The other day I received my most recent Amazon order – the box set of Seinfeld, seasons 1 through 3. It’s all dressed up in unneccesary unnecessary hoo-hah (playing cards, salt & pepper shakers etc.), and I could live without them. Normally, I wouldn’t have bought this kind of edition.
However … in this case I did because included in this set was a script (“The Big Salad”) and I really wanted to see what a script from a show like Seinfeld would be like.
(I suppose it would have been cheaper and easier to simply go to the site, Seinfeld Scripts.)
What strikes me most about it is how minimalist it is. It’s almost exclusively the dialogue – few, if any, stage directions. Those that are there are quite … umm, terse I suppose you’d call them.
The point here, I think, is the simplicity.
And watching the shows on the DVDs, the simplicity comes through and is, to a large extent, what makes the shows work. Yes, it’s funny. But that is partly because nothing gets in the way of the lines and how they are delivered.
(Cross-posted on Writelife.)
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