Why Only One Episode of ‘Seinfeld’ Has Singing in the Theme Music

It’s hard to imagine Seinfeld without its distinctive funky synth-bass theme music. Like, would the show have still been a big hit if it began with a Full House-esque song all about Jerry and his wacky friends? 

As composer Jonathan Wolff explained back in the ‘90s, the off-beat track was specifically designed to compliment, rather than interfere with, Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up lines during each show’s opening segment. Wolff referred to Seinfeld’s jokes as the primary “instrument,” and reworked each episode’s track to suit the specific monologue.  

This approach was employed for every single episode, except for one. The third season premiere, “The Note,” found Kramer spying on Joe DiMaggio, Jerry pestering his dentist to break the law and George questioning his sexuality after he’s aroused by a male masseuse. 

At the beginning of the show, Jerry does a stand-up bit about getting referrals for doctors. But, jarringly, the music includes a female vocalist, who accompanies the familiar synth part with scat-like interjections. As actor James Urbaniak, of The Venture Bros. fame, recently pointed out on social media, this one-off experiment is basically an “abomination.”

Why is this one Seinfeld episode such a musical outlier compared to the rest of the series? Well, like the internet's favorite human-bee romance and the Netflix Pop-Tart movie this is yet another bad idea that originated with Jerry Seinfeld. As Wolff explained during the show’s DVD special features, Seinfeld randomly decided that the soundtrack was a little lacking, and suggested changing things up. “At the beginning of Season Three, Jerry called me on the phone and said, ‘What can we do to just give a little sparkle to the music? Something a little different?’” Wolff said. 

After Seinfeld told Wolff that he had recently heard some “group scat music” he liked, the composer responded, “Well, we could try that.” Wolff honed in on the theme music’s horn flourishes and thought to himself, “What if I put nonsense lyrics to those?”

But during this process, for some reason, nobody bothered to inform any of the other parties involved in producing Seinfeld. According to Wolff, “We tried it. Jerry liked it. Larry liked it. We finished the episode. We did the next couple of episodes, using that music, then the first episode aired — we forgot to ask anybody else. And when other people, (the) network, Castle Rock, heard this on the air, and were surprised by it, it was not a favorable reaction.”

Yeah, perhaps not surprisingly, producers and network executives weren’t thrilled that Seinfeld went rogue and ruined his own theme music without telling anybody first. So he wasn’t allowed to keep doing it, as he’d planned. “We went back and fixed the next two episodes,” Wolff recalled. “So there’s only one episode that has that music element in it, (and) that slipped through because we forgot to ask permission.”

It also didn’t help that one refrain in the new music sounded like the singers were saying a specific phrase. “They weren’t singing this, but it sounded to me like they were singing, ‘Easy to beat!’” Julia Louis-Dreyfus told the Los Angeles Times. “At the time we were failing in the ratings, and I was convinced they were saying, ‘Easy to beat!’ So now they’re out, and now we’re the No. 1 show.”

In fairness, the “easy to beat” lines would have been appropriate for “The Contest.”