Within the last week, seemingly timeless holiday staples Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving were thrown under the Internet’s #content bus. If children’s fare like that isn’t safe, then what chance does a slightly more edgy classic sticom like Seinfeld stand when viewed through the lens of 2018?
That’s certainly the premise of Does It Hold Up? a YouTube series where classic forms of entertainment are shown fresh eyes to see if, well, they hold up. Seinfeld is absolutely a show of its time — a world without cell phones in a very different New York, politically and socially.
And though it’s closer than you might think, in the end, a group of teens and 20-somethings came together to vote on whether or not Seinfeld held up and the results were not all that surprising.
The video is quite long at nearly 15-minutes, but it does feature a good amount of Seinfeld clips which you can watch without judgement when you claim you’re doing so under the guise of historical contextualization. In the video, a group of 8 young people of various ages, races, religions, sexual orientations, etc., who were previously unacquainted with the show, were tasked with watching classic episodes of Seinfeld.
They were then asked if the episodes would hold up in 2018. While at least half the viewers thought each individual episode – “The Merv Griffin Show” (5/8), “The Soup Nazi” (4/8), The Cigar Store Indian (5/8), “The Contest” (7/8), and “The Hamptons (5/8) – “held up,” overall the younger generation voted that Seinfeld as a whole does not hold up today.
The end result might hurt the feelings of or confuse people of an older, less hip generation, but it should make sense to anyone who has been paying attention. While the spirit of Seinfeld has lived on with Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm and the titular character lives as a real human being making Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, its understandable how the exact plots of the show would be considered problematic today. It’s not unreasonable to think today’s children will one day grow up to think that everything happening today wouldn’t be cool then. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
