Visiting Jerry Seinfeld's home in the Hollywood Hills, one finds that the benefits of being a top television performer are readily apparent: even the three Porsches in his smartly-tiled garage - two vintage, one a 1997 Turbo - have a view of all Los Angeles. This is thanks to a picture window cut into the garage wall.
Yes, it's nice to be a TV star (Seinfeld owns an additional 60 or so cars, not all of them Porsches, which he warehouses in an airport hangar in Santa Monica). And now that even Mikhail Gorbachev has begun doing commercials for Pizza Hut, it seems pointless to argue with the medium that so dominates our lives and culture. Most of us threw in the towel long ago. But not Jerry Seinfeld. The star, one of the executive producers of the comedy that bears his name, is unafraid to bite the hand that feeds him.
"It's an habitual medium," he says matter-of-factly. "Most people aren't really entertained. What they need is they need to watch TV. Entertainment is almost a luxury item. Television is like a flyer somebody sticks on your windshield. Who gives a damn what's on it? It's iridescent wallpaper. Sometimes I think people just like the light on their faces."
Seinfeld is irritated with critics who have complained that the show is "off" this season; the fact that critics care enough to carp about a mere TV programme, he feels, is both ridiculous and a tribute to the level of quality Seinfeld, the show, had maintained over its nine seasons.
Consequently, Seinfeld, the person, has been even more perplexed and flattered by the outpouring of grief that came with the Christmas announcement that his show would be pulling its plug even though it is the US's top-rated sitcom, even though it is as lucrative as ever, even though the audience has not yet tired of the self-absorbed lives of Jerry, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George (Jason Alexander) and Kramer (Michael Richards). This is not the way successful TV shows are supposed to end.
Everyone knows they usually wind up sliding into irrelevancy and dwindling ratings amid desperate plot contrivances, like marriages and multiple births and, in some sad cases, an irritating self-importance that increases in opposite proportion to the show's declining popularity (bye, Roseanne). But here was someone who could have been paid regally for just phoning it in for another year or two.
Aided by the dearth of much real news over the festive holidays, America's papers and airwaves filled themselves with pleas from mourning fans for Seinfeld to reconsider and speculation from any media buyers still in their offices about how NBC would survive the loss of the most profitable show on television. "Say It Ain't So!" read the cover of People magazine, which added, with only half-mock portentousness: "A stunned nation prepares for life without Seinfeld".
NBC knew it would eventually lose the show but executives had hoped to persuade Seinfeld to stick it out for one more year. Though the comedian had already told his co-stars of his intentions, Seinfeld and his managers, Howard West and George Shapiro, gathered in New York the Sunday before Christmas for a final hearing with Robert Wright, president and chief executive of NBC, and Jack Welch, boss of General Electric, NBC's parent company.
The discussion lasted two hours at Wright's Central Park West apartment. "What made me want to come back," Seinfeld says, "was how much they believed in me. That was the sum and substance of our meetings. Because they know that's all I care about, the quality of the show." In an effort to prove Seinfeld still had creative life in it, Wright and Welch gave Seinfeld a formal presentation titled "Seinfeld: A Broadcast Phenomenon," full of neat and colourful charts - SEINFELD MORE DOMINANT THAN EVER - demonstrating that, unlike most shows that reach a ninth season, its audience was still growing, at least in the only demographic category that matters, adults aged 18 to 49.
There were carefully calibrated emotional appeals too. "Jack Welch told me this was one of the products General Electric is most proud of," Seinfeld says. Rather than be concerned that his show was being lumped in with light bulbs and missile parts, the comedian was moved. "That affects me," he says. "I like it, that the people who own the show take pride in it." The meeting ended warmly but inconclusively.
Despite many interested parties, everyone says the answer rested solely with Seinfeld. As he puts it: "This was between me and the show." The decision, when it finally came, was based on one of those peculiar divinations that Seinfeld thrives on. "I felt . . . the Moment. That's the only way I can describe it," Seinfeld explains in the tone of voice the TV Jerry might use to delineate a date's faux pas. "I knew from being onstage for years and years and years, there's one moment where you have to feel the audience is still having a great time, and if you get off right there, they walk out of the theatre excited. And yet, if you wait a little bit longer and try to give them more for their money, they walk out feeling not as good. If I get off now I have a chance at a standing ovation. That's what you go for."
Most times, of course, you also go for money. But Seinfeld insists recompense was not a consideration despite NBC's reported offer of an unprecedented $5 million a show if he would return for another season. Seinfeld refuses to confirm the figure. "I don't really care about the money," he insists. "In my business, the only way you can get as much money as I have" - Forbes magazine put his earnings last year at $66 million - "is if you don't care about money and you care about comedy, then, somehow you end up with money. I'm not the kind of person who could do a show and think, `Well, we've kind of run out of gas here, but the money's great and the ratings are still good, so let's keep grinding them out'. It would break my heart."
Two days after meeting Welch and Wright, Seinfeld phoned Wright and gave him the news. Telling his co-stars had been a more loaded proposition, given their bonds as an ensemble and the fact that, while Robert Wright still has a job, Michael Richards - for one - soon won't. Complicating things further was the fact that Richards, Alexander and Louis-Dreyfus had only recently received huge rises after a much publicised and, by some accounts, bitter hold-out before the start of the current season.
Their meeting took place on December 17th in Seinfeld's dressing room, where the cast traditionally assembles before the last taping of the calendar year to take stock of things. "It was pretty heavy, pretty wild," recalls Louis-Dreyfus. "There were no tears shed, but there was a lot of heart thumping." Seinfeld was relieved to find the cast agreed with him. "They just started making good money last year, but they were generous enough to respect the timing of the curve - not that they could have talked me out of it, I don't think."
"There was no question in anybody's mind when the four of us sat down that it was time to go," agrees Alexander. Richards says the sheer exhaustion involved in making the labour-intensive show was a factor. "I've been taking note of how everyone was working and the difficulties of maintaining the show each week. It was becoming work, real work, and we were losing our sense of play. After 12 episodes Jerry was weary. To think about coming back and doing another year - he doubted he could. And he never wanted that weariness to affect the show. That was the greatest fear."
As Seinfeld is the first to admit, it has been an impressive and improbable run for a show he has famously said is about nothing, which, of course, is charmingly disingenuous. Because if Seinfeld is about nothing, then so are the works of Jane Austen and Noel Coward. If Seinfeld seems trivial, it is only because manners have evolved over the course of our century. Like the rest of us, the show's overly analytic foursome must pick their way through an increasingly chaotic social battlefield, forced to write their own etiquette for even the most insignificant encounters. And then there are the big questions, like what do you do when your girlfriend suggests sharing a toothbrush.
But aside from jokes about masturbation and oral sex, the fundamental difference between Seinfeld and Pride And Prejudice, say, is that Seinfeld in its heart of hearts is concerned with avoiding romantic attachment, with repulsion (and its twin, self-loathing) - the starkest example being George's relief when his fiancee dies licking the envelopes of cheap wedding invitations. Never before has television been host to such unreconstructed misanthropy.
Just as Seinfeld is quick to give his co-stars and collaborators the lion's share of credit for the show's success ("My real talent," he says, "is in picking people"), he is loath to ascribe any cultural significance to Seinfeld, even while in a somewhat valedictory mood. The show's aims, he insists, are entirely unpretentious.
"I really aspire to The Abbott And Costello Show. That's my favourite sitcom. We walk down the street and bump into Bania, the bad comedian, the way Lou Costello would bump into Stinky, and then a scene comes out of it. That's classic. It's burlesque." Seinfeld finds himself in the curious position of facing, at the relatively tender age of 43, a sort of retirement. In this regard, you could say Jerry Seinfeld is the Bill Clinton of comedy, the boy wonder as lame duck - if only that is, Seinfeld were more desperate to be loved. Instead, he is the same affable fellow with the slightly snarky finish that he plays on TV.
"I've never had much interest in being liked," he offers. "And I think people like that. It's a relief. So many people want to be liked." With 10 shows left to shoot, Seinfeld won't reveal much about how he plans to end Seinfeld - indeed, he claims not to have figured it out himself except that he knows what the final episode's final moment will be. "It's not a big thing,' he says. "It's the shoelace that comes undone in the men's room and touches the floor. That's the kind of mood I'm looking for."
So Jerry and Elaine won't be getting married, as some fans have speculated. "Nah," Seinfeld says, pained. "That's not the show." (Co-creator and guiding light Larry David, who left after the 1995-96 season, has been asked to come back and write the finale.) One surprise Seinfeld will reveal is that the last half-hour episode will be paired with a onehour mock documentary about its making.
Another concrete plan is that one of the final episodes will be shot on location in New York - a first for the LA-based production. Though the question of spin-offs is out of Seinfeld's hands - Castle Rock, the show's production company, owns the rights to the characters - he and the rest of the cast swear they won't participate in, say, Everyone Loves Elaine or Kramer, The Vampire Killer. (As for a reunion show, Seinfeld recoils - "Good God!" - then pauses to consider the idea. "Well maybe by then they'll have engineered the lenses that can take it.")
Seinfeld says he relishes the prospect of returning to life on the road as a stand-up comic, which he says is his true vocation, the "noblest endeavour". He also has plans to tour Europe and Australia this summer and then spend a week on Broadway filming a Home Box Office special called I'm Telling You For The Last Time; it will mark the last time he performs his current act. It's a kind of self-imposed trick, he says, to force him to write and produce new material.
"I would like to be considered a great comedian, I don't think I'm there yet." Who is? "Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby. I haven't gotten personal enough yet to be considered great by my definition. That's what being great is, doing material only you could do and no one else. It's about getting my truer inner feelings about things." Asked what kind of things, he offers, thoughtfully, "breast implants".
Clearly he's not ready to start opening his veins in public just yet. When asked if he has been seeing anyone romantically after breaking up with his long-time girlfriend Shoshanna Lonstein last year, Seinfeld - after ribbing the reporter who dutifully if reluctantly posed the question - responds only with an old joke from Larry David's stand-up act: "I'd like to start a family but you have to have a date first."
Having already sold his LA home, he's planning to move back to New York and open up a small production company. Beyond that, the tour and the HBO show, his post-Seinfeld plans are vague. He variously claims that he'd like to do a movie some day; that he'd be open to returning to television, not in another sitcom but maybe a talk show; that he plans to pretty much take the next couple of years off and just recuperate from the rigours of producing, writing and starring in Seinfeld.
"I don't really live here," he points out, gesturing around his spacious kitchen. "I get home at 10, I'm asleep by 10.30, I get up at six, have a little exercise, then I'm back at the office." He claims never to go to restaurants - he eats at the office - to have no time to watch television or read the papers (except for reviews - he claims he's read them all), and to have seen only one movie last year (Titanic). "I'm not out in the world," he says. "I missed the whole 1990s. I don't know what happened." Given the fact that it seems to be his entire life, will he be sad when Seinfeld is all over? No, he says, then reconsiders. "I was sad the last few days. I saw an old Odd Couple show, and it was all yellow. You know those old shows - why are they all yellow? And then I thought, this is what my show is now - a re-run. It's not going to be a living thing any more."
No. Welcome Jerry, to the land of TV's un-dead. One senses there's a routine there somewhere.
Seinfeld: BBC 2, Tuesdays, 11.15 p.m.