I’ve been thinking for some time now that I would like to write about Seinfeld. Perhaps my all- time favourite television show I have hesitated in writing about Seinfeld as part of my research because I enjoyed it so much. So I think that blogging about it is a good compromise. I can begin a Seinfeld project, take it very seriously, but still separate my appreciation of the series from my more “academic” writing about television. Always wary of the tendency to analyse things to death, I want to avoid this eventuality because Seinfeld has provided me with over a decade of laughs and enjoyment. I would rather that this didn’t stop now. So here begins an ongoing series of posts I am calling “Pretzels and Puffy Shirts”. This category title honours two of my all time favourite episodes and well known lines from them. Pretzels…for the episode where Kramer scores a line in a Woody Allen film, the line being “these pretzels are making me thirsty”. The puffy shirt… from the episode where Jerry ends up wearing Kramer’s girlfriend’s puffy shirt on breakfast television and comes out with the beautiful line of complaint,”but I don’t want to be a pirate”.

So this evening I sat down and watched the original pilot episode. More on that very soon.