Movies - TV
Seinfeld’s Writers' Room Wasn’t Run Like Your Average TV Show
By DEVIN MEENAN
From scene to scene and line to line, Seinfeld is a consistently funny show. While that funniness can be credited to the show’s writers, there’s something to be said of the show’s unique writers' room which was more individualistic than other shows and prioritized storytelling just as much as jokes.
Steven Koren, who wrote a handful of episodes for Seinfeld, recalled that writers needed more than a basic outline for their episodes. When speaking of the process of writing the “Seinfeld” episode “The English Patient,” about an elderly fitness buff, Koren said, “On that show, forget the jokes, each subsequent story beat had to be funny, that was a rule.”
“Seinfeld” writers would write their greenlit pitches solo which in Koren’s words created a “sense of personal ownership of a story,” unlike other shows where writers would collaborate from the start. Once completed, the scripts were edited by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, although in later seasons after David left, all the writers would collaborate to edit the script.