The Massive ‘Seinfeld’ Cast Salaries Killed the TV Business, Or So Believes Jason Alexander

Seinfeld fans already know that NBC treating George Costanza as if he were less important than Ted Danson was a bad omen for the show, but did you know that, in real life, the network caused an industry-wide panic by pretending that Paul Reiser was a full $400,000 more valuable than Jason Alexander?

Well, that’s not exactly what Alexander said when he discussed his salary on the talk show Charlie Rose in April 1998, mere weeks before the airing of the soon-to-be infamous Seinfeld finale. However, the brilliant acting talent behind one of TV history’s most petty and envious a-holes did tell the journalism giant that the Seinfeld pay structure for which he, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards fought bitterly with NBC to secure destroyed the TV economy by ensuring that Reiser could command a $1 million paycheck per episode of the significantly less impressive sitcom Mad About You.

By the end of Seinfeld, Alexander and his non-Jerry co-stars were earning a market-breaking $600,000 paycheck each per episode, and in an unsurfaced interview that recently went viral on Twitter, Alexander explained why he thought that NBC was stupid to sign such a front-loaded contract that set a precedent for preposterous star salaries and permanently disrupted the power balance in sitcom production. 

I bet NBC wouldn’t cause a TV comedy economic crisis over Ted Danson’s contract.

According to Alexander, the wedge issue that caused the rift in the Seinfeld-NBC “family” was the subject of cast compensation for the massively profitable syndication deals that the network could easily strike with every affiliate station across the country, a practice that continues to net huge profits this day. For instance, any Seinfeld fan in Chicago can attest that the busses in the Windy City still sport massive decals advertising the airing of Seinfeld re-runs on a local channel.

However, for Alexander, Louis-Dreyfus and Richards, getting their fair share of the syndication money was an impossible task (as opposed to the comically easy time a certain co-creator castmate had in securing his own bag), so they needed to secure rest-of-their-lives money on salary alone, knowing full well that, as soon as Seinfeld ended, they would face an uphill battle to continue booking work with the specters of George, Elaine or Kramer hanging over them — though Elaine would obviously win that war, along with an election or two.

While the contract that Alexander and his co-stars eventually signed with NBC factored in the massive and continued profitability of their work, the Seinfeld deal also set the market rate for other A-list actors on sitcoms that wouldn’t enjoy the endless profits that come with a quarter-century of syndication — shows such as Reiser’s Mad About You. So, by short-changing the Seinfeld cast on their back-end points, NBC set the precedent that every episode of every show, massively popular or otherwise, should net the actors millions upon millions of dollars that the network would never recoup on local TV 27 years later.

Still, the most hilariously depressing part of Alexander’s breakdown of the bad business deal NBC made with him is that, even though his paycheck was so big that it broke the market for sitcom actors, it’s still a massive underpay considering the literal billions that Alexander’s work continues to earn for NBC (and for Jerry Seinfeld, for that matter). 

With that in mind, we’re starting to understand why Alexander bristles at the Yankees turning him into a bobblehead without throwing him a bone — George is getting upset.