“The Chinese Restaurant” is considered a seminal Seinfeld episode now, but NBC tried to pull the plug when Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David first pitched it. In its lackluster first season, Seinfeld had just about scraped by in the ratings and earned a season 2 renewal, but the show was on pretty thin ice going into its second year.
During the season, Seinfeld and David turned in a script entitled “The Chinese Restaurant,” effectively a bottle episode in which Jerry, Elaine, and George spend the entire half-hour waiting for a table in a restaurant. Now, it’s lauded as one of the greatest episodes of Seinfeld — and a major stepping stone in the foundation of the series — but at the time, NBC nearly scrapped the whole thing.
NBC Tried To Stop Jerry Seinfeld & Larry David From Making “The Chinese Restaurant”
According to the “Inside Look” on the DVD special features, when Seinfeld and David first showed NBC a script for “The Chinese Restaurant,” network executives objected to the episode’s production. They thought that audiences would be bored by an episode that plays out in real time, without any scene breaks or even a discernible plot.
NBC was ready to veto the whole thing until David threatened to quit the show if they didn’t approve the episode for production. The execs begrudgingly allowed the episode to be produced (you can’t lose Larry David), but the network held off on airing it until near the end of the season.
But, not only did “The Chinese Restaurant” make it to air; it became a classic. It reinvented what a sitcom could be. It’s when Seinfeld honed in on that show-about-nothing mundanity, digging into the tiniest minutiae of everyday life. Jason Alexander has since described this episode as “the defining beginning of the anarchy of Seinfeld.”
“The Chinese Restaurant” Is Now Considered A Quintessential Seinfeld Episode
Today, “The Chinese Restaurant” is considered a quintessential Seinfeld episode, often ranked alongside “The Contest” and “The Puffy Shirt” and “The Marine Biologist” as one of the high points of Seinfeld’s nine-season run, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a perfect example of what the so-called “show about nothing” did at its very best.
Nothing really happens in “The Chinese Restaurant,” but at the same time, so much happens. George tells an embarrassing sex story, Jerry sets off a chain of gossip through his entire family, and Elaine nearly dies of hunger. They’re just waiting for a table for 20 minutes, but something funny is always happening.
When people think about what a Seinfeld episode is, and what makes it different from episodes of other sitcoms, “The Chinese Restaurant” is what they’re thinking of. It satirizes the little annoyances in our daily lives. It strips away all the frills that distract from the bad writing of other sitcoms to put a spotlight on witty dialogue and well-rounded characters.
“The Chinese Restaurant” Helped Seinfeld Find Its Voice
Until Seinfeld and David wrote the game-changing script for “The Chinese Restaurant,” Seinfeld was set up as a more or less traditional multi-camera sitcom. The characters got into wacky misadventures throughout the course of their day, they fired off quippy one-liners in every conversation, and they always got their ironic comeuppance in time for the closing credits.
“The Chinese Restaurant” marks the moment that Seinfeld started to find its voice. Within a couple of years, Seinfeld would perfect the multi-cam format, revolutionize it, and ultimately make it obsolete. With an absurdly obsessive focus on the unspoken rules of society, Seinfeld wrote a comedic language of its own, and that language was born in “The Chinese Restaurant.”
To think, if NBC had gotten their way, “The Chinese Restaurant” would’ve never even existed. If Seinfeld and David hadn’t broken new ground and carved out their own niche in “The Chinese Restaurant,” then Seinfeld would’ve remained in its primitive form as a wannabe mainstream sitcom.
It might’ve legged it out for another season or two, but it would’ve eventually been cancelled, it wouldn’t have made television history, and NBC wouldn’t have the cash cow of all cash cows on its hands. If David hadn’t had the gall to threaten to walk, NBC would’ve vetoed “The Chinese Restaurant” and any of Seinfeld’s subsequent experimental episodes.
Seinfeld’s Bottle Episodes Are Some Of Its Best
People tend to look down their nose at bottle episodes, because they’re usually only made to save money and pad out the episode count. But a well-crafted bottle episode is a great way to slow down and focus on the characters. Breaking Bad’s controversial “Fly” episode might not advance the main plot, but it puts Walt and Jesse into a Waiting for Godot-style two-hander.
Some of Seinfeld’s best episodes were bottle episodes. “The Chinese Restaurant” is the first great example, but there’s also “The Parking Garage,” in which the awesome foursome spends an entire episode looking for their car in a giant parking lot. The existential dread of this episode — especially with its hilariously bleak final twist — almost feels like The Twilight Zone.
There’s also a different parking-related bottle episode, “The Parking Space,” in which George spends an entire day standing by his car outside Jerry’s apartment building, in a standoff with another driver. The whole episode is like a wish-fulfillment fantasy for anyone who’s ever been burned in a parking standoff.
“The Subway” doesn’t technically count as a bottle episode, since it jumps all over the city, but it mostly takes place on subway trains. Each of the four main characters have to venture onto the subway for a different purpose (a wedding, a job interview, etc.) and each of them faces a unique problem along the way (a mugging, a power outage, a nudist, etc.).
Most TV shows do a bottle episode when they run out of ideas or money, or both. It’s usually a last resort. But Seinfeld’s writers were so creative that they could write a bottle episode that was as exciting and unpredictable as a fast-paced, plot-heavy, action-packed episode.
