Maybe it’s simply because viewers at the time were unable to immediately get on the internet and register their disgust throughout the world after it aired, but in terms of divisive series finales, the end of SeinfeldHow I Met Your MotherLost
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In response to a question from an audience member at a show in Boston this weekend (via The Guardian), Seinfeld reportedly said that, “Something is going to happen that has to do with that ending” but that it “hasn’t happened yet.” He also vaguely teased that, “whatever you are thinking about,” he and Larry David “have also been thinking about it.” The implication seems to be that he wants to do some kind of revival, possibly as a second attempt at a finale that won’t make so many people mad, but he’d need a lot more people than just Larry David to be on board for that to happen.
But, to go back to that earlier point, is anyone still upset that Seinfeld ended with the main characters getting arrested in put in jail for a short time? It wasn’t “satisfying,” but what would’ve been? We flash-forward to see how each of them will die? We finally get to see Bob Sacamano? And how would those things land any better 25 years later than they would’ve at the time?
The finale as it aired is probably is misunderstanding of what people liked about the show late in its run—which is to say that it became more of a good-time show about funny people having fun as opposed to a subversive sitcom about funny people refusing to act according to the byzantine laws of social norms (and, for the record, it was never a “show about nothing,” that’s just the Jerry pilot they write, which is a parody of the show you’re watching not a literal recreation of it, as evidenced by the lack of a “the judge sentences a guy to be Jerry’s butler” storyline on Seinfeld).
The finale is a finale to what the show started as, where Jerry and his friends regularly suffer for their perceived crimes against society, with the final episode escalating it to them literally going to jail. That’s funny on paper, but it’s not all that funny in practice, and that’s fine. Seriously. Most of the other episodes are good, and you could easily skip the finale in a rewatch. It doesn’t negatively impact the show as a whole the way that, say, the Game Of Thrones finale does.
All of that is to say: Don’t do a Seinfeld revival, please. Curb Your Enthusiasm already did a whole thing about it, you don’t need to do it for real. If Seinfeld and David or so desperate to revisist that universe, do it as a novel or a comic book—you know, the way something like that is supposed to be done.