Seinfeld on Netflix marks an olive branch between eras

The upcoming Seinfeld-Netflix convergence cannot help reminding us of the crossroads the 1997-98 television season constituted.

On Wednesday, one month ahead of the show’s availability October 1, Netflix introduced Seinfeld as its newest syndicated tenant. With one entity established as an entertainment empire, and the other fastened into an exemplary nostalgic legacy, the symbolic unity is altogether welcome.

That said, one party is still a decidedly 21st-century phenomenon, the other the definitive primetime sitcom of the ’90s. And there was a time, namely the decade’s final quarter, when the former’s period merrily encroached on the latter’s.

Before hitting its stride and fulfilling myriad prophecies through DVDs and the Internet, Netflix launched its brand on August 29, 1997. This means it came to life 27 days before “The Butter Shave” commenced Seinfeld’s swan song season.

It followed up by debuting its website on April 14, 1998, precisely one month ahead of “The Finale” on NBC. The company’s introductory press release touted “virtually every DVD…available for rental or purchase,” which amounted to roughly 925 titles.

With that bare-minimum overlap, Netflix’s arrival signaled the demise of more peaked-in-the-’90s names than Blockbuster Video. It was somewhere around umpteen-hundred-fifty among the items signifying the pop-culture gatekeepers’ excessive eagerness to usher in a new decade, century, and millennium.

And who else but Seinfeld’s title star reminded his onscreen nemesis and vast audience that the change in millennium was not as close as the hype insisted?

When Netflix was four months away, “The Millennium” saw Jerry burst Newman’s bubble with a technicality the latter overlooked while planning his “Newmannium” party more than two-and-a-half years in advance. (At that point the occasion he was booking a venue to celebrate was more than three years and change off.)

When Seinfeld ceased new output, it was one of the most emphatic tolls on the ’90s death knell. And there were still 596 days left in the decade.

For those who, at the time or retroactively, wanted to savor the ’90s in full while we could, there was no better spokesperson than Seinfeld’s namesake. This was a show that, ahead of its finale, the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik singled out opposite fellow 1989 startup The Simpsons for a peerless “postmodern sensibility.”

Either show “connects with the truth of our experience,” Zurawik proclaimed in his longform May 3, 1998 report. Seinfeld, in particular, “took a dying formula and reconnected it to the way millions of viewers were really feeling about their lives in the 1990s.”

Two years later, barely 10 weeks after the calendar underwent its four-digit change, Salon’s James Nestor quoted Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson as saying the series “tells us more about ourselves in the ’90s than the New York Times.”

As a firmer-through-the-passage-of-time testament to Seinfeld’s unique entrenchment in its decade, TV critic Jennifer Keishin Armstrong published Seinfeldia in 2016. Previewing that book, NBC News’ Adam Howard called the series a “blockbuster sitcom” (pun presumed unintended, but most apt) and an “era-defining phenomenon.”

With such a status, Seinfeld’s age is not supposed to mix with that of Netflix. When the show ceased new output, it was one of the most emphatic tolls on the ’90s death knell. And there were still 596 days left in the decade.

In fairness to the rising content acquisition/production behemoth, it did not overwhelm the balance of the ’90s with its futurism. Its only other major developments between “The Finale” and Y2K, let alone the real millennium a year later, were declining Jeff Bezos’ purchasing bid in the summer of 1998 and establishing its subscription offerings in September of 1999.

Now that Netflix and Seinfeld are together, subscribers can gorge on as much gourmet ’90s nostalgia as they please at a time, any time.

Cofounders Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings were making obligatory calculations for the long haul, and their startup strategy looked ahead with sound accuracy. But in the meantime, they incorporated plenty of what was then an array of unmistakably then-and-now trends from the ’90s dusk.

Brian Raftery captured that balance in a Wired write-up on the brand’s 20th birthday. He noted that DVDs had emerged as the (arguably long-time-coming) visual counterpart to compact discs in 1996. And as other sources recounted, Hastings was hurting for a way to eliminate hard-hitting late fees like the $40 he once incurred.

“The direct-to-your-door approach might now seem typical of the late-’90s shop-com boom,” Raftery wrote, “but Netflix’s strongest selling point may have been its pro-binge approach, even back then.”

Any ’90s kid who had a halfway fulfilling childhood remembers learning a better-than-nothing attitude when they could only rent their latest favorite film from Blockbuster for a single day. Netflix, Raftery reminded us, started its revolution by permitting weeklong windows between delivery and return.

And it was all done by mail. That meant a natural convenience for the customer and, in the Seinfeld universe, a new item for Newman and his postal colleagues to handle with care.

Fast-forward (or whatever you call the post-cassette-era version of that action) to the streaming era, and binging looks here to stay. Now that Netflix and Seinfeld are together, subscribers can gorge on as much gourmet ’90s nostalgia as they please at a time, any time.

It may be only one item from that menu, but it comes from that menu all the same. Lose yourself in the show more than in its host, and you will forget to ponder whether Jerry could have grown lasting legs in the streaming age.