Why Seinfeld Didn't Get More Episodes, According To Jason Alexander

Television shows getting the "proper" time to breathe and evolve is a hot topic in film and TV criticism these days, as streaming models for production have warped how long any given series gets to run. It seems like certain shows get to stretch on forever, like "Stranger Things 5" coming this fall, having started its first season in 2016, while others are left on the side of the road, hoping for a good Samaritan to take them in. "Seinfeld" is a series from a bygone era of broadcast television that ran for nine seasons, and Jason Alexander explained why the beloved program got cut short!

Years ago, he talked to EmmyLegendsTV.org about his time on "Seinfeld" and why the show reached a natural stopping point for the actors involved. It turns out that it just wasn't feasible to keep doing episodes because of the difference in profit for the people at the center of the show, namely the producers and the folks performing the classic roles that everyone still loves today. Alexander said that he could have just kept playing George Costanza until he was a very rich man, but in order to have a future in the entertainment business, it was time to step away and do something different. 

"Because Julia [Louis-Dreyfus], Michael [Richards], and I are not partners in the syndication of the show, in which there was an enormous amount of profit to be made, we could no longer root for the longevity of the show," he revealed. "Because we knew, historically, if you play an iconic character on a TV series, your career might be done! So, we were going to have to spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to get the next gig, if we were ever going to work again," Alexander demurred. "So, since 'Seinfeld' wasn't going to be the annuity that it was going to be for Jerry [Seinfeld], Larry [David], and a couple of the other partners, continuing to make more of them was a self-defeating prophecy. We were going to contribute to our own eventual demise as actors."

It's an eloquent answer to a tricky question posed to Jason Alexander, who is great at telling stories about the show, and he did his best to address all the factors at play when dealing with a cultural behemoth like "Seinfeld." Yes, they could have kept making episodes until the sun exploded, and some fans really did try to get that off the ground a few years ago with a frustratingly silly application of plagiarism software that plays very differently in 2025 than it did at the time. His co-stars weren't going to get a cut of those syndication dollars, so they were going to have to work extra hard to become known as more than their characters on this beloved show.

It's interesting to think about them continuing the show for so many more seasons if that revenue split was negotiated differently from the word go, people might have even regarded it similarly to something like "The Simpsons" now, as that show has run for decades, and is even making jokes about it at this point. Instead the people at the heart of "Seinfeld" decided to keep it at nine seasons and figure out what to do next, a choice that some fans probably lament and even more are probably thankful for now as they don't have to deal with the subtle decline that a lot of long-running shows experience after their creative peaks. It's nice to have this window into a complex issue from one of the actors firsthand, but there will always be people out there who wonder what could have been if there were just a few more episodes out there in the ether to sift through.