NBC's Audience Research Said Seinfeld Was a Show With No Future

Jerry Seinfeld, a stand-up comedian best known from Late Night with David Letterman appearances, sat down with the writer Larry David in 1988 to develop a pilot for NBC. They wrote it in Seinfeld's apartment over a few weeks, structured around a comic and his friends sitting in a coffee shop talking about nothing in particular. The Seinfeld Chronicles shot in early 1989 and aired on July 5 of that year as a one-off in NBC's summer schedule.

NBC's audience research department, run by Brandon Tartikoff's deputy Warren Littlefield, sent the program to a test audience in Burbank. The internal memo that came back graded the pilot 'weak.' Viewers in the focus groups found Jerry's friend George 'wimpy.' They said Kramer 'lacked depth.' One sentence in the report became famous later when it surfaced: 'No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.' The recommendation was to pass.

The pilot was not formally killed only because Rick Ludwin, NBC's late-night executive, used four episodes of slack budget from late-night programming to get a tiny initial order — 'four scripts, not even four episodes,' Ludwin recalled. That bought the show enough time to find Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who replaced an earlier waitress character; to drop 'Chronicles' from the title; and to find the rhythm of the now-canonical four-handed scenes.

Seinfeld ran nine seasons and 180 episodes, finishing in May 1998 as the most-watched scripted program on American television. Larry David later turned the test report into a recurring punchline; the two of them wrote the Larry David character in Curb Your Enthusiasm to argue with NBC executives in retrospect. The 'weak' memo is now a teaching artifact in television research seminars.