Reunions - Not Just a Thing of the Past

 

"Every time you see one of those reunion shows, it feels like they´re doing it for the wrong reason," Dreyfus told Larry on Sunday´s episode.

Given the huge pots of cash the actors took home weekly from "Seinfeld," and not even counting the pin money they continue to earn from its syndication, there is no reason for them to be here -- within and without the context of the show -- except that it might be fun, and it might be good. (Larry´s typically self-serving motivation is to get back ex-wife Cheryl Hines by giving her a part in the reunion show.) And there is Alexander´s observation to Larry that, if nothing else, "it could make up for the finale."

That finale, written by David -- in which his co-creations are put on trial and imprisoned for insufficient empathy -- stands with the black-screen end of "The Sopranos" as one of the least-loved conclusions in the history of television. I can´t recall if the jokes worked, but it was conceptually apt -- a final denial of uplift and warmth and all the approved TV values, a defense of the indefensibility of those characters.

Additionally, this Television Event is taking place not upon the wide, public expanses of NBC -- whose fictional counterpart is set to fictionally broadcast the fictional reunion within the actual reunion -- but under the somewhat protective cover of a premium cable channel, with its looser rules and smaller, paying audience. Sunday´s show, which put Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards into the same camera frame for the first time since 1998, attracted 2.3 million viewers, or about 1/30th the 76 million who watched the final "Seinfeld" in 1998.