Now what’s… the big deal… about Seinfeld? Two decades later, the hit sitcom is still being referenced, watched, and loved by audiences around the world. Author and TV critic Jennifer Keishin Armstrong explores the great question of the show about nothing in her new book Seinfeldia. The secret, Armstrong says, is in the show’s almost never-ending density, and its simplistic way of subverting everything we thought we knew about sitcoms.
The show’s willingness to play with the traditions of the sitcom, to comment on earlier episodes and even contain a self referential arc about its own creation, speaks to the kind of complex, meta-intertextuality that modern audiences feast on.
