“I’m a pimp. I’m a pimp.”
Although these words were coming from an unlikely source, they were unmistakably uttered by Jerry Seinfeld, his excitable voice rising and falling like a car alarm.
Working in an editing suite at the Brill Building this month, Seinfeld was fine-tuning a new episode of his online series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, recording audio for a segment in which he and Steve Harvey cruise around Chicago in a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible.
Like his live act and his consecrated NBC sitcom Seinfeld, the making of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (which begins its new season on Wednesday on Sony’s digital Crackle channel) appeals to Seinfeld’s obsession with minutiae and his tendency to see problems as jigsaw puzzles. By putting pieces in their right places, he said of his internet show, “You can make it something that it really wasn’t — but almost was.”
Comedians in Cars, which in zippy instalments tracks Seinfeld’s free-form conversations with peers and pals like Jon Stewart, Tina Fey and Sarah Jessica Parker, has also helped its creator fit into a post-internet world and a popular culture that could have moved on without him.
Seinfeld, 61, is at a point when he could coast on the unexpected online value of his past achievements. Next month, Hulu is adding all nine seasons of Seinfeld to its library as that streaming service shores itself against competitors like Netflix and Amazon. The deal, which reportedly cost $130 million to $180 million (Dh477 million to Dh661 million), will further enrich Seinfeld, a series co-creator who receives part of its profits.
Instead, he has taken what could have been a glorified side project and fully committed himself to it, turning Comedians in Cars into a stealth powerhouse. Its episodes have been streamed nearly 100 million times since its 2012 debut, and it is now a central part of Sony’s ambitions to make Crackle a more formidable combatant in the arena of online content.
While it is to be expected that a younger class of comedians who came of age with the internet — like Aziz Ansari, Amy Schumer or Chris Hardwick — would naturally adapt to it, Seinfeld could not say precisely why he was thriving with digital content when his own peers — say, David Letterman, or acolytes like Chris Rock — were largely absent from it.
Speaking generally about comedians, Seinfeld said that no two paths unfold similarly and that there was little that well-established stars could teach one another.
“The first 10 years of a lot of careers, you could say, ‘This is pretty similar,’” he said. At this point, “I can’t look at Jay Leno’s career, or Louis C.K.’s career or Chris Rock’s career and learn anything. I can’t model anything on what they do. Precedents are not helpful.”
Even as he applies his stand-up comic’s approach to his online work, Seinfeld makes no assumptions that his stage and TV career should guarantee him success in this new realm.
“The internet is the least forgiving medium of anything,” he said. “Even at a nightclub, an audience can’t all get up and leave. On the internet, they can.”
And if detractors want to dismiss his latest passion as a vanity project, Seinfeld says he happily embraces that label.
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. If there’s no vanity, that’s the end of show business.”
The following afternoon, Seinfeld was eating lunch at a West Side restaurant, dressed casually in a T-shirt, his hair cropped short and his money clip nearby him on the table. (A $1 bill, visible on the outside, concealed an unknown wad of cash within.)
He has a relaxed manner but is unafraid to speak his mind, and his sense of humour is more cutting than his vintage-‘90s TV persona. Freely admitting that he does not prepare for the celebrity interviews on Comedians in Cars, he said with a laugh: “There’s nothing I really want to know.”
The show has been criticised for a lack of nonwhite, non-male guests and for a perceived inability to relate to viewers who are not as prosperous as its creator.
But a promotional video Seinfeld helped oversee at the editing session encapsulated its quirky, unrushed spirit.
In quick cuts, set to jaunty jazz music, it showed him at a variety of diners and coffee shops, peppering guests like Stephen Colbert, Jim Carrey and his former Seinfeld co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus with absurdly precise questions and observations. (“What kind of underwear do you wear?” “Have you noticed that orange juice now comes in a variety of pulps?”)
Steve Mosko, president of Sony Pictures Television, said the show is “authentic to Jerry, and viewers feel it whether they know it or not. His fingerprints are on every single piece of this.”
Seinfeld is neither a technophobe nor a hard-core geek. He tweets occasionally but doesn’t listen to podcasts. He admired another restaurant patron’s Apple Watch but said he preferred to wear a more traditional timepiece. (“I need the gears,” he explained.)
A few years ago, when he began pitching Comedians in Cars to media sites like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, he said he was repeatedly told that no one would watch videos more than a couple of minutes long. Envisioning episodes that were 10 to 15 minutes or more, Seinfeld balked.
“The less you know about a field,” he said, “the better your odds. Dumb boldness is the best way to approach a new challenge.”
He found a receptive home at Sony, which handles the distribution of Seinfeld and was happy to give Seinfeld the autonomy he sought.
But why Seinfeld wants to have a Web presence at all is a trickier question.
Although it predates the modern-day internet, the aesthetic of Seinfeld, which celebrated over-the-top specificity and punch lines that could be boiled down to just a word or two (“shrinkage”; “serenity now”) was tailor-made for an online environment that thrives on insular, easily digestible memes.
“It’s locating those tiny little things that render Seinfeld immortal, where generic sitcoms don’t have that lasting power,” said Jason Richards, the author of @seinfeld2000, a Twitter account that uses the catchphrases and characters of that show to comment on current events. “It’s almost like it unknowingly anticipated internet culture.”
(Seinfeld dismissed this idea as “far-fetched,” adding: “You’re really off the farm now.”)
Friends of Seinfeld’s say there is some irreducible part of him that craves reinvention and untried experiences.
Actor James Spader, who met Seinfeld in the 1990s, said, “Since I have known him, he has, quite by design, complicated his life to an unbearable level, again and again and again, until it knocks him to his knees.”
He added, “He can’t resist his curiosity and enthusiasm for something new.”
Although Seinfeld has lately popped up in the Chris Rock movie Top Five, the Louis C.K. series Louie and the grand finale of David Letterman’s Late Show — all in appearances that poked fun at his confident and entitled persona — he understands that retaining one’s cultural relevance is a continuing pursuit.
In his line of work, Seinfeld said, “Audience acceptance is the currency.” And, as he acknowledges, “It had been a while since I connected with an audience.”
Since the heyday of Seinfeld, he has starred in an HBO comedy special and a documentary, Comedian. His 2007 animated feature, Bee Movie, performed adequately, taking in $287 million worldwide, but left no lasting impact.
And his NBC reality series The Marriage Ref, which he produced and occasionally appeared on in 2010 and 2011, was an outright dud.
“I took the burned wreckage of that show,” he said, “and rebuilt it as this show.”
“Comedians are the best people to talk to,” he explained. “But if there’s an audience there, they’re going to play to the audience. So let me get them away from a studio and maybe I can show how interesting they are.”
When he shook hands with Sony on Comedians in Cars, Seinfeld could not be sure if the studio was interested in his idea or just in keeping him on its roster.
“Who cares?” Seinfeld said. “If it was just me, I earned that, too.”
But when he put out his first episodes, Seinfeld (who takes what he says is an unsentimental, mathematical, “3-D modelling” approach to looking at showbiz careers) said his past success could leave an audience feeling tired of him.
“When you’re a known, accepted quantity,” he said, “there’s a sense of, ‘What do you want now?’ with your next thing. ‘How much money do you want now? How much time do you want now?’
“So,” he added, “I thought, ‘what if I just give you something in your pocket, for free?’” (A sponsorship from Acura currently solves this problem.)
Crackle, which also offers downloads of movies and television episodes, sees the series as a cornerstone on which it can build its brand identity and compete with other online and cable networks. It has begun committing to new feature-length and episodic projects with established stars like Dennis Quaid, Bryan Cranston and David Spade.
“This show isn’t successful because it’s just anything that Jerry is putting out,” Eric Berger, the general manager of Crackle, said of Comedians in Cars. “He really has applied all of his years in the business to create this piece of content that could only come from someone like him.”
For Seinfeld, one reward is being deluged by the ridiculously detailed data that only the internet can provide about his online show. He said it was increasingly being watched on traditional television sets, using devices like Roku or Apple TV, and especially popular with viewers age 25 to 34, some of whom were not yet born when Seinfeld made its debut.
He was pleasantly baffled that Hulu still had an interest in his old NBC show, calling the deal “insane.”
“Should I mention the other shows that were on at that time?” Seinfeld asked wryly. “Unsolved Mysteries? Alf? Where are they? Why is there no Hulu deal for them?”
Finding himself with new momentum and the flexibility to make new episodes of Comedians in Cars when he wants, Seinfeld knew exactly how he planned to use this freedom.
“It might be fun to see what it’s like to run something into the ground,” he said. “I missed out on that. I’m curious about it. I want to know what it’s like for everyone else.”
