Why Jason Alexander Thinks The Seinfeld Cast Ruined Television Forever

Television Comedy Shows

Calling "Seinfeld" a success story is understating it. But Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza on the show in every episode except one, thinks the series' success might've had bad consequences for the TV industry as a whole. In a Charlie Rose interview from 1998 (the same year "Seinfeld" concluded), Alexander walked through the story of how he, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine), and Michael Richards (Kramer) fought for a raise about halfway through the show's run.

Alexander (who appears thoughtful, soft-spoken, but quietly confident, the complete opposite of the neurotic George) explained how, around season 5 of "Seinfeld," he, Louis-Dreyfus, and Richards felt "there was no upside" in staying on the show anymore. The success of "Seinfeld" could even be a double-edged sword since they'd be typecast as actors going forward. His fears ended up being founded; of the three, only Louis-Dreyfus has become more than her "Seinfeld" character to the larger public (see her role as Selina Meyer on HBO political satire "Veep," which received new life when Kamala Harris unexpectedly became the Democratic nominee for President in 2024).

Initially, the three actors tried to get in on the show's syndication success. Syndication, a lost art in the streaming TV era, is the act of a network essentially leasing out their programming to other stations. If you were part of a popular syndicated show, residuals (compensation for use of a completed work) could be a sweet deal. Multiple TV stations would want to be able to air a show like "Seinfeld" because it would attract a lot of viewers, ergo episodes would be constantly rerun and the residual payments would add up. So the actors were making money from salaries and residuals, but because they knew NBC was making millions of dollars in pure profit for every episode in syndication, the trio asked to receive a percentage of those profits. NBC said no — until it was time to re-up the show for another season.

"I want to leave the most successful half-hour in the history of television knowing that I never have to work again," said Alexander, so he, Richard, and Louis-Dreyfus presented a "success formula" for what made the show profitable. In their estimation, the three actors them were one-fifth of the success of "Seinfeld," alongside Jerry Seinfeld himself, co-creator Larry David, the other writers, and everyone else. Their first offer? $1 million, which NBC "laughed" at. The three ultimately agreed to somewhere around $600,000 per episode upfront, which Alexander still feels was "detrimental to television" because it meant actors from less profitable shows wanted salaries comparable to theirs. He specifically cited Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt's $1 million per episode deal for "Mad About You," which indeed was reported at the time as part of a trend where TV actors were asking for bigger paychecks (via Entertainment Weekly).

In television, the real money is in residuals

While the deal ultimately set up Alexander and his family for life, he still called NBC's handling of the situation "foolish." Part of that, he said, was for setting a bad precedent about paying actors exorbitant amounts of money up front, but another part was because NBC held out on negotiating until near the deadline, so the rest of the show's cast and crew had to work without knowing if they'd still have their jobs when the season wrapped. Alexander also recounted that Jerry mostly stayed out of negotiations until the end, being stuck between "a rock and a hard place" (his duties to keep costs down as the show's producer, and wanting to support his cast mates).

It's telling that NBC and other networks evidently preferred paying big salaries up front; with "Seinfeld," at least, they could afford it from the show's profit margin, but when actors from less profitable shows starting making similar demands, that's where things become unsustainable.

A show like "Seinfeld" (an 180-episode half-hour sitcom) is made for syndication reruns, where profits can still be made long after you stop producing new episodes. Cutting in the supporting trio would've eaten up a chunk of that back-end change. This is why residuals are vital, though. Acting, and really any creative career, is unstable gig-work. Residuals are meant to offer subsistence when actors are between jobs; it shouldn't just be the corporation who owns a piece of art that profits from it, the people who made it should, too.

It's easy to see that dodging residuals is one reason behind the pivot to streaming TV. Netflix and the other streamers make the rerun and syndication models a non-issue and until recently, didn't offer residual payments to the writers/actors of programs in their library. During the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, actor Sean Gunn described how he and the rest of the "Gilmore Girls" cast recouped nothing from the show streaming on Netflix, and how its presence there cut into their existing residual deals. (To watch "Gilmore Girls," people would just sign up for Netflix, making it a less unique draw for syndication on standard TV networks that would actually pay those crucial residuals every time an episode aired.)

Speaking of: Netflix paid $500 million for the "Seinfeld" streaming rights. Alexander's response when asked by TMZ about the then-ongoing bidding war for those rights? A shrug, because, as he said, "None of that goes to me." As astute as he was for criticizing NBC frontloading the money, Alexander couldn't predict just how badly TV would be uprooted in the next millennium.