8 Things About Seinfeld Season 1 Everyone Forgets

Kramer Starts Out With A Different Name

Larry David famously based the character of Jerry’s eccentric neighbor Cosmo Kramer on his own eccentric neighbor, Kenny Kramer. But before he decided to just use Kramer’s real name for the character, David named the character “Kessler.” In the pilot episode, Michael Richards appears as the character we now know as Kramer, but he’s called Kessler.

The show didn’t acknowledge this inconsistency until the final season. In Seinfeld’s revolutionary reverse-chronological episode “The Betrayal,” the final flashback took us back to Jerry and Kramer’s first meeting. Jerry mistakenly thinks Kramer is called Kessler, because of a mixup in the building.

Jerry & Elaine's Breakup Is Still Fresh In Season 1

Jerry and Elaine’s unique relationship in Seinfeld subverted the usual male-female dynamic of American sitcoms. In shows like Cheers and Friends, the male and female leads were friends who might become lovers. But in Seinfeld, they were lovers who decided to just be friends. Jerry and Elaine’s romantic past paved the way for some hilarious storylines, like their friends-with-benefits “deal” and the revelation that Elaine faked all her orgasms when they were together.

But, in keeping with Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning” policy, Jerry and Elaine rarely spoke about their feelings for each other. The show never wanted viewers to think there was a chance they would get back together, or get emotionally involved in their relationship, and the series finale even subverted that expectation with a wink to the audience.

So, when you go back and watch season 1, it’s weird to see just how much the breakup is weighing on their fledgling friendship. When the series begins, Jerry and Elaine have only recently broken up, so the wounds are still fresh. Jerry is reluctant to ask Elaine for another woman’s number, or even discuss his dates with her. Jerry and Elaine would later talk openly about each other’s relationships, introduce each other to their partners, and even set each other up on dates (with varying degrees of success, ranging from “man hands” to “he took it out”).

Claire The Waitress Disappears After 1 Episode

Seinfeld’s pilot episode introduces a major character to the main cast who is mysteriously never heard from again. The pilot starts off with a familiar sight — Jerry and George sitting opposite each other in a New York coffee shop, discussing the mundane minutiae of everyday life — but then, they’re joined by an unfamiliar face: Claire the waitress, played by Lee Garlington.

The episode insinuates that Claire is good friends with Jerry and George, but we never see her again. They never even mention her again. It’s not uncommon for cast members to be fired or replaced after shooting a pilot episode, but the series makes no attempt to explain away her sudden disappearance.

There Were A LOT Of Standup Segments In Season 1

While Seinfeld has proven to be one of the most timeless sitcoms of the ‘90s, and almost all of its storylines are just as funny today as they were when the episodes first aired, one part of the show that’s aged pretty badly is the opening and closing standup segments. They’re classic nightclub comedy routines, and since Jerry Seinfeld had to generate so many minutes’ worth of jokes every season, very little of it is A-material.

Seinfeld and David originally pitched Seinfeld as a show about how a comedian gets his material. The events of an episode’s plot would inform Jerry’s standup act when he went up on stage that weekend. In season 1, they really leaned into this conceit, and they wedged in a standup set in between every other scene. But as the show found its feet, the stories stood on their own and the standup sequences were confined to the cold open and the tag.

The show eventually phased out the standup completely. By the time Seinfeld took over as head writer, the standup segments went the way of the dodo, because he didn’t have time to run the show on his own and write a few minutes of material for the beginning and end of every single episode (although the cold opens in those later seasons were often just standup bits in dialogue form).

Jerry Had The Same Girlfriend For Multiple Episodes

There have been plenty of social media posts calculating just how many people Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer dated over the course of Seinfeld’s nine seasons. Whereas shows like Friends and Cheers would introduce long-running love interests for multi-episode (sometimes multi-season) arcs, Seinfeld almost never brought back a love interest for a second episode, because it usually only took one episode for these characters to ruin a relationship.

But in season 1, Jerry had the same girlfriend for multiple episodes. He started going out with a woman named Vanessa in “The Stake Out,” and he was still dating her a few episodes later in “The Stock Tip.” According to the “Inside Look” on the DVD bonus features, Larry David decided to bring back Vanessa because “The Stock Tip” called for a girlfriend character, and they’d given Jerry a girlfriend a few episodes earlier and never mentioned a breakup, so it made sense that they would still be together.

It happened a couple of times later in the series, where a love interest would appear in two or three episodes (or, in the case of Susan Ross, stick around for a season-long engagement with a morbid twist ending). But most of the time, the characters get brand-new partners at the start of every episode. That season 1 logic of continuing a relationship that hadn’t explicitly ended on-screen wasn’t carried through to the subsequent seasons.

George Was A Real Estate Agent

Throughout Seinfeld’s lengthy nine-season run, George Costanza switched between a wide variety of careers. He was like Homer Simpson, bouncing from job to job, leaving chaos and calamity in his wake. He briefly worked at Pendant Publishing before he was caught having sex with the custodian on his desk. He briefly worked as a hand model before destroying his God-given gift in an ironing accident. He eventually settled into a lucrative career as the Traveling Secretary for the New York Yankees, reporting directly to Mr. Steinbrenner.

But, way back in season 1, George had a very different vocation. When we met George in Seinfeld season 1, he was a real estate agent. The guy who would, just a couple of seasons later, move back in with his parents, used to find people their dream homes for a living. Back then, Jason Alexander still hadn’t quite found the character, so he didn’t really feel like George, no matter what his job was. In season 1, Alexander played George as Woody Allen, and the character wouldn’t become an icon until he started playing him as Larry David.

Elaine Isn't An Original Cast Member

It’s impossible to imagine Seinfeld without the unmistakable comedic energy that Julia Louis-Dreyfus brought to the show as Elaine Benes. Elaine was a trailblazer for women in comedy, paving the way for Fleabag, Liz Lemon, Abbi, Ilana, and “Sweet Dee” Reynolds. She proved that women didn’t have to be the voice of reason in a comic ensemble; they could be “one of the guys.”

But Elaine wasn’t an original cast member. When you go back and watch the pilot episode, she’s nowhere to be seen. She was added in the second episode to appease network executives who wanted more female representation on the show, and it’s a rare example of a network note making a series a million times better.

There Are Only 5 Episodes In Seinfeld Season 1

The most surprising thing about Seinfeld’s first season is just how short it is. After the pilot episode got back some of the worst test scores of all time, the network ordered just four additional episodes, bringing the total episode count for season 1 to a whopping five.

It’s one of the smallest orders in television history, and a sign that NBC didn’t have much faith in the series. Just a couple of years later, NBC would be ordering as many Seinfeld episodes as they could get their hands on.