Before the “Seinfeld” finale aired, the world was excited to see what the ultimate fate of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer would be. After it aired, the excitement waned a bit. To say that feelings on it are mixed would be an understatement, but many of the 76 million people who watched the finale thought that it was one of the worst TV series finales of all time — a sentiment shared by one of the show’s stars, Jason Alexander (George Costanza).
In an interview with the Television Academy, Alexander said the finale didn’t exactly match expectations. “It was certainly a letdown,” he said. “But do we care? No.” That’s because Alexander said there was no way the episode could have lived up to the hype. “When you say it’s going to be the last one, everyone has an image of what that could be,” Alexander said. “I don’t know how anybody could have captured all of that.” Co-star Jerry Seinfeld was also bothered by the “Seinfeld” finale.
Alexander, however, shared an idea he thinks would have gone over much better. “The smartest thing we could have done was to not do a finale,” he said in the same interview. “We should have just done an episode and got off the air.” Instead, he said the show’s final performance was doomed from the start. “We were setting ourselves up for failure no matter what,” Alexander said in the interview. “The energy on it was too high. What could we have done that would have been our show?”
The series finale couldn’t damage Seinfeld’s lasting legacy
The “Seinfeld” finale missed the mark for cast members and fans. Even Bill Murray said the “Seinfeld” finale was “terrible.” Still, Jason Alexander has come to appreciate what the episode was. In a 2019 post on X (formerly Twitter), Alexander said it wasn’t as bad as some made it out to be (via Buzzfeed). “To be clear, I adored the Seinfeld finale,” Alexander posted. “I just keep getting crap about it from fans. I loved that Jerry/Larry found an organic way to bring back all the amazing guests that enriched our show. It was an amazing week together filming it.”
In Alexander’s eyes, there was nothing the finale could have done to tarnish the legacy “Seinfeld” left behind. In the interview with the Television Academy, he said that calling “Seinfeld” a show about nothing doesn’t tell the whole story of the show’s genius. “The impression was if there was a funny run of dialogue that had nothing to do with the story, but it was funny, we’re doing it,” Alexander said. “The willingness to go so far off story to be funny means that the story was less valuable than the funny … hence you got the show about nothing.”
