The End of the Beginning, or Farewell to Seinfeld

Each member of the audience, even family members, had to go through a metal detector to ensure that there were no secret recording devices hidden under shirts or in pockets. Each had to sign a confidentiality agreement; nothing of what was seen or heard would be told to anyone before the broadcast. They sat on bleachers before the stage.

This was the taping of the final episode of Seinfeld, the last before it went off the air forever (except, of course, in endless reruns). By this time the entire nation was addicted to the show, and its ending, at the height of its popularity, had been major news ever since the announcement. Coming out to warm up the audience, Jerry Seinfeld — the star, co-creator, and sometime writer of the show, who was most associated with its success — joked that the audience members, who had actually managed to acquire tickets, thought they were "hot shit." He compared it to having seats on the Grassy Knoll for the Kennedy assassination. It was a cocky, even arrogant thing to say, but Seinfeld could easily get away with it. The show had made him the most popular comic on the planet.

He asked whether he ought to say something to make everyone cry. Actually, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was already crying.

Seinfeld reiterated to the audience the need not to tell people about the show before it aired. Jon Lovitz, one of the celebrities in the audience, yelled out, "Do you have any hush money?"

The taping was long and arduous; it didn't end until 2 a.m. The ostensible director was Andy Ackerman, a veteran of the show. But there was another man moving about the set, helping actors with their line readings, deciding whether a take was good enough or had to be done over. Tall and lanky, balding and bespectacled, he gestured broadly with his hands stretched out, hummed under his breath, broke up laughing, or consulted the script in his hands. It was his script after all. He, Larry David, had been tapped to write the very last episode of the country's most popular sitcom. And he had been given twice the airtime, an hour.

The television audience was not familiar with Larry David. Most did not know his name. Few knew what he looked like. They did not realize that he was as responsible — perhaps even more responsible — for the success of Seinfeld as Jerry was. He had written its most famous episode, "The Contest," and many other great episodes, and he had presided over the first seven seasons of the show. He had come up with the idea that it would be about "nothing." That it would break the conventional sitcom rules. That there would be "no learning, no hugging." The character of George was based on him. Kramer was based on a man who had lived next door to him. Jerry's parents were modelled on Larry David's parents. Many of the story lines came from Larry's own life. The show had made him very, very rich, but not famous the way that Jerry and the other actors on the show were.

If Larry David was frustrated by the lack of recognition, he kept it to himself. But the press had written extensively about his writing the script as part of the lead-up to the airdate. The pressure had been on him to end the show on an appropriately high note.

Jerry had been running the show without his co-creator since Larry had quit in 1996 after seven seasons. But before the ninth began to film, he met with Larry to tell him he thought this would be the show's last. The characters, he thought, were getting too old to keep acting so immaturely. As Larry later put it, "All the dating would have been unseemly." Jerry asked Larry to come back and write the last episode. Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, which owned NBC, personally offered Jerry $100 million to keep the show on the air for another season. But Jerry, already rich beyond his wildest dreams, said no.

Even though Larry had wanted the show to end when he himself quit, the thought of it actually finishing made him feel quite depressed. He had been thinking about the last episode ever since he himself contemplated leaving. His first idea was a show without any story lines at all but just conversation about the usual little things that obsessed the characters. But after a few pages of writing, he found it boring and gave up. He also considered bringing Jerry and Elaine together romantically, but Jerry, on one of his off-season tours, had asked audiences about the possibility and the responses had been mostly negative. Julia had long harbored the idea that they drive off a cliff. Larry David's mother, who didn't like the episode in which Susan dies, begged her son not to kill off the characters.

Strangers offered Larry suggestions in the street. So did friends and people on TV talk shows. Larry himself told one of the reporters who began to call regularly, "I haven't really thought about it too much. It's a difficult show to write a final episode for. The nature of final episodes is 'big ideas.' People get married, they go to Europe. It's a big thing. So I don't know what I'm going to do yet." He also said, "I would say that, knowing George, you know more about me than you do if you speak to me. Because I feel like I'm the phony. I'm the fake. People who are talking to me, they're not getting sincerity, for the mos part.... I think George is much more real than I am." It was the sort of ruminating that would eventually lead to Larry playing Larry on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

More articles appeared, raising the stakes. The New York Times Magazine asked, "Can the last episode ever do justice to the dozens that preceded it?" Larry took his time writing it. Or even starting. But one morning he woke at 3 a.m., heart pounding. He realized he had to get on with it. He gave it a code name title, "A Hard Nut to Crack," and began.

The script that Larry finally sat down and wrote was possibly the least sentimental of any Seinfeld show. It begins with a new head of NBC giving a green light to the television show that George and Jerry had come up with years before. NBC loans its private jet to them, and they take Elaine and Kramer to Paris. Except that the plane has engine trouble and needs to land almost immediately. While walking in town, the foursome witnesses a very fat man being mugged. Instead of helping, they comment and laugh, and Kramer even videotapes the crime. The four are charged by a cop for breaking the new "good Samaritan law" and are put in jail.

There are several moments in the last show that anticipate Curb Your Enthusiasm. The meeting with the NBC executives is a precursor to several network pitch meetings from the second season of Curb. The expression "walk and talk" will be rewritten as the more memorable "stop and chat." The intention of Jerry and George to move to California to do the show anticipates the L.A. setting of Curb. There are several jokes about Ted Danson, a friend of Larry's who will become a recurring character on the latter show. Even the plane getting into trouble is an earlier version of the plane ride that Cheryl takes in season six of Curb, which results in her decision to leave Larry.

But all that was in the future and totally unknown and undreamed of. A trial follows in which Larry brings many old characters to the witness stand — the Low-Talker, the Soup Nazi, Babu Bhatt — reminding...