YMMV / Seinfeld S2 E11 "The Chinese Restaurant"

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The restaurant manager played by James Hong deliberately prevented them from getting a table and only gives them one after they leave, due to them ignoring him for several minutes when he asked how many were to be seated and instead talked about their private lives.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: NBC strongly objected to the entire episode (they actually thought the script that was sent to them was missing pages because nothing happened). They refused to air the episode, only relenting when Larry David threatened to quit the show, and even then they aired it near the end of the season, believing that the episode would flop. It didn't.
• Growing the Beard: Generally regarded as the show's first truly great episode.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The episode features a Shout-Out to Mystery Science Theater 3000, as Jerry Seinfeld and Joel Hodgson were good friends. Jerry had a guest appearance in the show's 2017 revival.
  • George screams "You know, we’re living in a society!", a decade before the phrase would be memetically linked to The Joker.
• Once Original, Now Common: The biggest example of it in the whole show. At the time, the idea of spending a whole episode just watching the characters stand around and talk with no other plot was considered completely unworkable by the studio execs. Nowadays, entire shows revolve around the concept, and how common it is for comedies to do this, including later seasons of this show, makes it hard to see how daring the idea was at the time.

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