Chuck Klosterman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is Seinfeld still funny? Here I have in mind two points of view. One is the view that now it’s just rude. The girlfriend named Mulva — you couldn’t get away with that [now]. The other view is it’s not rude enough. Now we have Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that’s really rude, and it makes Seinfeld and Jason Alexander just not necessary. What’s your take? Is Seinfeld still good and funny? Well, I still find it funny, although I will admit it might be difficult for someone who experienced it first to have a real accurate understanding of that. One thing that I have found when I talk to young people is that they tend to like Friends more than Seinfeld. They see Friends almost as this timeless situation dealing with problems that everyone goes through, where Seinfeld seems more rooted in this worldview that doesn’t exist as much anymore. I might be a hard person to gauge that. It does still seem funny to me. I think the thing that matters, though, is that the tone of Seinfeld was both unlike the culture of today, but also massively popular. That is the thing that just kept coming up over and over again whenever I’d write about television. This idea that we have these events now like, oh, the finale of Game of Thrones, the finale of Mad Men, or whatever, that seem like these points in the zeitgeist that everyone is discussing simultaneously. Yet, any episode of Seinfeld was seen and experienced by more people, which meant that experience was just kind of normative entertainment. It’s always so tempting, when you look back at any period of time, to look for these strange apex moments. The outlier that seemed incongruous with everything else that was happening and maybe seems closer to what’s happening in the culture of the present, and you go, “Well, this is what really mattered.” I always sense that the thing that really mattered was the thing that we did not even view as having that ancillary secondary meaning. They were just what was being consumed, and the ideas and the morals and the values within that. What was important about Seinfeld wasn’t that it was more rude and brusque and adversarial with the classic idea of a sitcom, where everything is happy and everything works out. That was important, but the bigger thing was that those ideas were just on, and people watched them because there they were. That sets the texture of an era more than, say, Twin Peaks or something that doesn’t seem like it fits in the time that it came. Did the golden age of American TV end after the ’90s? And if so, what happened to it? Because you have The Sopranos, The Wire. The years differ, but it’s around that time, right?…

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