When this show was first on air way back in the 80's and 90's I was alive and had other things going on in my life and therefore didn't pay it very much attention. I had no idea how great this show is because I guess I was involved in other things like going to college and being very interested in girls.
I still didn't pay it much attention even after they had long-since stopped making them in 1998. People would have the entire series on DVD and I never thought to even watch it.
I know that i am very late to the party but this show is absolutely amazing and I understand why people consider it to be one of the most influential sitcoms of all time.
For people that have never seen the show and perhaps even live in remote areas, I would imagine that they recognize the above people, even though they might not be exactly sure why.
It is one of the most successful shows of all time and had 20-nearly 40 million people that tuned in to watch the 22-minute episodes every week. As far as financial success is concerned it is absolutely immense. It is difficult to determine exactly how much money is made these days but the main 4 actors still make millions per year off of it and every time the rights to broadcast it change Jerry Seinfeld ends up raking in sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
When the show first started out Seinfeld was only making $20,000 per episode but this quickly doubled and then doubled again. By the time the final season was upon us Jerry was making a cool million per episode and at that point he had so much money that when the studios offered him $5 million per episode or $100 million to do just one more season. At that point in his life Jerry was so wealthy that he flat out refused it and says now that he never even considered it. It is difficult for all of us peons to imagine turning down $100 million for a year's work, but that is exactly what he did.
The thing that is really special about Seinfeld is that the show is kind of timeless. Sure the technology in the show such as everyone using land lines for the most part is dated now that everyone and their goat has a mobile phone, but the comedy in the show isn't really attached to any particular point in time or current event. Most of the scenarios are completely made up and don't rely on people being aware of what happened to be going on in the world at that particular point in time at all. The celebrities cameos are almost always the celebrities playing themselves so that is kind a nice little walk through time as well.
Some episodes are more famous than others and for me the one that basically everyone knows is the one about the "Soup Nazi" which as it turns out is based on a real person that made amazing soup and really did have a lot of rules if you wanted to be able to purchase anything in his store. Lots of Jerry's material comes from experiences that he had in his own life and as a stand-up comedian, I suppose that is his job. The fact that he plays himself in the show and is a comedian in the show, is just quite perfect and maybe was really easy for him to pull off. He didn't have to pretend to be Jerry, because he IS Jerry.
There are a total of 9 seasons of Seinfeld and 7 of them contain at least 20 episodes at 22-24 minutes each. The best thing (the best Jerry!) about the show is that you can just choose a random episode and start there because very little of what happens in the show is at all dependent on things that happened already in previous episodes. The writers were very clever to build the show this way because now you don't need the backstory in order to just jump in anywhere. This is something that scares me away from other shows because I am not going to watch 3 seasons of something just to get up to speed on what is happening in the current season.
I'm kind of surprised at myself for not giving this show a chance until over 20 years after they stopped making them but in a way I am glad that this happened because now most of the episodes are something that is totally new to me. I do think that for me this show will be something that I can watch multiple times and not have it get old because it is just extremely well-written.
This is actually one of just a handful of good shows that Netflix has maintained their contract with and at least for now, they are secure to keep the rights to the show for at least another year. Netflix is pretty closed-lipped about how much they pay for stuff, but there are rumors that they had to pay $500 million for global exclusive streaming rights to the show.
If you haven't ever watched it I think you are in for a treat and you should probably go ahead and give it a shot!