NEW YORK (Special) - As the Soup Nazi might put it: No more Seinfeld for you!
The most defining and popular sitcom of the decade will halt production this spring after its ninth season, NBC confirmed yesterday.
Jerry Seinfeld, the star and creator of the hit series about four self-absorbed New Yorkers, announced his long-awaited decision after rejecting NBC's offer to raise his pay from $1 million to an estimated $5 million (U.S.) per episode next season. It would have been a record payday for a weekly series.
``I wanted to end the show on the same kind of peak we've been doing it on for years,'' Seinfeld said in yesterday's New York Times. ``I wanted the end to be from a point of strength. I wanted the end to be graceful.''
The showcase for the dysfunctional friends became a major profit-maker for the network and evolved into a signpost for the 1990s just as surely as The Cosby Show marked the 1980s and All in the Family the tumultuous '70s.
It was the ultimate water-cooler show, a topic of conversation at work on Friday mornings. (In fact, a Milwaukee jury awarded $26 million U.S. in June to a brewery executive who was fired after telling a female colleague about an episode in which Jerry forgets his girlfriend's name and remembers only that it rhymes with a part of the female anatomy.)
The Seinfeld finale next spring promises to be a television event along the magnitude of final episodes of the long-running M*A*S*H and Cheers.
Last spring, following a contract dispute between cast members and the network, Seinfeld said he would decide around the end of the year whether to continue. He was as good as his word.
``We've all seen a million athletes where you say, `I wish they didn't do those last two years,' '' he told the Times.
``For me, this is all about timing. My life is all about timing. As a comedian, my sense of timing is everything.''
And so it's an end to the show that won 10 Emmys and made catch phrases out of ``not that there's anything wrong with that'' (being gay, that is), ``master of your domain'' (a euphemism for resisting the urge to masturbate), ``yada, yada, yada'' (blah-blah-blah), and chip ``double dippers'' (germ spreaders).
The show claimed to be about nothing, and nothing was too trivial to inspire a half-hour of humour. One episode had the characters searching for their car after a day at the mall.
The ensemble cast features Seinfeld, who plays himself as a stand-up comic; Julia Louis-Dreyfus as his high-strung former girlfriend Elaine Benes; Jason Alexander as his neurotic high-school pal George Costanza; and Michael Richards as his eccentric neighbour Kramer.
``They continue to stick around with each other because each of them is someone they've stuck with for years, even though they can't quite justify it,'' actor Wayne Knight, who plays a hateful mailman named Newman on the show, said in a recent interview.
Seinfeld told the Times he decided late Tuesday to wrap up production with a special show. The next few months' episodes will be geared toward that end.
Some critics complained that the series already had begun to fade in its latest season, but the show's popularity hasn't faded with viewers. It is the No. 2-ranked show on the air, just behind the NBC drama ER.
``To keep a show of this calibre at its peak is a great undertaking, and we respect Jerry's decision that at the end of this season, it's time to move on,'' NBC said in a statement.
The announcement blows a gaping hole in the network's Thursday-night lineup, by far the most popular in television. NBC, which also faces a difficult negotiation to keep ER, almost lost Seinfeld after last season.
Louis-Dreyfus, Alexander and Richards demanded a lucrative contract and a deal wasn't struck until the eve of NBC's announcement of a fall season. The three co-stars reportedly earn $600,000 per episode.
The Times quoted one executive familiar with the latest round of negotiations as saying Seinfeld was ``walking away from more money than has ever been offered before to a television star.''
The executive estimated the network was offering Seinfeld about $5 million an episode for 22 shows. But Seinfeld, whose income last year was estimated at $94 million by Forbes magazine, wasn't moved.
``They did everything humanly possible but money was not a factor at all,'' he said. ``I was not even looking for a raise.''
The Times said Seinfeld's immediate career plans involve a return to his roots in stand-up comedy.
He called his sitcom ``the greatest love affair of my life,'' telling the Times: ``We all felt we wanted to leave in love.''
His reasoning warmed the heart of university professor Robert J. Thompson, who has singled out Seinfeld as the only TV series of the 1990s included in his History of TV course.
``One of the disadvantages of American series television is this obligation to keep going as long as someone will continue to pay,'' said Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television in Syracuse, N.Y.
Though filmed in Los Angeles, Seinfeld has done the Big Apple proud, as New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani noted yesterday. Calling it ``the show of the decade,'' the mayor, who made a cameo appearance in a 1993 episode, said Seinfeld promotes the city ``with grace and humour.''
But not everybody is a fan of Seinfeld - the man or the show.
Al Yeganeh, the model for the authoritarian soup chef made famous in the ``Soup Nazi'' episode, took deep offence at the use of the word ``Nazi.''
``When that clown idiot came to my place to apologize, I tell him what an idiot he is and I tell him to say it to the world,'' Yeganeh said in an interview.
Yeganeh kept his small Soup Kitchen International shop in Manhattan closed yesterday in an attempt to avoid the fallout from Seinfeld's decision.
``That guy, he make me crazy with all the publicity, I burn my soup and my quality goes down because I am constantly distracted,'' a flustered Yeganeh said.
Copyright Torstar Publishing, 1997.
