Way back in 1997, Jerry Seinfeld and the rest of the “Seinfeld” gang decided to pull the plug on their hit NBC show while it was still a ratings darling.
Jason Alexander, famous for playing George Costanza on the sitcom, recently offered a little insight as to why they “called it quits” and took themselves off the air after nine great seasons.
“We all thought that the show could continue to be funny,” Alexander said during an appearance on the podcast “At Home With The Creative Coalition” with CEO Robin Bronk on Tuesday.
“The writers were always really good and they would find these amazing guest people to come in all the time. So there was a constant flow of a new sense of humor,” he explained. “And we thought funny is not the obstacle here.”
“The obstacle was that — after nine seasons ― the audience could more or less anticipate how any of these characters would react in any given situation,” Alexander said. “There was nothing new we could do to these characters and still have it be ‘Seinfeld.’”
The actor said everyone agreed that the show “had career-wise done everything it was going to do for us and it had taken care of us financially extremely well.”
“The mutual thought was, ‘Why don’t we tuck it in before the audience says this kid’s been up too long,’” he added.
And so they did.
At the time, Seinfeld attributed his decision to walk away from the show as a matter of “timing.”
“We’ve all seen a million athletes where you say, ‘I wish they didn’t do those last two years,’” Seinfeld told The New York Times in 1997, after reportedly turning down $5 million an episode to continue doing the show. “For me, this is all about timing. My life is all about timing. As a comedian, my sense of timing is everything.”
“I wanted to end the show on the same kind of peak we’ve been doing it on for years,” he added. “I wanted the end to be from a point of strength. I wanted the end to be graceful.”
Seinfeld called the sitcom “the greatest love affair of my life” and said it was “extremely difficult” to end it.
“But we were all together on it,” he continued. “We all felt we wanted to leave in love.”