Watching “Seinfeld” and Reminiscing About Life in the Pre-Cell-Phone Era
The first two seasons of the show made me feel nostalgic for answering machines, pay phones, and video stores
The first season of Seinfeld came out in 1989, and it ended its run in 1998. Seinfeld and its absurdities were staples of my TV viewing growing up. Over the holidays, I rewatched a lot of seasons 1 and 2.
On this rewatch, I liked seeing the fashion from those times — shoulder pads, 80s hair, and scrunchies — but I especially noticed how different things were before our lives revolved around cell phones. A lot of the show’s plot is based on small miscommunications, and many of those would play out differently now.
From the very first standup clip that starts the episode, we hear something that sounds a little different from how things would go today. Jerry Seinfeld says that he and everyone in the audience are out of the house, and people don’t know where they are. He says that his friends wonder about his whereabouts: “He didn’t me where he was going — he must have gone out.”
In those days, when you left the house, you were mostly unreachable. Unless you had a beeper, I guess, which the characters in the show don’t seem to have, and most people didn’t have back then, if you weren’t at home you were, as Jerry said, “out.” You’d be back later, and you might call someone back then.
In the first episode, George and Jerry dissect a conversation that Jerry had with a woman. They struggle to parse the signals of whether the woman is interested in Jerry. They spend a lot of time sifting through small clues gleaned from short phone conversations with women, trying to tell whether there is interest or whether they’re going to get rejected. They don’t have any text messages to send or to go over.
I felt nostalgic remembering how back then, you either talked to a person in person or on the phone. That’s it. Now, we’re all instantly available with a call, text, or chat at most hours of the day.
Later, George keeps Jerry company at the laundromat. George stares at the clothes tossing around in the dryer and says that he’s bored. The people around them fold their laundry or put laundry into the machines. No one is looking at a cell phone. Boredom couldn’t be relieved by looking at social media or the news. Have we lost something now that it’s so easy to relieve boredom by pulling out a phone at any time? George wants Jerry to hurry and take out the laundry before it’s overly dry, and they have a silly conversation about how it’s not possible to over dry something.
Then Jerry sits down at 1:00 a.m. to watch a baseball game he has taped on his VCR. Someone calls Jerry — a lot of the silliness and misunderstandings in the show revolve around Jerry’s landline phone. He picks it up and pleads with them not to tell him who won the baseball game. He’s been avoiding people since the game aired and is about to watch the recording (of course, then Kramer bursts into the apartment and tells Jerry who won).
In the beginning of episode 2, Jerry, in standup comedian mode, jokes about how women in front of him in line at the grocery store use checks to pay for even small amounts. He observes that women are quick and skilled at check writing.
I remember seeing my parents write checks in the grocery store. I even did it myself, for a while, until debit cards came around. Does anyone write a check in the store anymore?
Then, Jerry and Elaine browse movies in a video rental store. They pick up video tapes (not DVDs — it’s too early for that) and laugh about the covers, guessing at how good or bad the movies might be.
Now that we have streaming, it’s convenient to scroll through our options and watch movies instantly. But remember how it was fun to wander through a video store until you found something you liked? And maybe pick up a package of microwave popcorn at the counter when you checked out?
Later in the episode, Jerry’s mom hands him a message she wrote down from a woman who called while Jerry wasn’t home. Jerry’s mom wrote the message on a little piece of lined yellow paper, the kind we used to keep by the phone to take down messages. Jerry asks what tone of voice the woman had, and his mom isn’t sure. Jerry isn’t happy with the uncertainty, but he has to live with it until his next planned meeting with the woman.
He and his mom are play Scrabble. They have a dictionary to look up words. Kramer hovers over the table and helps judge whether words are acceptable or not. These days, we would probably be looking up words on our phones, not an actual dictionary.
In episode 3, Jerry and George sit in a diner and peruse menus. There are two pay phones along one wall of the diner, and a man is talking on one of them. In pre-cell-phone times, if you were out, and you wanted to make a call, you needed to find a pay phone. They were around, outside of stores, along the street, at gas stations. You needed to remember to have change with you when you went out, in case you ever needed to make an emergency call, and you also had the phone numbers of your close friends and family memorized.
In episode 4, Kramer is sitting on Jerry’s couch talking on Jerry’s telephone. He holds up the receiver to Jerry and says, “It’s for you.” He won’t tell Jerry who it is, and Jerry is annoyed. Remember those days when we’d answer a landline phone, never knowing who was calling? The way Jerry holds the receiver reminded me that there used to be a certain elegance in holding a phone. The receiver had weight, and there was a way to hold and maneuver it that was comfortable, a motion born of practice.
The most memorable and silliest technology mishap I saw in the early Seinfeld episodes was in season 2, episode 5, which is about George and his neurotic struggles with a woman’s answering machine. I had almost forgotten that answering machines used to have physical cassette tapes in them.
Several times over a few days, George calls a woman he’s dating and leaves a series of hesitant and then defiant and angry messages on her answering machine, as he thinks he’s being ignored. Actually, she’s on vacation. She finally calls George and makes plans to see him — but he worries about what she’ll think once she returns and listens to the embarrassing messages that he left.
George begs Jerry for help. They make a plan to bring an empty tape into her apartment, distract her, and let Jerry switch the incriminating tape out for a blank one. In his jacket pocket, Jerry stashes two blank tapes, regular sized and micro, to fit any model of answering machine that the woman might have.
They succeed in the plan to switch the tapes, but of course, in the end they find out that she had already listened to the messages and thought they were a joke. The episode revolves around George’s anxiety and how he makes situations worse by worrying. The episode was also a reminder of when an absurdly small tape could hold the power to convey a life changing message, but it could also be outsmarted by replacing it with another, blank version of itself.
Today, instead of debating a video rental, we might get mad at each other for not being able to decide what to watch in our streaming queue. Instead of searching for a pay phone to use, we might discover that we’ve lost our cell phone somewhere. I‘m sure that in 2022, George and Jerry would complain about being ghosted by someone who just stopped replying to text messages.
We still have life’s misunderstandings and miscues. Nevertheless, I had fun mentally time traveling back to the more analog days of the late 80s and early 90s with Seinfeld.
