When you think about the archetypal sitcom, it’s hard not to focus your attention on Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s “show about nothing”, the quite brilliant Seinfeld. Set in New York as a fictionalised version of Jerry lives out his life as a comedian with friends Elaine, George and Kramer, the show is both pioneering and joyously irreverent. It’s as good today as it was when it was first released over three decades ago.
The very nature of a sitcom is to bring joy into your home. A sub-30 minute piece of television designed to warm your heart and nourish your soul, the art of creating a sitcom was arguably perfected by the team at Seinfeld. With Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as Elaine, Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer and Jason Alexander as George Costanza, Seinfeld had a high-level supporting cast to rely on.
Running from 1989 to 1998 and delivering 180 impeccable episodes, the show is regarded as a pinnacle of television work. However, not everything was sweet behind the scenes of the show and, at one point, one issue threatened to derail the show’s narrative.
Alexander’s George Costanza is often cited as the finest part of the show’s humour. Based on Larry David’s real life, he acts as Seinfeld’s partner, providing comic relief, an unbelievably cantankerous constitution and delivering line after line of quotable brilliance. In the earlier season of the show, George is often in pursuit of women, trying to find a romantic relationship, though he is hopeless at maintaining them.
That almost changes when he becomes attached to Susan Ross, played by Heidi Swedberg. Susan, an executive at NBS who helps greenlight George and Jerry’s sitcom pilot, eventually becomes George’s fiancée before sadly passing away from toxic glue poisoning after licking too many wedding invitations. Her death is welcomed by George, who quickly moves on with the iconic line: “Well, let’s go get some coffee”.
The duo matched their on-screen issues off-screen as Alexander and Sweberg allegedly struggled to connect while not filming, and the actor behind George claimed it was eventually what saw Swedberg’s character meet her untimely end, stating she was “fucking impossible” to work with.
“I couldn’t figure out how to play off of her,” Alexander said of Swedberg when speaking to Howard Stern in 2015. “Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring. And she would do something, and I would go, ‘OK, I see what she’s going to do — I’m going to adjust to her.’ And I’d adjust, and then it would change.”
It left Alexander dismayed when he found out Larry David was planning for Susan and George to get engaged after only three episodes. “What [David] said was, what Heidi brought to the character is, we could do the most horrible things to her, and the audience was still on my side,” Alexander told the radio host.
It would take Seinfeld and Louis-Dreyfuss’ stepping in after equally difficult scenes with Swedberg for the axe to come down. “They go, ‘You know what? It’s fucking impossible. It’s impossible,’” said Alexander, who has always maintained he had no problem with Swedberg as a person. “And Julia actually said, ‘Don’t you want to just kill her?’ And Larry went, ‘Ka-bang!’”
After appearing on the show, Alexander was pained to clear up that there was nothing personal behind his comments: “The impetus for telling this story was that Howard said, ‘Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me you all wanted to kill her.’ So I told the story to try and clarify that no one wanted to kill Heidi.”
“[Swedberg] was generous and gracious, and I am so mad at myself for retelling this story in any way that would diminish her,” Alexander continued. “If I had had more maturity or more security in my own work, I surely would have taken her query and possibly tried to adjust the scenes with her. She surely offered. But, I didn’t have that maturity or security.”
