Bill Murray Hated ‘Seinfeld’
It’s hard to imagine Seinfeld.
Jerry Seinfeld’s name. But it turned out Murray did catch at least one installment of the sitcom. “I never saw Seinfeld until the final episode, and that’s the only one I saw,” Murray revealed. “And it was terrible. I’m watching, thinking, ‘This isn’t funny at all. It’s terrible!’”
Get in line, Murray. The Ghostbusters star is hardly the first person to have a less-than-glowing appraisal of Seinfeld’s final episode. While Larry David has long defended the decision to punish the show’s main characters for their crimes against humanity, critics and fans largely held their noses. “The show’s swan song was off-key and bloated,” said Entertainment Weekly. Time described the reaction to the episode as “downright awful.”
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Even Seinfeld wasn’t sure the finale worked. “I sometimes think we really shouldn’t have even done it,” he said during a 2017 New Yorker festival. “There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy.”
So, of course, Murray didn’t find the final episode funny. Every joke was a reference to an earlier Seinfeld episode, with weirdos like the Soup Nazi and the Bubble Boy testifying against the show’s antiheroes. None of this could have made sense to Murray, who might have appreciated the finale’s coal-dark humor if he’d been along for the ride for nine seasons.
Murray itted he was out-of-touch when it came to TV comedy across the board, never catching a single episode of The Office — neither the Ricky Gervais nor the Steve Carell versions. He calls Larry David “What’s-His-Name” when trying to come up with Seinfeld’s name, and then its he never saw Curb Your Enthusiasm either.
Fighting buddy Chevy Chase was starring in Community at the time of the Murray interview, but predictably, Murray hadn’t seen that sitcom either. “I’m hoping it’s funny. It looks kind of funny,” he said. “Chevy in life can really be funny. I don’t see him that often anymore, but in life he’s a hell of a lot more fun than I am.”
His Chase and Murray threw punches backstage at Saturday Night Live, neither guy was cut out for sitcom sets.
