Why Seinfeld is better than Friends starts with one rule Larry David never let anyone break
Seinfeld and Friends shared NBC's Thursday night for four seasons and wanted completely different things from their audience. The gap starts with a writers' room rule Larry David enforced for seven years, then came back to apply one last time.
Four words: no hugging, no learning. Friends built ten seasons on both, and most of what separates the two shows follows from that.
Seinfeld ran on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998, for 180 episodes. Friends premiered on September 22, 1994, and ran 236 episodes to May 6, 2004. For four seasons they sat on the same Thursday lineup, both about single New Yorkers with flexible schedules and a regular table somewhere. The case for Seinfeld rests on a design decision Larry David made before Friends existed, and kept enforcing for as long as he was in charge of the show.
The rule
David co-created the show with Jerry Seinfeld and ran the writers' room through the end of season seven. The instruction he gave the staff was short. Nobody hugs. Nobody learns. No episode closes on a lesson, a reconciliation or a character becoming a slightly better person, and nothing that happened last week changes how anyone behaves this week.
NPR critic Eric Deggans summed up the result: "Their characters were terrible people, and they didn't apologize for them."
The rule does two jobs at once. It deletes the standard sitcom closer, the scene where the music softens and someone finally says the thing they've been avoiding. It also makes every episode self-contained, because no one carries any growth forward to the next one.
Read more: Why did Chuck Lorre reunite with Charlie Sheen? “If he’s sober.”
What it looks like on screen
- "The Bubble Boy" (1992) — George ends up wrestling a sick teenager in a plastic bubble over a Trivial Pursuit card that misprints "Moors" as "Moops." Nobody apologizes.
- "The Invitations" (May 16, 1996) — George's fiancée Susan dies from licking the toxic glue on the discount wedding envelopes he insisted on. He takes the news with what a doctor later describes in court as restrained jubilation, and the four of them head out for coffee.
- "The Finale " (May 14, 1998) — David returned to write it two years after leaving. The four are arrested in Latham, Massachusetts, under a Good Samaritan law for cracking jokes through a carjacking instead of helping. The trial calls back a parade of people they wronged over nine seasons, and the verdict is a year in jail.
- The last scene — in the cell, Jerry and George replay the conversation about the second button on George's shirt that opened the 1989 pilot. Nine years later, same topic, same positions.
David's own defense of the Susan episode works for the whole series: "It would have been dishonest to make [George] upset, and that's why it's funny."
What Friends does instead
Friends runs on attachment. Its central question for a decade is whether Ross and Rachel end up together, and the answer comes in the finale when Rachel gets off a plane to Paris. Monica and Chandler marry and adopt twins. Phoebe marries Mike. The group hug is a recurring move, and a typical episode ends with somebody understanding somebody a little better than they did 22 minutes earlier.
That formula worked spectacularly well, and the finale drew about 52.5 million viewers. It also ties every episode to the state of the relationships, so the show is best watched in order and with the arcs fresh in mind. Seinfeld has no arcs worth tracking. Any episode plays the same in any order, in any decade, because the characters are identical at both ends of it.
The Seinfeld finale drew around 76 million viewers in 1998, a crowd that showed up to watch four people get punished for never changing and then watched them not change.
The market's verdict
In 2019 both shows went back on the auction block within months of each other. WarnerMedia reportedly paid $425 million to keep Friends for five years on HBO Max. Netflix reportedly paid more than $500 million for global Seinfeld rights starting in 2021, for a show that had been off the air more than two decades longer than its rival.
For the record: Friends ends its run with the six of them leaving the apartment for coffee and Chandler asking where. Seinfeld sent its four out for coffee eight years earlier, about a minute after George found out his fiancée was dead.
Earlier we wrote: Lauren Graham: Gilmore Girls’ title may have kept it from being a hit