Bigger isn’t always better … in comedy, that is. Jerry Seinfeld opened about the controversial series finale of the beloved ’90s sitcom Seinfeld. “I sometimes think we really shouldn’t have even done it,” said the show’s star and co-creator, 63, in an interview with David Remnick during The New Yorker Festival on Friday, October 6.
The farewell episode, which aired on May 14, 1998 with 76.3 million people watching, brought back past episode enemies who were called in to testify as witnesses to a “Good Samaritan law” that the show’s four friends had broken.
The series ultimately ended with Jerry, George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Kramer (Michael Richards) behind bars. “There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy,” the comedian added.
The much-anticipated series finale was called “off-key” by Entertainment Weekly, and fans are still talking about it today. “This is worse than the finale of ‘Seinfeld’ which I still don’t like,” one tweeter wrote in response to an offbeat Black Lives Matter joke that Seinfeld had made on January 26, in which he tweeted, “New! “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Lewis Black. Black’s life matters.”
Though the ending of Seinfeld remains quite polarizing, the much-loved series, which aired from 1989 to 1998 with 180 episodes, was full of humorous antics including what Seinfeld, himself, claims to be the funniest episode. “We got very lucky,” he said of their 78th episode titled ‘The Marine Biologist,’” where George lies about being a marine biologist to a woman, which then backfires as he’s put on the spot to save a beached whale whose blowhole was clogged by Kramer’s golf ball. “We came up with it the night before we were shooting,” he added.
