‘Seinfeld’ fans can again watch — or fall asleep to — the show once again when the comedy begins streaming on Netflix next month.
The streaming giant announced Wednesday that the Emmy-winning sitcom about nothing will begin streaming on the platform globally on October 1, bringing back all of Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine’s shallow, fairly obvious observations with it.
The announcement arrived with a tongue-in-cheek trailer and statement, underselling the show’s enormous success by claiming that Netflix had landed all 180 episodes of a situational comedy “called, simply, ‘Seinfeld,’” that was “created by rising New York comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who wrote for ‘Saturday Night Live’ for a single season.”
“This is the first time we’ve taken a risk of this nature, going all in on 9 seasons at the jump,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in the facetious statement. “But Jerry has created something special with this sitcom that nobody has ever done. I truly think he and Mr. David have enormous futures ahead of them and I’m thrilled Netflix could be the home for them to grow their fanbases.”
“Larry and I are enormously grateful to Netflix for taking this chance on us. It takes a lot of guts to trust two schmucks who literally had zero experience in television when we made this thing,” Seinfeld said in the statement. “We really got carried away, I guess. I didn’t realise we made so many of them. Hope to recoup god knows how many millions it must have taken to do. But worth all the work if people like it. Crazy project.”
The NBC show completed production in May — of 1998 — and, as they put it, explores “the minutiae of the comic’s everyday life as he navigates his relationships with a talented ensemble cast, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus (‘Troll,’ ‘Family Ties’), Michael Richards (‘UHF,’ ‘Fridays’) and Jason Alexander (‘Pretty Woman’).”
After losing NBC’s ‘Friends’ in 2019, Netflix fired back amid the battle for popular network sitcoms by landing the global streaming rights to ‘Seinfeld’ as part of a five-year deal with Sony Pictures Television, which controls distribution of the iconic show. The deal reportedly set Netflix back $500 million (Dh1.8 billion).
‘Seinfeld’ is still a common fixture in syndication on network and cable TV.
