I have overdosed on television, I am unresponsive and cyanotic, revive me in your shower of gelid light and walk me through your piazza which is made of elegant slabs of time.
—Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Seinfeld is ashamed of being television. It resides in that New Yorker mindset that David Foster Wallace describes in “E Unibus Pluram”—“weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force.” This contemptible fascination emerges in a multitude of forms through the series whether it is a secret love of Melrose Place—that Jerry goes so far as to deny on a polygraph machine to maintain what he considers to be his dignity that would be compromised by openly enjoying the show—or openly mocking the process of creating a television show:
Jerry: “So you're saying, I go in to NBC, and tell them I got this idea for a show about nothing.”
George: “We go into NBC.”
Jerry: “We? Since when are you a writer?”
George: “Writer. We're talking about a sitcom.”
* * *
Jerry’s mom: “Since when is George a writer.”
Jerry: “What writer? It’s a sitcom!”
Wallace warns of the monster of television’s appropriation of meta-fiction’s sophisticated ironies, the challenging literary approaches of John Barth, Donald Barthelme and other avant-garde authors of the ‘60s have been co-opted by mainstream consumer culture: “the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative.” It is not just that television has co-opted what was once radical, he argues: what was radical is indebted to television—
For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching. And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television ... especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious Metafictional zenith was less a "response to" televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down.
What Wallace describes at the moment Seinfeld was in its initial production the necessity for Seinfeld, though Infinite Jest was that which Wallace ultimately decided to provide us. It is not Mark Leyner and his superficial television-mirroring prose that shall undermine television’s hold on American culture and aesthetics and free us to once again be free-thinking individuals: it is a television that ironizes irony, jokes about joking, makes fun of making fun of television, is ashamed to describe the shame of watching and creating television programming, a show that presents on one level the most popular comedy to ever appear on television, yet, on another level, challenges us with the most explicit—though often infinitely subtle—critique of network television’s mediocrity, proclaiming that because it is on network television it is mediocre though because it is able to say this on network television it is genius, and because American literature has collapsed under its own pretensions and snobbishness about television that television has replaced it, and that that is incredibly hilarious.
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