Well, I certainly think so. But since this month marks the ten-year anniversary of the sitcom's final episode, you just knew some cranky-ass little critic boy would have to take the opportunity to be all, "Meh. You suck!" So here's Newsweek's Marc Peyser. "As someone who doesn't dip into its bottomless rerun pool much, I was surprised when I sat down with the show again by how poorly 'Seinfeld' holds up. What once seemed smart—they just did a storyline on John Cheever's diaries!—feels like shtik. The pacing—no show had ever packed in so many scenes, some of them lasting a few seconds—now seems formulaic and forced. You can almost hear the guys sitting in the writers' room throwing out ideas: Wouldn't it be funny if [...] Jerry dated a deaf girl?" Yeah, and I can also almost hear a bunch of lazy editors sitting around a conference table saying, "Hey wouldn't it be funny if, instead of celebrating the anniversary, we do a smack-down? Yeah!"
"'Seinfeld' became the '90s version of bowling night: the place you kicked back once a week and shared life's little triumphs and humiliations with folks who knew just what you were going through." [Really? You're going with "bowling night"?] "They made you feel like part of the gang, right down to the inside jokes. The problem is, we've changed, and the 'Seinfeld' gang hasn't. There's a reason that the great sitcoms—'The Mary Tyler Moore Show,' 'M*A*S*H' and 'Taxi,' to name a few—still work. They're not just about being funny; they're about people who grow enough in a week, and over time, to keep them interesting. They have depth. Jerry and George have issues. That can be amusing, even occasionally hilarious. But after a while, it all has started to sound like a whole lotta yadda yadda yadda."
Feel better now? Gonna put on your big boy pants now? [Newsweek]
