If anything so emphatically and inescapably present as television
could be said to have a history, the final episode of “Seinfeld” is
destined for an honored place in its oxymoronic annals, if only
because of the record $1.5 million and upwards it was said to have
charged for thirty seconds of advertising.
Who will care about this astonishing number in a few
years’ time, when it is as meaningless as the rates charged by “The
Honeymooners” are today? Yet the “show about nothing” may deserve a
special place among the hits of yesteryear because it has refined to
its essence the art of television—
which is also about nothing. Even
things that are something, like world news events, are reduced to
the status of nothing when they become television. Just as the
tornado that flattens your house is not the one that was on TV, so
the one that is on TV is by definition the one that happened to
somebody else. And if it never happens to you, it’s not real. You
can take it or leave it, like an episode of “Seinfeld.”

Not that “nothing” is not a big subject. Boring, but big. People who
live lives as cavernously hollow as those of the “Seinfeld”
characters must fill them with something, and the insubstantial odds
and ends of pop cultural triviality and personal self-absorption
with which their nothingness is stuffed could supply—and doubtless
has supplied—the material for many a long summer’s day toiling over
ponderous