Seinfeld Season One
Well my best Christmas present this year was the Seinfeld Seasons 1-3 Giftset. Despite having a miniscule napkin dispenser (which leads to a Seinfeldian complaint: Where do you find napkins that size?), it's a pretty awesome DVD set so far. Each of the episodes has a little subtitle trivia track (Notes On Nothing) & are the uncut from syndication originals. Other than one introductory scene (before The Stakeout episode), everything is digitally cleaned up & looks excellent.
The best part about that trivia track: it keeps track of the things that don't matter. Stupid little statistics that people like me love. Everytime Kramer comes into Jerry's apartment, bam, KRAMER ENTRANCE #1, & so on. Every girlfriend that Jerry has, bam, a short-listed explanation on her. Excellent.
As well, a lot of the episodes have an "Inside Look" little featurette to go along with them, that basically shows what the cast was thinking or what was going with the show around that time. Interesting, AND informative.
Anyways, the first season only consisted of the pilot episode (The Seinfeld Chronicles) & four additional episodes (the smallest sitcom order in television history) to be broadcast over the summer months of 1990. Even close to fifteen laters, the humour is still great & not too terribly dated. Almost timeless, if it weren't for that pesky fashion sensibility of the early '90s.
Seinfeld truly was one of the best shows on TV, not just because of it's excellent writing & cast. Despite my favourite TV show of all time, the Simpsons, paying almost NO attention to continuity, Seinfeld pays strict attention to continuity. Which means George's love of pretending to be an architect or having a business named after Art Vandelay isn't restricted to the first season episode (The Stakeout) in which it first appeared.
Five episodes is pretty small for a first (or any non-cable non-British) season run, but this was a show that was probably five minutes ahead of it's time. It took a year or so for everyone to understand the humour & since it was so different from everything else on TV at the time, it took longer to reach audiences that had more than a cultish fever for it. One odd thing about the season was that George ended on a financial high, something we wouldn't see again for awhile. He's still cheap though.
Seinfeld Season Two
Seinfeld Season Three