Tuesday, August 30, 2005

But You Don't Shave Your Legs Every Day!

Seinfeld Season 4

The fourth season of Seinfeld is when the show suddenly became a huge success. Coincidentally, it was also the one when they moved away from the 'show about nothing' conceit and began to get a little more surreal. In the first episode Kramer is mistaken by the police for a serial killer, and the season as a whole has an overarcing plot thread where Jerry and George develop a sitcom show, neither of which are situations in which people would ordinarily find themselves in their everyday lives.

Fortunately the shift to a more mainstream style only enhanced the shows quality, proving that while being the show about nothing was a clever idea, the reason it was so good was simply brilliant writing. Some of the best episodes of the series run come from this season, most memorably 'The Contest', where the four main characters have a bet to see who can go the longest without masturbating. Not only is it hysterically funny, it was also written slyly enough so that the word 'masturbation' is never mentioned once, nor any other term that could trip the censors bad-o-meter, not too easy given the strict rules prime time TV must obey in the USA.

Other popular episodes include 'The Outing', where everyone believes George and Jerry are gay (“not that there's anything wrong with that!”), and 'The Bubble Boy', which you'll remember if you've ever seen it (“I'm sorry, the correct answer was actually 'The Moops'.”). My personal favorite has to be 'The Opera', which stars the character of Crazy Joe Davola, who likes dressing up as a clown and is obsessed with Elaine (“Are you scared of clowns Kramer?”).

DVD extras are little scarce on this collection, especially when compared with the first volume, but I guess there probably just wasn't that much interesting stuff to say that hadn't already been said on the previous discs other than 'Yay we won an Emmy!'

Volume 1
Volume 2

1 comment:

Joel said...

G recently bought the first 3 seasons on special and we've gotten halfway through the second season. It's great, considering I missed all the early ones when I was growing up.

Nothing like comedy :D