‘SNL’ Gave the ‘Seinfeld’ Finale the Perfect Follow-Up
There’s been a lot of talk about the last episode of Seinfeld this year after Curb Your Enthusiasm essentially remade the controversial finale, giving Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld a spiritual do-over. Sadly, Larry and Jerry didn’t continue to rewrite past embarrassments by, say, traveling back in time to stop Jerry from ziplining across Parisian rooftops in a Bee Movie costume.
But long before Curb revisited the ending of Seinfeld (which was good, actually), Jerry Seinfeld got the opportunity to add an epilogue of sorts to the finale, thanks to Saturday Night Live and the cast of Oz.
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In 1999, Seinfeld hosted SNL’s 25th season premiere with musical guest David Bowie. Coming just one week after the Saturday Night Live 25th Anniversary Special, and five months after the Seinfeld finale aired, Seinfeld used the opening monologue to joke about all the free time he suddenly had to watch Wings reruns and date married women.
But the highlight of the episode (other Chris Parnell’s “clownpenis.fart” commercial, of course) was a pre-taped sketch that followed the Jerry Seinfeld character after the events of the last episode. As we all know, the final moments of Seinfeld’s “The Finale” found the gang being sentenced to a year in prison for violating a good samaritan law, and Jerry attempting to do stand-up for his fellow inmates. It doesn’t go well.
In the SNL bit, we get to see more of Jerry adapting to life behind bars, but for some reason he’s in the intensely brutal prison from HBO’s Oz.
Jerry actually finds some aspects of prison life appealing, such as “the hole,” or solitary confinement. “You know they throw you in naked. It’s like a spa,” Jerry muses.
Jerry also got the chance to befriend, and discuss the petty minutiae of life, with Oz characters such as Beeche — presumably because George and Kramer have already been shivved to death at this point. Jerry even references the Seinfeld episode where his girlfriend “was always wearing the same dress” while discussing how Beecher took a dump on another prisoner’s face.
And J.K. Simmons shows up as his terrifying white supremacist menace Vernon Schillinger. Jerry’s meeting with the horrifically anti-Semitic Schillinger goes over about as well as his introduction to that vindictive doorman.
He also parodies the iconic episode “The Contest,” but with a disturbing Oz twist that I don’t even want to describe, to be honest.
Weirdly, the year after this episode aired, Oz itself made a sly reference to the SNL sketch. Augustus Hill, played by Harold Perrineau, learns that a local TV star is visiting the prison and remarks, “Next we’ll have Seinfeld in here.”
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In retrospect, HBO and NBC probably left a billion dollars on the table by not collaborating to turn this brief crossover into a full series.
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