No learning, no hugging - in fact, no nothing

By Jessica Winter

COURTESY US MAGAZINE The four apostles of nothing at all.

I've been thinking a lot about Dr. Niles Crane lately. Maybe it's the flying-buttress chin, the sleek swimmer's build, the not-long-for-this-world gaze, the sex life out of Madame Bovary. Maybe it's the titillatingly incongruous hairy knuckles, or David Hyde Pierce's, SM '81, recent appearance on Letterman during which he described a naked 3 a.m. traipse through the neighborhood with his emotionally fragile dog, or all of the above that have left me wishing I looked a bit more like the teenaged Nadia Comaneci, or whoever Maris's prototype is supposed to be.

But at this point in the going, whose shredded nerves couldn't use soothing by nude gambols in the park with fellow Yalies--after all, the End is Nigh. There are only three new episodes of the revolutionary sitcom which scant years ago and lives away the late Brandon Tartikoff deemed "too Jewish, too New York" to make it in prime time, and we indolent types must find something to replace Nothing. I have taken refuge in the Fastidious Anonymous meeting that is Frasier, but any show that inspires an essay in a recent Sunday New York Times about the American class struggle circa 1998 leaves me thinking I should be doing something more frivolous with my painfully abundant free time.

Channel-surfing, alas, has left water in the lungs. Just Shoot Me,which will probably nab the Helen of Troy-like vacant time slot, is 20 minutes of limp gags dutifully followed by some self-affirmation with your hosts David Spade and George Segal, only proving the timeless merits of Larry David's "no learning, no hugging" rule for his "show about nothing." I watched half an episode of Third Rock from the Sun and thought my chest was going to explode. Ally McBeal--what fresh hell is this? Everyone knows that the first "do-me feminist" (a phrase indicative of how hard-up for buzzwords we'll be once Kramer has borrowed his last box of Double Crunch) was Ms. Elaine Benes, and anyway she's way cuter than Calista "Pinchy" Flockhart.

The problem is that, by breaking all that ground and shedding all that water and whatever other adjectival epiphanies folks will be sputtering in the coming weeks, Seinfeld begat scads of lesser imitators. Too many writers mistook the show's critique of young urban shallowness and its shrewd indulgence of Jerry's fascination for the excruciating minutiae of everyday life as excuses to be, well, shallow and excruciating. Suddenly, everything on television was a cartoon (excepting Frasier, which embodies a strange inverse of this maxim in that its star is a cartoon, which is very exciting for me because Kelsey Grammer's increasingly frequent trips to court and Betty Ford have pushed up the Niles quotient to undreamed-of heights).

At this point, Seinfeld itself is a cartoon, so I'm glad they're getting out now. There was something sweet and guileless about the first few seasons--just-friends Jerry and Elaine working out the rules by which they could still have sex; George in the Chinese restaurant holding forth on a gastrointestinal near-disaster during a romantic rendezvous--that has somehow curdled over time. The show has gotten vicious, and lately for no greater purpose, whereas the season (1995-96) that encompassed George's engagement to Susan was an unpredictable and darkly brilliant exposition on the nether-regions of the soul. That year's first episode found Jerry and George making a pact to get serious about settling down; learning, even hugging, seemed imminent. By half-hour's end, however, Jerry had broken the agreement by ending his most recent relationship--the woman wouldn't split the tab on an order of pie, or something--and George was betrothed, last seen locked in Susan's arms, forced to watch Mad About You and wearing the look of Hamlet after he slew Polonius. The writers finally killed off Susan--an act of euthanasia, really, like Montgomery Clift pushing Shelley Winters off the boat in A Place in the Sun--and the quartet's nonchalance following her death, reviled at the time, is now seen as a crucial turning point for just how far the sitcom can go.

Nowhere from there, so far. Susan's death seemed a culmination for Seinfeld, and it has been spinning its wheels ever since. Recent gimmicks--George's "candy lineup," the gonorrhea-from-a-tractor incident--have seemed empty and contrived, and the show post-Susan finds itself in the same quandary as The Simpsons after Maggie shot Mr. Burns. Both shows pushed the boundaries of comedy so far that neither could maintain its own standards of pace and density. Perhaps the problem is that Seinfeld has so completely rearranged our synapses--so altered the way we observe the social world and identify its rituals--that nothing within its universe can possibly surprise us anymore. Seinfeld became a casualty of its own fearless innovation, which would be fine if somebody else had picked up the slack on this rickshaw. Thank God and Niles Crane for syndication, where nothing lasts forever.

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