A unanimous groan of discontent must have risen up across the nation as "Seinfeld" had its much-hyped finale last night.
"Too much?" George asked Jerry at the beginning of the show as he beat a joke to death, "yes" would be our answer. It was 30 minutes too long, it tried to rehash all its best episodes and never really got that much of a payoff from all the mayhem. It just wasn't that funny.
"There's something in the air," Kramer said, and there was. The show had a leaden feel to it, a far cry from the free-wheeling goofiness that characterized its best episodes. It gave us a little of the old "Seinfeld" flare with plotlines surrounding water in Kramer's ear, George urinating in Jerry's apartment with the door open and Elaine trying to make a serious phone call from all the wrong places.
After a brief resurrection of the show-within-a-show plotline, the foursome get hold of a private jet and headed for Paris.
They end up making an emergency landing in backwoods Massachusetts, where they quickly get arrested on a Good Samaritan Law for mocking an obese man as he was robbed.
Like something out of Kafka, the foursome are put on trial for their "selfish, self-absorbed" lives, and all of the minor characters they've come to alienate come back to get their revenge.
It started off with the old lady who got her prized marble rye ripped away by Jerry. She was followed by, among others, Babu, the Soup Nazi, the Virgin, the Bubble Boy, the Low-Talker and Teri Hatcher as Sidra, with those spectacular, and real, breasts.
Along the way, the show threw some best-of clips at us, even though we had just sat through the "Seinfeld" retrospective which preceded it.
The final joke of the four being carted off to prison, only to rehash the old bits they've already gone through, fell flat for an episode which brought so many characters together, only to let them stand there.
In the show's best segment, under the ending credits, Jerry does a hilarious stand-up routine for the prison crowd, only to be heckled by a fellow prisoner -- "You suck! I'm gonna cut ya!"
We'll be more forgiving. After nine years of some of the best television ever, it tried to top itself. "Seinfeld's" brilliance always came from its ability to find humor in the little things, not from trying to live up to the hype.
