Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee Is Unlike The Other 99 Percent of Webseries

Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t been like you for decades now.

Even if you are, like him, a stand-up comedian.

Even if you are, like him, making your own webseries.

Case in point:

  • As Seinfeld promotes his upcoming fourth season of his webseries, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, he does so via interview by David Letterman in front of a live audience at the Paley Center for Media. If you’re lucky, Splitsider will pick your webseries for its “This Week in Web Videos” column.
  • His crew shoots three hours of footage with each guest, driving and talking, and edits it down to episodes that range from almost eight minutes to more than 22 minutes. Your typical webisodes averaged five minutes long but now are closer to three. Viewers watched 30 seconds before deciding whether it was funny enough to watch an entire episode, let alone the rest of them.
  • He has a budget of $100,000 per webisode. Do you have a budget? If so, was it entirely supported thanks to donations from Kickstarter or Indiegogo, or just directly from your friends and family?
  • He has many millions of dollars from his megahit sitcom, Seinfeld, and stand-up touring, but his dollars don’t pay that budget; Acura sponsors his webseries, which is produced by Sony’s Embassy Row and distributed via Crackle — the Sony-run digital studio (Sony Pictures Television also produced/distributed Seinfeld). Acura already is sponsoring 24 new episodes. You used to know a gal who owned a green Acura Integra in 1998. She seemed cool. What’s her number, again?
  • Seinfeld owns a large collection of Porsches but doesn’t use his own cars for the series; instead, they’re vintage cars secured for the episodes by Acura. Or are they? Complex, whilst documenting all of the cars seen in his series, seemed to think one supplier of Seinfeld’s cars actually is owned by him. You never thought about using a car in NYC, but when you rented a car in L.A. for a weekend, you racked up three parking tickets and there went your budget.
  • His webseries doesn’t even have a point. It’s just what the title says. If even that. “This is an anti-show about a nonevent,” Seinfeld said last night. Bwhahahahahaha.
  • And the guests are all people who inhabit the same 1-percenter orbit of Seinfeld. He described his required guest list of comedic personalities as a  “weird, subset Pekinese breed of human,” adding: “Anybody who is a little normal, even a normal actor or actress, I’m lost.” His orbit extended in this fourth season to Aziz Ansari, Robert Klein and Sarah Jessica Parker, Jon Stewart and George Wallace. Everyone in your webseries is a “normal” actor or actress, no matter how “weird” they may be to anyone outside of show business.
  • He also has multiple Webby Awards and an Emmy nomination for his troubles. You thought about nominating your webseries for the Webbys but couldn’t afford the entry fees.
  • And I’m writing about it right now. Your emails promoting your webseries are languishing in my inbox along with 3,000 other unread emails. Please accept my apologies.

Here is the trailer for the fourth season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which returns June 19, 2014:

Case closed.

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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