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Related:

The Economics of Seinfeld - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673394 - Nov 2014 (23 comments)

The Economics of Seinfeld - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898243 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)

Love this. I never watched the show but majored in economics so this is fun.
The funniest Seinfeld episode had no actors, but lots of irony.

Jerry Seinfeld owns a an automobile collection of about 150 cars, including a large Porsche collection. He rented a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport in California, for an extended period during the 1990s for storage of some of the collection. In 2002, Seinfeld purchased property on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he built a $1.4 million two-story garage to store part of his Porsche collection on the East Coast. The centerpiece of his collection is a $700,000 Porsche 959, one of only 337 built.

In 2008, Seinfeld was involved in a car accident when the brakes on his 1967 Fiat 500 failed and, to avoid an intersection, he pulled the emergency brake while turning sharply, ultimately causing the car to flip onto its side. No one was hurt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_959 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Seinfeld#Automobiles

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I was hoping this article was going to be about TV show syndication. Jerry Seinfeld was worth nearly one billion dollars last time I checked, nearly all from royalties paid out for reruns of the show. How the hell did broadcast networks like NBC afford a payout like that?
> Jerry Seinfeld was worth nearly one billion dollars last time I checked

I always wondered who made out better from the show - larry david or seinfeld?

> nearly all from royalties paid out for reruns of the show. How the hell did broadcast networks like NBC afford a payout like that?

The royalties aren't just from NBC. It's from everywhere they syndicate the show - netflix, amazon, other tv channels, other countries, etc.

At those dollar amounts, they probably made out roughly the same. David would also be worth about a billion (similarly, mostly from Seinfeld), if he hadn't divorced.
Idk the payout by role, but besides only being an actor in a few episodes (stienbrener's voice, cape wearing attorney, & ?) Larry David left the show (as a writer) after season 7.

I'm sure he still got paid plenty as a co-creator for post-season-7, but I'd think not being a writer for the full run, or being primary cast, would put him earning less overall royalties than Seinfeld, assuming they got paid roughly the same as creators.

Seinfeld was among the last shows that paid no royalty to the actors going forward. Seinfeld gets royalties because he was a producer.
The cast receives standard SAG-AFTRA residuals and negotiated profit participation in the DVD sales.

But yes, those are likely order of magnitude less than Seinfeld/David get with their backend participation.

> Larry David left the show (as a writer) after season 7.

I’m rewatching with my wife, who never watched it before, and definitely the latest seasons feel worse. I didn’t remember it this way. Now I understand why.

Larry David contributed so much of his trademark awkwardness, but also was responsible for tying together multiple plot arcs at the end of episodes.

The episodes that all seemed to culminate perfectly on multiple levels as the credits rolled where largely his doing.

Similar to George learning to walk out on a high note, leading to outsized expectations. And that type of pressure is largely why David left the show.

ETA: If you've never watched curb your enthusiasm, watch a couple of episodes and you'll immediately recognize what was largely missing in the episodes once David left.

> Similar to George learning to walk out on a high note, leading to outsized expectations. And that type of pressure is largely why David left the show.

I’m not sure I follow? do you mean that he was worried about the show going downhill as it became more popular, so he preferred to leave when it was still doing great?

yes, I watched some curb your enthusiasm. it was harder to get used to because of the improv style, but I enjoyed it a lot. Hope my wife will like it as next step after we finish seinfeld.

He was so good at ending the episodes on a that multi-dimensional high note- it was a hard thing to keep doing. At least to his standards.

I think it was more of not wanting to disappoint himself/others in that role than any expectation that the show would go downhill or was on the verge of getting stale.

But that's just my layman's take.

There's plenty of early era blog posts written on the topic by people more informed than me, though. As well as dead-tree entertainment magazine articles.

I think to some degree Larry David is more selfish than you’re describing and I’d argue he cares more about himself being embarrassed rather than disappointing fans of the show
> but also was responsible for tying together multiple plot arcs at the end of episodes.

In writing terms this is called the "Harold format". David didn't invent it, but he might have been the first person to bring it to TV.

Didn't know it had a name, thanks.

I'm trying to think of what other shows regularly do that.

South Park is the only one that comes to mind.

Not just Larry leaving, but David Mandel writing and running more of it. By accounts a very nice man, easy to work with, financially predictable for the network, but hardly a brilliant or challenging comedy writer. He also took over more of Curb and Veep in their later seasons and the corresponding quality drop happened on both of those shows as well.
The interesting thing is that two of the most remembered jokes from the show, "Serenity Now!" and Festivus, were both in Season 9.
honestly fwiw I only vaguely remember festivus and don’t remember serenity now at all.

I don’t think seinfeld was great for jokes as such. if anything, I feel like later episodes were a bit trying too hard to create jokes and over-the-top silly situations (e.g the episode where Kramer sells the real Peterman bus tour and Elaine trying to dump the stumps of the cupcakes)

The Peterman bus tour was a meta joke because the real Kramer was running a Seinfeld bus tour in real life.
Muffins
Those are basically the 'Bazinga!' moments for the show. Maybe David would have been able to prevent that.
> How the hell did broadcast networks like NBC afford a payout like that?

They have paid it out as a percentage of revenue over many years. They raised the offer to $5 million an episode for the 10th season (that he refused), so they only had been paying like $2 million an episode ($46 million a year) when it was on.

> How the hell did broadcast networks like NBC afford a payout like that?

Obviously from receiving more than a billion dollars...