Rob Reiner Begged NBC to Keep ‘Seinfeld’ on the Air
Rob Reiner got very rich thanks to Jerry Seinfeld’s titular sitcom — but only because the comedian wasn’t as good as Howie Mandel.
“We did another show called Past Imperfect,” Reiner told Howard Stern in 2016. “Jerry came in to audition for that. We hired Howie Mandel, and the show went on for 13 weeks.”
“My life was going well at that point – regular spots on The Tonight Show, 300 club dates a year, I was doing big concerts, I’d bought an apartment on Central Park West,” Seinfeld told New York Magazine in 1998. “I don’t even know why I was reading for Past Imperfect. I definitely did not want to be in a sitcom.”
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Oh really? Because soon after the failed audition, Seinfeld’s manager, George Shapiro, who also happened to be Reiner’s cousin, approached Reiner and his Castle Rock Entertainment about another idea for a sitcom. “He and Larry David, they came in,” said Reiner. “Now Jerry was an established comedian. We knew Jerry, we knew his sensibility. And I knew Larry from when he did Fridays and from Saturday Night Live. So we knew there were two funny guys. When they said they wanted to make it a show about a stand-up and how he observes things, we said ‘Okay, let’s go with this.’”
NBC wasn’t as sure as Reiner. The network committed to only four episodes that it ran over the summer to middling ratings. Stern wanted to know if Reiner felt like, “Oh shit, we backed a loser.”
Nope, Reiner says, Castle Rock knew it had a great show. But NBC wanted to take it off the air because it couldn’t understand why viewers would want to watch people waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. “They said ‘We can’t have this show,’” Reiner remembered. “What is this show? It’s just people sitting around talking.”
NBC was ready to pull the plug. “So I went in there, and I had a screaming, crazy thing with (NBC executive) Brandon Tartikoff,” Reiner told Stern. “I begged him. I said, ‘Please, I promise you there’ll be stories. You can’t take this show off the air. It’s going to be one of the great shows you’ve ever had.’”
It turned out to be the greatest show Castle Rock ever had. While it tried with a few other sitcoms — The Single Guy and Boston Commons — none lasted more than a season or two. Thankfully, though, it had an ownership stake in Seinfeld. In fact, Castle Rock generated $1.5 billion from the show, according to New York Times estimates.
If those numbers are anywhere near correct, that makes Reiner’s tirade the most profitable tantrum in television history.
