Today I examine why this controversial episode was never made.
Genre: TV episode
Premise: As Elaine contemplates buying a gun, Kramer comes back from vacation, claiming to have slept with the stewardess on his plane, prompting Jerry and George to bet on whether he’s telling the truth.
About: This is the infamous unmade episode of Seinfeld that featured a gun. It looks like this would’ve aired in season 3 or 4. The episode spiritually died in the table read, when Julia Louis Dreyfuss read a line about shooting Jerry. After the table read was over, the producers and creators huddled up then came back and told everyone to go home. They wouldn’t be making the episode. You can hear the cast talk about the episode here.
Writer: Larry Charles
Details: 52 pages
When you run a screenwriting website, you’re constantly coming up with ideas for things you can do on the site. I remember an early morning, while still in bed, half-asleep, where I became convinced that I needed to have a contest to write a modern-day episode of Seinfeld. For a good hour of half-asleepness, I had convinced myself it was the greatest idea that had ever been invented.
Then I fully woke up and, within five minutes, reality slapped me in the face, as it became clear that a website dedicated to feature screenplay writing probably wasn’t the best forum to do a contest for a sitcom that had been off the air for 20 years. So even though my love for Seinfeld remained unparalleled, I put the sitcom to rest. Finally.
That was until today when I learned that there was a Seinfeld episode that had never been filmed! Based on a script that had actually been written! This was like a dream come true. I knew these characters so well that a script might as well have been a filmed episode since it was so easy for me to envision these characters in that world.
In The Bet, Elaine shows up at Jerry’s apartment and claims that someone she knows got robbed and she’s thinking about getting a gun for protection. Jerry tells her she’s not a gun person but Elaine makes a strong case about being a woman in a big city with a lot of crime. You need to be able to defend yourself.
A sunburnt Kramer barges in, recently back from Puerto Rico, and tells Elaine that he knows a guy who can get her a gun. His old buddy, Mo. Elaine is thrilled. Then Kramer shares a secret with the crew – he slept with the stewardess coming back from Puerto Rico.
As Kramer and Elaine leave, a frustrated George, bemoaning his lack of opportunities with women, is convinced that Kramer is fibbing. Jerry, however, thinks Kramer is telling the truth. Therefore, they make “The Bet.” They bet 1000 dollars on whether Kramer was telling the truth or not.
We then head over to Mo’s, where Kramer, Elaine, and Jerry, go to buy the gun. Mo is a weird loser who lives with his clueless mother. He has several guns for Elaine to choose from. It all becomes too overwhelming for Elaine and she decides not to get a gun. Instead, she goes down the street and buys a fake gun so she can at least scare people away.
The group, minus Kramer, then head to the airport to find the stewardess who supposedly slept with Kramer. They locate her and ask, in a myriad of ways without being direct, if she joined the mile high club with Kramer. The woman is freaked out and in the pandemonium, Elaine accidentally pulls out her gun from her purse, and the group gets swarmed by security.
A couple of months later, they’re all back in their homes and everything is fine. Kramer shows up at Jerry’s and reads the group a letter from the stewardess who hints at, in no uncertain terms, that they did have a physical tryst on the plane. So Jerry wins the bet and George loses at life, once again.
One of the things I’m constantly telling you guys to do is TAKE RISKS. But “risk” is a nebulous word. A risk to one writer may not seem like a risk at all to the next writer. So it’s important to identify when real risks are taken. That way, you guys know what I mean by “risks.”
This was a big risk for Larry Charles, the writer. He admits as much in the accompanying interview. He says that he was always looking to take darker subject matter and find a way to make it funny. Building an episode of Seinfeld around a gun is pretty dark, relatively speaking. This wouldn’t be risky for an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia. But that’s a show that got 1/20th the viewership of Seinfeld. It’s not mainstream so of course it can be darker.
The consensus from the Seinfeld group seems to be that Charles’s script was too risky. “You can’t make guns funny,” they concluded. I think that’s b.s. And I’ll tell you why. Suicide is way darker than guns. And suicide came up several times throughout Seinfeld. There’s one episode where Newman keeps threatening to commit suicide. They even have a couple of episodes dealing with sexual assault (the masseuse and the woman with the toys), which turned out to be two of the funniest episodes in the series.
So I don’t buy that they couldn’t make guns funny. They just couldn’t make this episode work. The plot didn’t lead to funny situations. Going to buy a gun from a random guy who lives with his mom? Where’s the funny in that? I guess it’s ironic in that you’d normally expect to buy a gun from some sketchy hustler on the street. But they needed another angle. Mo was a dead-in-the-water character who didn’t generate a single laugh.
What I was really hoping to find in this episode was some classic Seinfeld dialogue, even if it was only one stand-out exchange. That’s where Seinfeld excelled, was in its dialogue. Because Seinfeld was the only show able to create funny dialogue out of nothing.
What I mean by that is, in most sit-coms, the scenes always had a point. For example, if you watched the first season of The Big Bang Theory, they’d have a scene where Penny was coming over to have dinner with our protagonist roommates for the first time, and Leonard would tell Sheldon, “Your job tonight is to just be normal. Don’t do or say anything weird!” And so the whole scene would be about Sheldon trying to be normal. And because Sheldon isn’t normal, he would end up saying and doing weirder stuff than usual. That’s where the comedy would come from.
But Seinfeld would just have the characters talk about nothing and it would still, somehow, be funny. So I was hoping to catch a glimpse of that here and learn something from it. There was a little bit of it and what I learned is that this brilliant team of people at Seinfeld had a particular voice that understood the minutia of everyday life in a way that the average person couldn’t articulate.
So when they picked apart that minutia (“I hate that guy. He stands so close to you when he talks. He’s a close-talker”), it was usually amusing. The lesson here is: pay attention to details in life. It’s those details – it’s those things that seem insignificant – that allow your characters to converse about things that you don’t usually see conversed about in movies and TV shows.
For example, if you’re on a plane and there’s a person sitting nearby who’s not doing anything – they’re not sleeping, they’re not reading, they’re not watching a movie, they’re not on their phone – they’re just sitting up straight and staring forward. You might see that, shrug your shoulders, think “That’s weird,” then never think about it again.
But Seinfeld used that premise for one of its plotlines. When Elaine is dating the dimwitted Puddy and the two are flying back from their trip to Europe, Elaine notices that Puddy is staring forward doing nothing. “You’re just going to sit there and do nothing?” “Yup.” “You’re not going to read?” “Nope.” “You’re not going to sleep.” “No.” Elaine is so flabbergasted by this bizarre behavior that she breaks up with him on the spot. She can’t handle it!
Paying attention to details, as a writer, pays off.
Speaking of dialogue (go buy The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written!), I wanted to share another dialogue tip with you. Here’s the scene with the tip.
The tip is: not every character in your scene needs to be participating in the same conversation. You can have fun with the fact that one or more people are having their own conversation. We see that here with George. George weaves in and out of the conversation, occasionally having a conversation with himself, obsessed with finding the punchline for his joke.
Everyone says this episode was TOO DARING FOR TV. I think it just wasn’t funny enough and they didn’t want to put a dud on the air. But they could’ve made guns funny. I’m sure some commenters will come up with some funny plotlines they could’ve used.
Script link: The Bet
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You never want dialogue to be too perfect. In real life, conversations are messy. That’s why you want to do things like have one character in the room having a completely different conversation from everyone else. It adds that “messiness” that mimics the kinds of interactions people have in real life.
