The pilot episode of Seinfeld was weird for a number of reasons. George and Jerry are hanging out in some place called Pete’s Luncheonette, palling around with a server named Claire who they proceeded to ghost for the next nine years. Then there’s the fact that Kramer’s name is “Kessler,” and he owns a pet dog.
But the most glaring difference between “The Seinfeld Chronicles” and the rest of the show is the absence of Elaine Benes. Famously, the Elaine character was added to Seinfeld after network executives complained that the dynamic in the pilot was “too male-centric.” But even after Elaine (originally “Eileen”) was incorporated into the world of the series, she wasn’t given very much to do.
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The first episode that Julia Louis-Dreyfus worked on was “Male Unbonding,” which became the fourth episode of Season One. But Elaine only pops up in one scene, the beginning of an unfortunate trend in which the show’s weak writing consistently sidelined the lone female member of the gang.
“To be truthful, I really didn’t like only having one scene in ‘Male Unbonding,’” Louis-Dreyfus once said in an interview. “Or in any show where I didn’t have a lot to do, that was a very difficult thing for me to digest, shall we say.
In Larry Charles’ new memoir, Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter, the longtime Seinfeld writer admits that Elaine’s character was underserved in early years because the dudes running the show didn’t believe that they could write a female character, which was extremely frustrating for Louis-Dreyfus at the time.
“Concerned and frankly upset that she was being underutilized in the show, (Louis-Dreyfus) came to Jerry (Seinfeld) and Larry (David) weeping, while I was sitting with them in their office,” Charles writes in the book. “Her distress was justified. She was right. We had not yet tapped into the magical formula for Elaine or for unleashing Julia.”
“We had never had a need to write for three-dimensional women,” Charles continues, “and it was a failure of ours and the male hierarchy in general.”
According to Charles, the writers eventually had an “epiphany” concerning Elaine. Since they had an abundance of George ideas, they figured, “Why not give Elaine one of George’s stories?”
One such idea (pulled from David’s real life) involved a girlfriend flying in to visit George, who quickly becomes anxious for her to leave. But she doesn’t. So in Season Two, this exact premise became an Elaine storyline.
“Giving it to Elaine was easily one of the most important and seminal moments in the show,” Charles argues. “It gave Elaine an inner life. It was not a happy one. It was as dark as the guys. She was capable of the same social crimes as they were. Though she was attractive and personable, she was a mess. Suddenly Elaine was born.”
Although the idea that Elaine would become a gun nut may have been taking the “dark” element of the character a little too far.
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