Jerry’s parents come into town so Morty can get a doctor to look at his back, only for his wallet to get stolen. Elaine returns from holiday and tries to break up with her psychiatrist boyfriend. George passes on the deal with NBC to develop the pilot.

Written by: Larry David
Directed by: Tom Cherones

This has the most basic of Larry David writing tics: an incredibly tiny error or leap of faith that has the worst possible outcome and spirals out of control. This is what gives it a very different tone, even from the sitcoms that followed in Seinfeld‘s wake – the actual details of the story are completely banal, they’re just injected with absurdism and hysteria by the characters, which ironically is completely realistic. In fact, there’s a very funny tension in how the tone of Seinfeld has both the sense of a clockwork machine ticking over, and a sense of everything going out of control. As soon as Morty puts the wallet down, you know he’s going to lose it.

You could say that Seinfeld is an expression of anxiety and the constant terror of the worst case scenario playing out. You even see this in Jerry’s conversations with his parents; this continues the story of Jerry throwing out a watch his parents gave him, and even simply trying to dodge the conversation entirely keeps blowing up in his face. I find Jerry’s relationship with his mother very relatable in how she is determined to fix every single minor issue in his life, and he actually finds this more annoying than just having the problem; Morty is just as funny because he has a businesslike approach to solving the problem and won’t just let him deal with it alone.

(Both Liz Sheridan and Barney Martin are so fucking funny because they’re playing their characters completely straight – no exaggeration or caricaturing, just two people trying to be decent)

Meanwhile, this is one of the first episodes that makes a lot of comedy out of common women-specific issues with Elaine. It blows me away how unethical the relationship with her psychiatrist is and how the cast and crew make it so funny without either excusing the relationship or wagging their finger at it. This is so clearly a man abusing a position of power over someone and they make the expression of that so absurd.

A thing I like about Elaine (especially comedically) is that – and I say this as someone who can relate to her – she’s both self-righteous and clearly weak in character; she folds to his silences like Superman on laundry day. Elaine basically believes in the social contract as a moral force (as opposed to Jerry, who is more too lazy to fight it, or George, who hopes to spin it in his favour), and like many people who do that, she surrenders moral conviction in the face of the slightest breeze from someone who isn’t George. God forbid she look silly for a second!

TOPICS O’ THE WEEK

• Another very Larry David writing tic is someone trying to inject a new topic into the conversation that people are already having.
• Something about Jerry having long hair makes this feel like real Seinfeld as much as the more constant playing of the theme.
• Larry David dictated that the show have “no hugging, no learning”, and yet there is clearly hugging when Elaine returns this episode! Which clearly means he didn’t mean it 100% literally.
• Julia Louis-Dreyfuss gives her best expression yet when sarcastically responding to Jerry’s “Maybe he’s got a cheerful hold on you.”
• There’s a casual bit of meta when we go straight from “to be continued” to Jerry riffing on the phrase onstage.

Biggest Laugh: Something about the sheer uselessness of this combined with Morty’s openmindedness is so funny to me. Helen’s outrage over this is funny to me because it reminds me of my mother getting offended when I make self-deprecating jokes.

Next Week: “The Watch”