Dispatch from The Department of Now We’ve Really Seen It All: SEINFELD compared to Jane Austen
The Guardian is happy to have SEINFELD syndicated on British television, and compares the show to Jane Austen.
Seinfeld has been called a show about nothing, but it is only a show about nothing, in the sense that Jane Austen wrote novels about nothing. Just as Austen fixed her gaze firmly on English country life in the early 19th century, and depicted the foibles of that tiny corner of society with irony, so Seinfeld remained rooted in the enclosed world of four rich single people living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The two shared a similar obsession with manners, and an ironic take on the gender divide.
Actually, it’s not a bad analogy when you think about it.
November 1st, 2004 at 4:32 pm
The analogy does break down though, when one recalls the Seinfeld creators’ promise that episodes end with “no hugging and no learning”. Luckily, our Jane had no such scruples.
November 2nd, 2004 at 6:14 pm
of course it is:!!!!!!!
Thro’ the rough ways of Life
Thro’ the rough ways of Life, with a patten your Guard,
May you safely and pleasantly jog;
May the ring never break, nor the Knot press too hard,
Nor the Foot find the Patten a Clog.
JA juvenilia…