Friends, it is finally happening. Seinfeld is coming to Netflix on October 1, 2021 — two years after the streamer paid USD $500 million for the rights to the iconic sitcom.
Netflix will now be Seinfeld’s streaming home for the next five years, but the show will not be exclusive to the platform.
Frequently regarded as one of the greatest TV comedies of all time, Seinfeld was created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and ran for nine seasons from 1989 to 1998. Over the course of its run, Seinfeld won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993, the Golden Globe Award for Best TV-Series (Comedy) in 1994 and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 1995, 1997 and 1998. The series won 10 Primetime Emmy Awards overall, out of 68 nominations.
The show’s cult status couldn’t even be diluted by the extremely divisive series finale, which is truly saying something as people realllllly did not like that last episode!
The premise of the show was often described as being “about nothing”. Jason Alexader, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Michael Richards rounded out the cast of vaguely terrible (but completely hilarious) characters who populated Seinfeld’s life as they went about their business in New York.
Of the sitcom’s 180 episodes, the most popular include ‘The Chinese Restaurant’, ‘The Soup Nazi’, ‘The Parking Garage’ and ‘The Contest’.
To celebrate the series finally coming to Netflix, the streamer released a parody trailer touting Seinfeld as “2021’s hottest new show — well, not actually new but never seen before… on Netflix” and referring to David and Seinfeld as “rising stars.”
Jerry Seinfeld’s partnership with Netflix will also continue with his original movie Unfrosted, which explores how the Pop-Tart — an invention he says “blew the back of his head right off” — came to be. The comedian is co-writing the script with Spike Feresten and Barry Marder with production expected to begin in the first half of 2022. The comedian will also direct and act in the film.
Earlier in 2021, Rolling Stone placed Seinfeld at number three on its list of the 100 Best Sitcoms of All Time, coming behind Cheers and The Simpsons, with critic Alan Sepinwall writing, “Yes, co-creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David obsessed over ephemera, but they did it with the kind of comic precision the medium had never seen before.
“In particular, David’s masterstroke was figuring out how to make each episode’s plots collide with one another at the end… now among the show’s most-copied (if rarely as well) elements. Seinfeld is the gift that keeps on re-gifting.”
It truly is, and we cannot wait to unwrap all of that sardonic goodness once more.
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