NYPR Archives & Preservation
Did ‘Seinfeld’ Put the Polish Back on The Big Apple?
It was a sitcom that was, by its own admission, about nothing; with an ensemble cast playing (let’s be honest) irredeemably self-absorbed jerks. But was it responsible for putting a polish back on the national reputation of The Big Apple?
When Seinfeld debuted in 1989 the media trope for New York had descended from the glamour of Breakfast at Tiffany’s to The Big Rotten Apple: a dark and dirty dysfunctional dystopia. Guys and Dolls and On the Town had given way to Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Death Wish, and Escape From New York. Even The Odd Couple, the iconic ‘70’s sitcom set in New York, regularly had Oscar or Felix being mugged or otherwise pummeled by a city perceived as beyond control.1 In their 1978 Rolling Stones hit “Shattered” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sung “Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don't mind the maggots.” Or as the guest of the January 4, 1998 On the Media episode John Podhoretz put it: there was “nobody in the country with a good word to say about New York.”
During that segment of On the Media, Podhoretz, the New York Post Editorial Page Editor, joined host Brian Lehrer and Elizabeth Lesly Stevens of Business Week to discuss the Seinfeld phenomenon and what the show meant to the public image of New York City.
Podhoretz theorized that the show had “reinvented New York in the eyes of America from a city of danger and horror into what New York likes to think of itself as at its best, which is sort of an exciting, action-packed place full of glamorous eccentrics.” He added that, with its visits to real New York places like actual bodegas and diners, no television program had ever been as much “about a specific setting as Seinfeld.”
And perhaps because of those specific New York settings and the eccentrics who inhabit them, America seemed to have fallen back in love with The Big Apple.
Is that theory, or just more yadda, yadda, yadda?
1TV Tropes. (2019). The Big Rotten Apple - TV Tropes. [online] Available at: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheBigRottenApple [Accessed 4 Nov. 2019].