The Seinfeld Reunion

I don't have HBO and won't order it just for this, but if it comes out on DVD I'll definitely rent it:

The cast of Seinfeld is reuniting on Curb Your Enthusiasm this fall? Giddyup! The multi-episode story line on Larry David’s HBO comedy will follow our favorite pessimist as he recruits Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Michael Richards for a reunion show. You can read all about it in this week’s EW, but here are some bonus quotes from Mr. Seinfeld.

On why the cast decided to reunite:

“Doing it with Larry and on his show just seemed like the only possible way it would be fun….We would never do the type of thing that these shows usually do. That wouldn’t be our style. But something like this — that was sillier and a little more offbeat — felt like it might be right for us.”

On possibly passing up big bucks if the gang had held out for a traditional “reunion show”:

“I don’t think we really thought about that. If we were about the money we would have kept doing the show. We were about: ‘What would be the biggest treat for the audience?’”

On getting together at Larry David’s house to write dialogue for the “reunion show” scenes:

“We did have this one scene that Larry and I wrote, as we always did, really fast. We were just boom, boom, boom, like a tennis game where you hadn’t lost any of your skills. We knew each other, we could read the lines, it just goes right through the processor: ‘Oh, I know what to do here. I think you’re over here in this one.’ ‘Why don’t you walk, I’ll follow.’ ‘Yeah, right, right!’ That was a lot of fun.”

On being back on Stage 19 of the CBS Radford lot, where the old Seinfeld sets had been taken out of storage and updated:

“The best analogy is a snow globe. You’re walking into a miniature fake environment that has been recreated. As I told people about it, I could go back in your life 10 years and recast your friends, recreate where you live, everything in it exactly how it was, and now somebody with a headset points at you and you walk in now, and there it was, and you go, ‘Jesus Christ, this is my old life!’ We all felt like it was a very special experience. Just to go back in time in life is a fantasy.”

“One of the coolest moments was to sit down again in that little foursome that we always sat in. Somebody suggested something about some camera shot: ‘Can you switch?’ And we looked at the guy like, ‘Are you kidding?’ Because we would always sit in that exact configuration. There was no way we were going to change now.”

There's more here.

My wife and I are big fans of the Seinfeld series. I get so sick of the news anymore that in the evening instead of watching the 10 o'clock news I'll often turn on a local channel that runs two Seinfeld episodes back-to-back.

When visiting the Smithsonian four years ago I even got a photo of the famous "puffy shirt":

We know all the catch phrases and it's funny how often something in real life will spur one of us to say something from the show. My wife's an even bigger fan than I, and for a special Christmas present this year I just ordered tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld in San Diego on December 5th. He doesn't do that many live shows anymore, and we always seemed to miss him when he was in Las Vegas.

Should be fun.