At night, when Bill O'Reilly is sound asleep beneath a blanket made of surplus XXL "Culture Warrior" varsity jackets and lying on a bed made almost entirely out of "The Spin Stops Here" golf balls, what are the petty annoyances and long-held grievances that fill his rage-dreams? Thanks to his new, rambling, thoroughly untethered to logical structure, personal memoir, A Bold Fresh Piece Of Humanity, we now know at least one thing that O'Reilly is still irrationally angry about: The Seinfeld finale.
As you may remember, though maybe you don't considering it happened ten years ago, Seinfeld ended not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a "Good Samaritan Law" court case: Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer stood trial for essentially being self-involved, with several of the enemies they had made over the course of the series coming back to testify against them. It wasn't the best ending for a long-running sitcom, but it certainly wasn't the worst (Roseanne). Still, it stung Bill O'Reilly right in the heart like a giant cynical liberal jellyfish.
Reports Portfolio:
"After nine years of clever writing and brilliant comedic acting, Seinfeld's closing act rivaled Petticoat Junction in witty payoff," he writes. "So what the heck happened?
"Since I'm pretty sure I understand the deep cynicism of head writer Larry David and also the middling cynicism of Jerry Seinfeld, I think these guys tanked the final episode on purpose."
Friends, I'm pretty sure I understand the deep cynicism of Bill O'Reilly, which is why I think he's suggesting that David and Seinfeld wrote a bad finale on purpose, with no evidence and/or basic logic to support his claim. Why would they crash and burn the series on purpose? Just to piss off Bill O'Reilly to such a degree that he writes about it 10 years later? (Incidentally, that's exactly why they did it, and I applaud them.)
Still, O'Reilly thinks he could have made the finale much, much better:
Using Johnny Carson's brilliant last program as a model, all the Seinfeld people had to do was assemble the cast for a one-hour "best moments" special. Just let the characters kick it around, telling viewers what mattered to them and why, and then roll in the clips. Give the folks some inside-baseball as to how the show came together each week and then wrap it up with some bloopers.
Forget the fact that Carson's Tonight Show was a talk show not a sitcom, and that Seinfeld did actually have a clip show immediately preceding the finale, O'Reilly is brilliant. A clip show! Inside baseball! Bloopers! Why didn't anyone think of these things before? People love clips and blooping while looking inside baseballs!
Bill O'Reilly should re-write every TV finale. Instead of a moving, death montage epilogue, The O'Reilly Cut of the Six Feet Under finale would be a roundtable with all of the characters discussing, "What do you think happens after you die?," and laughing about that time Michael C. Hall tripped and fell into a casket on set (hilarious!). Likewise, The O'Reilly Cut of The Sopranos finale wouldn't end with an ambiguous black screen, but with a heart-warming montage of James Gandolfini going door-to-door shaking hands with HBO subscribers and personally thanking them for watching the show.