What was the best Seinfeld episode? The usual answer is one NBC was afraid to put on air
Every "best Seinfeld episode" poll runs into the same problem: one episode keeps showing up at number one, and it's the one Larry David assumed the network would kill on sight. He was wrong about that, which is its own kind of story.
"The Contest" — season 4, episode 11, first aired November 18, 1992. Written by Larry David, who won the 1993 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series for it. TV Guide ranked it number one on its 1997 list of the 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. The premise: the four leads bet on who can go longest without masturbating.
Larry David hid it from NBC on purpose
David kept a blackboard of upcoming episode ideas, which network executives would scan after table reads. "The Contest" never went on the board. He told Vulture, for its 2017 oral history of the episode, that he'd decided in advance what he'd do if NBC balked:
"I'm quitting. I'm quitting. I'm gonna quit," David recalled thinking, per Vulture's 2017 oral history.
The executives showed up to the read-through with no idea what was coming. The laughs were enormous. Their entire note, per David, was that it was very funny. NBC president Warren Littlefield then cleared it with standards and practices on a technicality Jerry Seinfeld had engineered: the word "masturbation" is never spoken in the episode.
The workarounds became the famous part
Forced into euphemism, the script produced the lines people still quote:
- Master of my domain — Jerry's formulation, and the one that stuck.
- Queen of the castle — Elaine's.
- Lord of the manor — George's.
It happened to Larry David first
The bet was real. David told Vulture it involved his friend Frank Piazza and probably a small amount of money. It lasted two days, maybe three. He won handily, he says.
What else gets nominated?
Plenty. "The Marine Biologist," "The Soup Nazi," "The Chinese Restaurant," "The Parking Garage," and "The Opposite" all turn up near the top of critic and fan rankings. None of them dislodge "The Contest" from the number one slot with any regularity.