XPost: rec.arts.tv
From: weberm@polaris.net

Twenty years ago, there was much ado about nothing — or more
specifically, the TV sitcom that was famously about nothing — when
“Seinfeld,” then a groundbreaking ratings juggernaut and pop
cultural phenomenon, aired its much-anticipated series finale.

Concluding nine seasons of micro-observational humor, complex but
absurdist intertwining plotlines, dialogue that became overnight
water-cooler catchphrases and a game-changing “no hugging, no
learning” approach to network comedy, star and executive producer
Jerry Seinfeld turned to his co-creator Larry David, who’d left the
series two seasons prior, to craft an ending that would, in
established “Seinfeld-ian” style, neatly tie disparate threads of
the series together. Living up to the hype fanned by network NBC
preceding its airing on May 14, 1998, was a lesser concern.

“Larry and I were so good together, if we both thought something was
funny, that was good enough for us,” Seinfeld recently told host
David Letterman of their overall shared philosophy for the show in
general. “If it can get through those two filters, and we both think
that’s funny, I wouldn’t even care if it wasn’t funny.”

Seinfeld and David didn’t do it alone, of course: To mark the 20th
anniversary of the finale, Variety turned to members of the all-star
team that had a hand in the aptly titled “The Finale.” Here, stars- turned-cultural icons Jason Alexander (George Costanza) and Michael
Richards (Cosmo Kramer); guest actors Patrick Warburton (David
Puddy), Larry Thomas (The Soup Nazi) and Phil Morris (Jackie
Chiles); executive producer Alec Berg (currently EP of “Silicon
Valley” and “Barry”) and supervising producer David Mandel
(currently showrunner of “Veep” starring “Seinfeld” leading lady
Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and producer Suzy Mamann-Greenberg (whose
subsequent credits include 144 episodes of “How I Met Your Mother”)
reflect on the series-ender.

Why was season 9 the right time to end the show?

Alec Berg: “Jerry’s always had such an amazing head on his
shoulders, and he’s never been in awe of any of it. He handles it
all with dignity, and I think he just felt like this felt right to
him. [The network] had offered to give him seven gazillion dollars
and his own planet if he wanted to do another season. And he thought
about it and said, ‘The only reason to do another year would be
money, and that would be a shame.’ And he’s never been in it for the
money. He’s always said, ‘Do the work and the money will come. But
if you chase the money or chase success, you’ll fail.’ …I think he
just felt like ‘This is the right call, I’m confident in it, and
we’re going to do it this way, and we’re going to make it good.'”

How did working toward the end feel that season?

Jason Alexander: “From the Christmas prior when the announcement had
gone out that it was the last season, so there was a frenzy of
attention on the show. A lot of magazines, a lot of press, a lot of
fan curiosity about how we would go out. …We — and when I say ‘we’ I
mean everyone except Jerry and Larry and perhaps a few select
writers and producers — had no idea what the finale was going to be.
So we were as curious as everybody else.”

Berg: “We were so exhausted. The last two years, Larry had left. And
so a bunch of us were trying to do what Larry did, 24 episodes a
year. And the level of exposure. …Something like 33 million people a
week were watching the show, so if we screwed it up, it would have
been a pretty massively embarrassing screw-up. We lived and ate and
slept and hung out at the office. And there was a day during the
last season when I looked at a calendar, and it had been 59 days
since I had [last] not come into the office. I went another two or
three weeks before I had one day off. And at that point, having a
day off was worthless, because you would just sit at home and
twitch. It was a totally unsustainable level of work.”

David Mandel: “There were a lot of other times when it almost was
the end, including when Larry left. Jerry made the decision to keep
it going, but when Jerry basically was telling us that it was
finally going to end, he had, if memory serves, already reached out
to Larry. So we knew right from the get-go, yeah, it was ending —
which sucked — but Larry was going to come back and do the end with
Jerry, which just seemed right.”

Alexander: “Larry and Jerry were the parents of our show — they gave
birth to this thing. And then Larry had gone off to explore other
things, and the show sailed along beautifully under Jerry’s
supervision, but there was always that feeling that we lost one of
our creators. …You have to understand that the ‘Seinfeld’
organization was a very unsentimental group in a lot of ways. It
doesn’t mean we didn’t care about each other. We cared about each
other, it just meant we didn’t hang out a lot together. So the fact
that we were all back was very, very exciting.”

Berg: “By the time the finale started rolling around, and Jerry said
that he had spoken to Larry, and Larry was going to come back and
help write the finale, we were all ecstatic. …Really, Larry could
have pitched us anything and we would have said, ‘Fantastic!’ We
don’t have to have this burden of coming up with the finale on our
shoulders. We were so tired that I’m not sure we could have mustered
the energy to do a good version of anything anyway.”

Mandel: “There was no question, as far as any of us were concerned,
that it had to be like that, and it was great. We had our last
episode, and then we also knew then there was this, and then Larry
was coming back. So in a weird way, it was almost like a double
ending, which was cool.”

How did David returning change the dynamics at the end?

Berg: “There definitely was a little bit of an adjustment from those
of us on the show who had been very much in charge of certain things
for the last couple of years. Larry just showed up and was like,
‘I’m going to the job the way I always did the job.’ It’s like a
husband had left the house for two years, and the kids had to take
care of everything, and then the husband came back, and the kids are
like ‘Oh, Dad’s back and I guess he’s going to do those things that
Dad does, and we don’t have to do those things anymore.’ But it was
just awesome that he was back.”

Michael Richards: “It was like the last day of school. You’re still
going to your classes for the last time, but it’s like everyone is
carrying their yearbook and we’re all signing each other’s yearbook.
It just had that kind of feel to it all. Larry was very, very busy
managing a huge show because he had written a script where he wanted
all of these past characters to be in the episode. And so it was a
really enormous undertaking. And then all those people on the set,
and we’re all touching down and going over episodes in the past,
just talking.”

What was the genesis of the idea of the trial and so many returning
guest stars?

Mandel: “Larry obviously leaned toward his seasons, but obviously we
had done two seasons that he was not there for. I remember
suggesting a couple of possibilities from our time, could testify,
and we definitely landed on Marcelino, a guy that had come out of
‘The Little Jerry’ episode, written by Jen Crittenden. So our era
was represented.”

Alexander: “Then all we knew was that a lot of our favorite guests
were going to be part of the week, and we were very excited about
the prospect of all these people that we have loved and adored. Some
of them have become a regular part of our team; others had only come
in for an episode, but had scored big. And the excitement going into
the last week was about having this giant reunion of people that
have meant so much to us versus the underlying sadness of ‘This is
it.’ …I also selfishly believed that George was a kind of alter ego
for Larry that nobody really understood in quite the way that Larry
did and I thought, ‘Well, this is gonna be a particularly satisfying
George episode.'”

Patrick Warburton: “I only did two guest spots during the sixth
season, and then two years went by where I wasn’t on the show — I
was on a show called ‘Dave’s World’ on CBS, and they wouldn’t let me
out to do guest spots. But then they canceled ‘Dave’s World,’ and I
was helping Jerry out with his American Express commercials — I did
Superman in those spots. That’s when he brought up coming back on
the show during the ninth and final season. I did seven or eight
episodes in the ninth season.”

Larry Thomas: “I was convinced that Larry and Jerry didn’t like me
[after my first appearance because they never had me back]. I was at
my old day job as a bail bondsman and a court investigator and I was
in court in Glendale and my manager called me and she goes, ‘So
would you be available to do the “Seinfeld” final episode?’ And I
just yelled and everybody was looking at me. ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, they
called and they want you to play the Soup Nazi again.'”

Phil Morris: “I was doing another show at the time — ‘The New Love
Boat.’ We used to do eight-day cruises to get all the exteriors and
the actual locations on the boat with actual passengers. So the
night I came back from this excursion to the Caribbean on a Sunday
is when I got the script and the notice that I was starting on
Monday. I didn’t know that I was even in the finale. I didn’t have a
clue that Jackie had so much to do. And to be honest, it kind of
freaked me out a little bit, because I hadn’t got my land legs under
me and showing up the work the very next day to do this incredible
popular culture experience. It was really daunting.”

Just how important was it to bring back so many familiar faces, and
what went into pulling it off?

Suzy Mamann-Greenberg: “What a fantastic love-letter to the real
fans of ‘Seinfeld’ that have been following all these years, and I
was really excited to get it together. It was tough, though, because
they decided they didn’t want anything to get out ahead of time –
like, nothing. And we started [production] three months before it
aired, so that was a real challenge. …Everybody wanted to know what
it was about. It was like the big secret.”

Thomas: “As soon as my agent hung up she got a call from
Entertainment Weekly asking ‘Is your client going to back for the
“Seinfeld” finale as the Soup Nazi?’ and she said yes. And then she
called [casting director Marc] Hirschfeld’s office and he said, ‘Oh,
by the way, this is going to be a major industry top secret. Larry’s
going to have to sign a confidentiality agreement. No one is to know
he’s coming back for the finale.’ So before even being told of Larry
David’s big secret, we blew it right off the bat. The first day back
on the ‘Seinfeld’ set Larry stood up in front of the 50 guest stars
and said, ‘This is my dream — this is to remain a major secret. No
one is to know what’s going on,’ and I’m just sitting there turning
red because I knew Entertainment Weekly was going to come out with
their next issue and say, ‘One thing we do know is the Soup Nazi
will be back,’ which they did.”

Mamann-Greenberg: “We had 52 guest actors in that episode, so
imagine, we didn’t have scripts going out and looked at. At the
table read was the only time the full script was read, and everyone
had to turn them in at the end of the table reading. Casting put out
only the pages that actors were in [and] we never had extras in the
same things twice. Everyone in the courtroom were actors except for
the jury, which was friends and family.”

Alexander: “Particularly sweet for me is that my wife was a jury
member. So my wife, who was taking the journey with me, got to be on
the set on the show for that last episode.”

Mamann-Greenberg: “We had fake names on every dressing room trailer
that were around the entire lot, stages on lockdown. Everyone had
signed non-disclosure agreements. Everything was locked up in my
office — the film, the everything. We just didn’t have anything
around that could be pieced together. No one had the full story
before it aired, so that was huge. …After the show had aired, and
then I created scripts for everybody to have as a token of the
finale for everyone.”

What did it feel like to return, only to say goodbye again so
quickly and so permanently?

Thomas: “Being a big ‘Seinfeld’ fan, I had become a fan of all these
other actors that played all the other characters in the series. It
was just like a huge party. We all had very little to actually do as
far as work, so it was just swapping stories. The late Ian
Abercrombie came by one day and said ‘Brian George and I going for a
bit of lunch — do you want to come with us?’ The three of us walked
across Ventura Boulevard and out of the corner of my eye and I’m
noticing people stopping and staring but I’m not putting two and two
together. Finally it occurred to me in the restaurant: people are
recognizing us and wondering ‘What are the Soup Nazi, Babu, and Mr.
Pitt doing together?'”

Morris: “I didn’t show up as Phil. I went right into makeup and
wardrobe. I came to the set as Jackie. There’s this whole courtroom
full of people, and I say my first line on the first take, and they
all broke up. And I turned around, looked at everybody and went,
‘Jackie missed you, too.'”

Warburton: “I only had one word in the final episode, but I didn’t
give a crap because it was a great word. Elaine was going off to
jail, and across that crowded court room, she says, ‘David, don’t
wait for me.’ And I just go, ‘All right.’ Which I felt was great. In
that one moment, it truly encapsulated the two of them and their
relationship.’

Berg: “I’ve never seen Jerry nervous. I’ve never seen him out of
sorts. I’ve never seen him thrown for a loop. …My sense was that was
his approach to the finale was just ‘OK let’s make sure this works
and that works.’ He was very rational. It didn’t feel like he was
emotional or I didn’t see any crying or like. ‘Oh my god, what have
I done? I wish we could keep going!’ I think he just felt like.
‘This is the right call, I’m confident in it, and we’re going to do
it this way, and we’re going to make it good.'”

Thomas: “In those years after my episode the one thing I
categorically refused to do was say ‘No soup for you.’ I thought it
would be a big mistake — it would sound like a bad impression of
myself. So [on set] Jerry and Larry called me over and Jerry just
goes. ‘I think you need to say it.’ And I looked at him for a second
and said. ‘Say it? Oh, say it! Really?’ And they both said, ‘We
think you need to say it out loud.’ So with dread I walked back into
the scene, thinking, ‘I’m totally going to sound like an idiot.’ And

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