitcom Seinfeld is “possible.” “Anything is possible,” Seinfeld admitted after…
Seinfeld is heralded as the “show about nothing,” but there are plenty of episodes that are about something, while avoiding sentimentality. For this 6 Things, we’re looking at six episodes of Seinfeld that were actually about something.
Welcome back to Pop Lexicon, The A.V. Club’s series with Kory Stamper, Merriam-Webster lexicographer and editor, where she reveals the origins of America’s favorite colloquialisms. Kory uncovers the roots of “yada yada yada,” a conversational shorthand popularized by Seinfeld—but it can be traced back even before…
It’s December, so it’s time to dust off those Christmas movies, those Christmas movies that aren’t really Christmas movies, or whatever side of that wall you think Die Hard falls on. But what if you’re in a holiday mood but not up for the whole two-hour jaunt to Bedford Falls? Or want something classic and familiar,…
TV now is a lot different than it was 25 years ago, but that doesn’t mean studio executives don’t still clutch their pearls when it comes to “controversial” content. These days, The Walking Dead can spill as many intestines as it wants, but many issues surrounding sexuality and gender identity are still considered…
Because real life has no soundtrack—nothing to set the mood as soon as the supporting characters of our days wander into view—we have to make it ourselves.
Jerry Seinfeld is a guy with a reputation for caring about jokes and comedy above all else (give or take a cup of coffee or a fancy car). Seinfeld doubled down on that humor-over-everything attitude last week, when he went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and the two ended up on the subject of comedy legend and…
We’ve all done the thing where we use our phone’s predictive text to spool out long sentences of utter nonsense that still manage to cohere into grammatically recognizable sentences. It’s interesting technology, if a little insulting to think that our thoughts are so easy to grasp that a computer could anticipate them…
Back in 1999, Jerry Seinfeld and the late David Bowie did a bit during the Saturday Night Live 25th anniversary special sending up their images as above-it-all, coasting megastars. “You gonna do the ‘lost sock’ bit?,” asks Bowie, to which Seinfeld replies with a sheepish nod. In his first stand-up special in 19 years…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
The Handmaid’s Tale took home the top prize at tonight’s Television Critics Association Awards, the professional organization’s annual celebration of TV excellence. In addition to winning the trophy for Outstanding Achievement in Drama, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel was named Program of the…
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