The Script For An Unmade Seinfeld Episode Has Been Leaked For All To See
"Seinfeld" could be an incredibly mean show. For peak cruelty, it's hard to top "The Invitations" in which George's fiancée Susan drops dead after licking too many envelopes. The finale is self-consciously nasty in the way it indicts viewers for having been emotionally invested in the lives of these relentlessly awful people for nine seasons. My favorite might be "The Yada Yada," where Jerry is called out as an "anti-dentite" for his dim view of dentists. But the series, created by Seinfeld and Larry David, knew how to go dark without alienating its audience — which is why they scrapped a Season 2 episode called "The Bet."
Unless you're a "Seinfeld" superfan, you might not know of this episode. If you are a "Seinfeld" superfan, you know "The Bet" quite well and have surely read the script that got leaked to the "Lost Media" subreddit earlier this month. It's been something of a holy grail for "Seinfeld" aficionados over the last few decades. Jason Alexander auctioned off his copy of the script in 2022 for an undisclosed sum, which led to photocopies turning up on eBay for several thousand dollars. Finally, someone snagged a copy for $800, and, being a stupidly generous soul, threw the script online.
So why did the "Seinfeld" team scrap "The Bet?" Could it have possibly been edgier than killing off Susan? Had it aired, I'm not sure the series, which was still two seasons away from becoming a Nielsen ratings juggernaut, would've survived the controversy.
Elaine got her gun
Writer and comedian Larry Charles knows the edge. "Seinfeld" was his breakthrough gig, and he went on to shred the outside of the envelope with his writing for "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and direction of "Borat" and "Brüno." He goes hard. And he went perhaps a tad too hard with his script for "The Bet."
Again, "Seinfeld" was just beginning to find its footing in that second season. The writers correctly identified Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Elaine as the off-kilter female counterbalance to the angsty duo of Jerry and George (and the unceasing chaos of Kramer), but they didn't place the character above the petty fray. Elaine was every bit as nutty as the guys, and this made the show sing. Everyone at any moment could be the straight person, and, alternately, the craziest person in the room.
"The Bet" would've given Louis-Dreyfus a wackadoodle showcase for the ages. Her role in this episode was the B plot. The main plot concerns Kramer's suspicious claim about having sex in an airplane lavatory with a flight attendant on his return trip from Puerto Rico. Jerry and George place a $1,000 bet contingent on proving Kramer's outlandish claim. This is fairly routine "Seinfeld" comedic business. It's Elaine's portion of the script that takes the episode over the top. She decides New York City has become too dangerous for a single woman, so she sets out to buy a gun. George encourages this desire, while Jerry is dead set against it. He believes Elaine would be escalating a potentially violent situation by packing heat.
Elaine persists, which leads Jerry and the gang to visit his gun-selling acquaintance Mo to acquire a pistol. And this is where the script takes a deliciously nasty turn.
Finding questionable comedy in the assassination of JFK
Elaine does not buy a gun from Mo. Jerry doesn't know this, so she plots to pull a very real-looking toy gun on him when he inevitably gets high-handed on her. When Jerry joins George and Elaine in a car (they're headed to the airport to hopefully confirm the veracity of Kramer's mid-flight fornication), he immediately starts in on her gun ownership. The exchange goes thusly in the script:
Jerry: George ... Annie Oakley ... is it warm in here or are you just packing heat?
Elaine: One bullet in the brainpan oughta drop your body temperature considerably.
Jerry: I guess that would provide some cross-ventiliation. Can you give me the Kennedy? In here (MOTIONING TO THE BACK OF THE HEAD) and out here (MOTIONING TO HIS ADAM'S APPLE)?
Elaine: Maybe I'll just take a little off the top.
Jerry: Aah, the Lincoln.
This was intended to air on February 13, 1991, which was prior to the December release of Oliver Stone's "JFK" (memorably lampooned in the third-season classic "The Boyfriend"). There's probably never been a perfect time to goof on the former president getting his head blown off, but Louis-Dreyfuss immediately objected. This was a relief to NBC. The episode got spiked. And it was notorious enough for Alexander and others to make money off the scuttled script.
This was probably a crucial call for a show that was, at the time, a cult favorite. Sitcoms didn't make light of a topic like this in such a brazenly graphic manner. But it was a harbinger of slightly less offensive provocations to come, and proof positive that "Seinfeld" would flit around the boundaries of bad taste for the rest of its run.