Hulu recently acquired the rights to Seinfeld and has put all nine seasons online, so over the last few days I’ve been going through and re-watching a few of my favorite episodes. The show’s brilliance holds up—every second of “The Contest” or “The Puffy Shirt,” for example, is perfect. But other episodes, while still very funny, are now so dated that their entire premise would be implausible today.
Consider the iconic “The Bubble Boy.” The action centers around a trip that Jerry, Elaine, George, and George’s girlfriend Susan plan to take in upstate New York, where Susan’s father has a cabin by a lake. On the day of the trip, Jerry is approached by a man at a diner who explains that his son, a huge fan of Jerry’s, has an illness that confines him to a hermetically sealed “bubble.” Would Jerry be so kind as to go upstate and pay the Bubble Boy a visit? Under pressure from Elaine, visibly moved by the man’s story, Jerry finally agrees. After Susan explains that the Bubble Boy’s hometown is on the way to her father’s cabin, Jerry and Elaine decide to follow George and Susan to the boy’s house.
Things go awry (for reasons I’ll explain in a bit), and George and Susan find themselves at the Bubble Boy’s house without Jerry. Unsure how to placate the unpleasant and foul-tempered boy, George agrees to play a Trivial Pursuit with him. Nearing victory, the Bubble Boy correctly answers “Moors” when asked a question about the Muslim group that conquered Spain. But George argues that the card in fact says “Moops”—due to a misprint—and that the Bubble Boy is wrong. This triggers a fight in which George and Susan accidentally pop the Bubble Boy’s bubble. When news of the Bubble Boy’s deflation spreads to the nearby diner where Jerry and Elaine happen to be eating, the two rush to the house where they encounter George and Susan. As the Bubble Boy is wheeled into an ambulance, Jerry, Elaine, George, and Susan drive to the cabin.
The episode is a true Seinfeld classic—cringeworthy, dark, and sharply written. But watching it last night, I was struck by how much of the plot would be totally implausible if set in the present day. Three scenarios in particular stood out:
- In the beginning of the episode, we’re introduced to Naomi, a girlfriend of Jerry’s who has an annoying, Elmer Fudd-like laugh. After they enter Jerry’s apartment, he absent-mindedly plays his answering machine and the two hear a message from George in which he mocks Naomi’s laugh. Deeply offended, she bolts from the house and refuses to go on the lake trip.
Today, there’s no chance a thirty-something standup comedian in Manhattan would have an answering machine. It’s even unlikely that he’d have a landline at all. Even if he had one, he’d use voice mail, thus removing the possibility that his date would overhear his messages. A 2015 version of “The Bubble Boy” could substitute a plot device in which Naomi reads a disparaging text message from George on Jerry’s phone. But this isn’t the same. Reading someone’s texts is a invasion of privacy, while overhearing answering machine messages is pure coincidence. Plus, it seems unlikely that George would bother insulting her laugh via text message, a medium that favors short, cursory bursts of information rather than free-flowing conversation. Had Naomi not heard the message, she’d have agreed to go with Jerry right away, and Elaine wouldn’t have gone on the trip at all.
- Later, Jerry and Elaine agree to follow George and Sun to the Bubble Boy’s house, where they plan to stop for 20 minutes, say hello, and then proceed to the cabin. But once they’re on the highway, George begins driving so fast that he soon loses Jerry, who realizes that he has no way to find the Bubble Boy’s house or the cabin. Annoyed and upset at George for ruining their weekend, Jerry and Elaine stop at a quaint diner for lunch.
In 2015, Jerry, Elaine, George, and Susan would have all input their destination’s addresses in their smart phone, removing any possibility that they would get lost. Jerry and Elaine may have still been annoyed at George’s irresponsible driving, but the consequences would have been minor: they would have simply arrived at the Bubble Boy’s house a little bit later than George and Susan. The idea that a broken caravan might upend an entire weekend is implausible today.
- Finally, there’s Kramer. At the beginning of the episode, Jerry’s manic neighbor declines the invitation to the cabin so he can play golf at a country club in Westchester County. But after his golf game is cancelled, Kramer returns to Jerry’s apartment where he finds directions to the cabin written on a piece of paper. Meanwhile, Kramer fields a phone call from Naomi, who has had a change of heart and wants to go to the cabin after all. The two set off, and along the way Kramer appears to enjoy Naomi’s hideous laugh. The two arrive and find that they’re alone at the cabin, but Kramer breaks in and the two prepare to go swim in the lake. However, Kramer absent-mindedly leaves a lit cigar on the mantlepiece, from where it falls and lands on a stack of newspapers and starts a fire. By the time Jerry, Elaine, George, and Susan arrive at the cabin, it has nearly burnt to the ground. The episode concludes with Kramer dashing inside to rescue his beloved Cubans.
In 2015, Kramer and Naomi would have likely texted the others to let them know that they were coming, and would have definitely gotten in touch when they arrived at the cabin. Even if they had arrived unannounced and broken in, it’s unlikely that even the unconventional Kramer would have lit a cigar inside the cabin without receiving permission from Susan. (Also, something that makes sense in neither 2015 nor 1992: Why didn’t Kramer take his cigar to the lake?)
The point of this exercise isn’t to judge Seinfeld for being dated. Of course it’s dated! The last episode aired 17 years ago. I imagine that in 2030 or so, someone will point out anachronisms in How I Met Your Mother or Modern Family. But it is striking how the ubiquity of cell phones has reduced a lot of the potential for miscommunication in our modern world. And miscommunication, of course, is an essential building block of comedy.
PS – I should mention that there’s a very clever Twitter account called “Modern Seinfeld” that explores this idea on a daily basis.…
