Julia Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t think Seinfeld could be made today

You couldn’t make “Seinfeld” today. Because it’s already two-thirty, and you said you were going to the grocery store to get more butter and milk. Also, you have to get your dad his noon medicine, he lives on the other side of town, and traffic usually picks up at that time of day, so by the time you get home, it will be dinner time. There’s not enough time to produce 180 episodes of a hit sitcom before bed.

Ha ha. That was fun.

In fact, one couldn’t make “Seinfeld” in 2024 because, like all shows, it was a product of its time. “Seinfeld” debuted in 1989, when Americans were growing increasingly weary of the useful, predictable sitcom tropes that had been repeated, ad nauseam, for decades. Some of the most popular sitcoms of the late 1980s were works of deconstruction, taking the bland beauty of classic American television and turning it on its ear. Married… with Children featured a suburban joint family, but the central joke of the show was that they were all unhappy, petty people who hated each other. “The Simpsons” saw the suburban American family as lower-class, quaint, and odd-looking (what with their yellow flesh).

“Seinfeld” was invented as an antidote to the emotional dreariness of traditional television shows. Show creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld describe their series as “about nothing,” and force its characters to learn no lessons and never exchange hugs. Instead, the characters had to be shallow and petty, forever trapped in their own petty neuroses and pathetic self-interest. And in terms of laughs, “Seinfeld” had long legs. In terms of its attitudes, “Seinfeld” will forever be a relic of the ’90s.

In a recent interview with New York Time Magazine“Seinfeld” star Julia Louis-Dreyfus was asked about the show’s potential immortality, and she also felt that its magic could never be recaptured. However, in her view, the calcification of “Seinfeld” was not so much a problem as the risk-averse modern television market. And I felt like no one would give “Seinfeld” a chance in 2024.

Louis-Dreyfus, like all of us, has survived the bitter streaming wars and admits that television is in a strange place. Studios will overspend on some series with valuable IP attached, release them without much fanfare, and then pull them from the service just a few months later (See: “Willow”). It was also revealed during the 2023 writers’ strike that companies – in general – care more about market cap than valuations. There is no longer a chance for a series to start small, gather an audience over time, stay on the air for years, and become a cultural institution.

Louis-Dreyfus remembers the loose, “let’s just laugh” attitudes of the early seasons of “Seinfeld,” and feels that environment doesn’t exist anymore. Every channel is risk-averse, and none seem willing to put a penny into anything that won’t work right away. When asked if something could start on “Seinfeld” in 2024, Louis-Dreyfus said:

“Probably not. I mean, what the hell is going on with network television anymore? When ‘Seinfeld’ was made, it was completely different from anything that was on at the time. It was just a bunch of losers hanging out. So I would say one The main reasons it’s not made now is because it’s hard to recognize anything different, especially these days, everyone’s kind of scared.

Louis-Dreyfus sure knows a lot about hit TV shows. She won an Emmy Award for “Seinfeld” in 1996, an Emmy Award for “The New Adventures of Old Christine” in 2006, and nine Emmy Awards for her starring role in “Veep,” which she helped executive produce. It will appear soon Marvel movie “Thunderbolt*.” It looks to the future, unconcerned with the structures of the past.