When Jerry Seinfeld came knocking at NBC’s door last year with an idea for a new reality show after a dozen years of relative seclusion, the suits greeted him as the master of their domain, the king of their castle.
Seinfeld’s timing was perfect; the Peacock network was in deep doo-doo, programming-wise, with a slew of low-rated shows.
“When Jerry was here with ‘Seinfeld,’ more than a decade ago, we were ‘Must See TV,’ ” said one network wag. “By the time he showed up again, we were must-not-see TV. Jerry was being viewed as a savior.”
“His arrival with a new idea that he was excited about was like the second coming,” said a network-TV big familiar with the pitch for Seinfeld’s new show, called “The Marriage Ref.”
With the Jay Leno disaster hurting both late-night and prime-time ratings, Jerry was being viewed as even more godlike.
“Jerry could have walked in the door with a show based on a guy sitting with a paper bag over his head and it would have been green-lighted,” said the executive. “His name and fame is golden, and the network needs all the help it can get.
“If you know the Yiddish term kvelling, that’s what the executives were doing. They were rejoicing. Jerry’s back! Seinfeld’s in the house again!”
In fact, NBC’s executives were so overjoyed that they didn’t even bother to put “The Marriage Ref” through any form of the usual audience testing. It went directly from pitch to green light to production.
“We were all very excited to see Jerry,” Paul Telegdy, executive vice president of Alternative Programming for NBC and Universal Media Studios, told The Post. “He came in and pitched and we said, ‘Yes. Jerry, we’d like to make that.’ ”
Fast-forward to last week when “The Marriage Ref” had a 30-minute sneak peek on Sunday night right after the close of NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage.
Seinfeld’s new baby garnered a huge audience — mostly fans of the Games who, during the many days of skiing and skating programming, were besieged by promos for the show and were curious to see what it was all about.
But the reviews from TV critics and viewers alike were as icy as the Vancouver bobsled run. The Thursday premiere saw about half of the Olympics’ viewers skate away, although the show had decent overnight numbers, of about 7-8 million viewers over the hour.
“We took advantage of the very broad upscale audience of the Olympics to get a sampling. The half-hour version of the show was run as a trailer,” said Telegdy, a former BBC Worldwide America executive with a reality-programming background. He joined NBC a little over a year ago — and who was one of the key executives who heard Seinfeld’s pitch and gave him the go-ahead for eight shows.
Interviewed a few hours before Thursday’s premiere show, Telegdy was aware of the negative reviews, and wasn’t completely discounting them.
“The reaction here is cautious optimism,” he said. “The show certainly created an interesting media effect. As creator, Jerry’s prepared to roll with the punches of positive and negative criticism, as we are as a network. It’s certainly a show that’s inviting a lot of discussion.”
The natural question is why would Seinfeld, 55, a gazilli- onaire who possesses fancy homes and a stable of Porsches, and who left a landmark show back in 1998 at the top of his game, decide to take those punches?
Mike Costanza, a former pal of Seinfeld’s, believes he decided to do “The Marriage Ref” because of “ego, pure ego.”
Costanza went to Queens College with Jerry, was part of his circle for years, and both appeared in an episode of “Seinfeld” and inspired a character’s name. But after a falling out, Costanza self-published a colorful tell-all called “The Real Seinfeld: As Told by the Real Costanza.”
In an interview with The Post, Costanza, a Long Island real estate agent, said Jerry was typical of “people who need to know that they can do it again. They had this one unbelievable success and they need to feel that they can do it again. That it wasn’t just luck. I’m not in the least surprised that Jerry’s doing this new show. I always knew he was going to do something again. And anything he does is a fully measured and thought-out thing.”
Telegdy has another take:
“Jerry’s a creator and creators like to create.”
Seinfeld’s choices since “Seinfeld” have been quirky. He wrote the animated “Bee Movie” in 2007, which did well at the box office but mystified many critics. He starred in a short-lived ad campaign for Microsoft. And he returned to what he loves best — stand-up comedy — drawing big audiences across the country.
Much of Seinfeld’s stand-up material revolves, as it always has, around his personal life, including his 10-year marriage to wife Jessica. “Having a girlfriend is like playing Wiffle ball,” Seinfeld jokes. “Being married is the war in Iraq.”
It was a spat between Seinfeld and Jessica, in fact, that sparked the idea for the show, according to the show’s feisty co-executive producer, Ellen Rakieten, who was Oprah Winfrey’s top gun for more than two decades. In the middle of the Seinfelds’ squabble, a friend of Mrs. Seinfeld who was present thought she should leave, but Jerry told her to stay and referee, and let them know who won.
A little more than a year later, marital spats over things like whether the dining-room table should be formal or informal, or whether a hubby should or shouldn’t wear his wedding ring when he plays basketball, are being acted out by “ordinary couples” three or four times during a show.
A panel of big-name celebrities — next week Madonna (who’s had her own well-publicized relationship issues), “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David (recently divorced), and the comic actorRicky Gervais — snarkily debate which spouse in the dispute is in the right. Clean-cut stand-up comic Tom Papa, hand-picked by Seinfeld, is the ref who announces the winner. At the end of the show, each couple gets a prize. Then they kiss and make up, and the credits roll.
Rakieten thinks the show will be hugely successful because “marriage is the ultimate comedy gold mine.”
She doesn’t seem to mind the negative press and comments by viewers that the show has been generating. “I love critics to review the show and hear what they have to say because for us it’s all fun — the positive and the negative, and watching people try to figure out the show. I’m always open to opinions. It’s fun to have a lively debate about a new creation, so the good and the bad to us is all good and all fun,” she said.
But there are those who feel “The Marriage Ref” will suffer — and deservedly so — a fatal knockout blow.
“Jerry Seinfeld’s name as the executive producer was really used to sell this thing, and to a great extent it worked,” observed television historian Robert Thompson, a professor and director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
“Nine out of 10 audience members who watched the Olympics stayed to watch ‘The Marriage Ref.’ It certainly got a decent trial, which it ought to have after all of that promotion. Advertising a show based on a single name — Seinfeld, in this case — can get people to watch the first episode. It can’t necessarily get them to continue to watch it.”
A longtime fan of “Seinfeld,” the sitcom, Thompson said he found the star’s first entry into network programming in a dozen years to be dull and dated and, at an hour, far too long. But, he noted, “NBC needs to fill those 10 o’clock plugs that Leno left open. But it’s way too long for the time slot. All the things that I thought were weaknesses in the half-hour trailer are now magnified and twice as bad for an hour.”
While Seinfeld was on the celebrity panel in “The Marriage Ref’s” trailer and premier shows, Telegdy thinks that the comic will remain behind the scenes as executive producer for most of the remaining seven episodes, and Thompson believes that’s a bad decision.
“When people find out Jerry’s not on the show, the one thing that was really the selling point — and, let’s face it, people aren’t tuning in to see Tom Papa — the ratings are going to go way down because they’ve taken out the draw,” Thompson said. “However you slice it, I would be really surprised if the show lasted very long. It isn’t innovative. It isn’t insightful, and the one thing it has going for it [for NBC] is it’s cheap to produce.”
For what it’s worth, the show does seem to stir passions, albeit mostly negative.
“I loved ‘Seinfeld’ and he has been a part of my life and everybody’s life because he’s so funny and so uplifting, but who in the hell wants to tune in to see somebody try to solve a marriage problem in a funny way?” said Al Primo, a television pioneer who developed the Eyewitness News concept, and was a vice president of news at ABC before becoming an independent producer.
Primo views “The Marriage Ref” as “a reality show gone amok, and I think it’s going to really come back and haunt Jerry. The NBC executives had to know this was a disaster because nothing gets on the air anymore without lots and lots of testing. My assumption is that nobody at NBC had the courage to tell Jerry Seinfeld that he had a bad show. But the network’s in trouble, so Jerry could have offered them air for an hour and gotten a deal. When Jerry calls up and says ‘I have a show,’ it’s a green light on the phone.”
Primo speculates that the show will continue to get panned, lose viewers and end up in the very crowded reality-show graveyard after its eight-week run — thus making its creator the latest victim of the so-called “Seinfeld Curse.” Others have included “Seinfeld” co-stars Jason Alexander, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus whose first post-“Seinfeld” forays into TV failed.
“The Seinfeld curse will be alive and well and will manifest itself in all its glory,” Primo predicted. “If you’ve worked in television, and you know what works in television, you can smell . . . either a winner or a bomb, or something that’s fixable. I don’t think this is fixable.”
Jerry Oppenheimer is the author of 10 biographies, including 2002’s “Seinfeld: The Making of an Amercan Icon.”