Before ‘Seinfeld’ became ‘Seinfeld’

Since “Seinfeld” went off the air in 1998, the show’s co-creators, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, have remained idiosyncratically true to their artistic selves. Seinfeld the polished comedian returned to stand-up and buried his old act in an HBO special, “I’m Telling You for the Last Time,” then built up new material and filmed that process too, in the 2002 documentary “Comedian.” Just as Seinfeld played the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in “Comedian,” David is now playing the dyspeptic “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO series that begins production for a fifth season in January.

What Seinfeld and David continue to say about themselves as artists is that they’re micro-view people. They don’t have anything big to say about politics or art or even comedy, just little side observations based on what they did today or yesterday or the day before. That’s their comfort zone. That’s a show.

And so it comes as no surprise that “The Seinfeld Story,” a one-hour special airing at 10 p.m. Thanksgiving on NBC, is not a grand thing, not a retrospective or a reunion show or anything that might reek of self-examination. It’s more a window onto a great sitcom’s accidental beginnings, not to mention a promotional push for the DVD of the first three seasons, which Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment released Tuesday, in the thick of the holiday season.

The special, edited from material on the DVD, makes no attempt to analyze what “Seinfeld” meant to popular culture. Nor is it feel-good or wistfully nostalgic: Cast members Jason Alexander, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus appear on screen, but not together in anything resembling a group hug.

Like an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music” or an “E! True Hollywood Story” without the madness, drugs and the stock shot of an ambulance, “The Seinfeld Story” follows the show’s early progression from failed pilot to full-fledged series. Though it’s by now a familiar story, the show’s beginnings remain remarkable. Networks seldom do what NBC inadvertently did with “Seinfeld” -- left it on the air to find its voice. The special relives this lore: How after getting dumped on the air as a failed pilot, the show was kept on life support by NBC’s Rick Ludwin, who gave up two hours of his specials budget so that four more episodes could be made. “I have to say, my initial reaction was not joy,” David says. The four episodes led to an order for 13 more in 1991 (David: “I couldn’t believe it; this thing now is getting much bigger than it was supposed to ... “), which became a full order for 22 more (David: “I cried on my bed at the prospect of coming up with 22 more of these things”). Along the way, “Seinfeld” was regarded inside the network as quirky but plot-less, an oddity. Nowadays it would be canceled, quickly, without a fruit basket.

But it’s also too easy to say that all shows should be given the second and third chances “Seinfeld” got. Seen today, the early episodes, even the now-classic “Chinese Restaurant,” feel slow and somewhat hesitant -- baby steps in an unlikely evolutionary process that would eventually make “Seinfeld” one of the most creatively innovative and lucrative sitcoms ever. (In syndication, “Seinfeld” has grossed what those in the entertainment industry refer to as “north of a billion” dollars.)

Indeed, most long-running sitcoms don’t change as significantly as “Seinfeld” did during its eight-year run on NBC. As initially conceived, “Seinfeld” was nominally supposed to be a show about how a stand-up comedian gets his material. The early episodes intersperse one or two light plot devices (Jerry’s grown sick of an old friend but wonders how to break up with a guy), with Seinfeld the comedian commenting on the action in his act.

From this template, of course, grew something much zanier, darker and freer. In the special, Seinfeld traces the “aha!” moment to an episode in which George has to save a whale and Kramer’s been hitting golf balls at the beach. “And we thought, wouldn’t it be great if it were Kramer’s golf ball that had gotten stuck in the blowhole of the whale. Can we do that? Should we do that?” By its latter seasons, “Seinfeld” was juggling four or five storylines, not two, and came up with increasingly loony ways to illustrate its characters arrested development. David left in 1995 and came back for the final episode, in which Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine, finally, are left sitting in a prison cell. This was “Seinfeld’s” final plot twist: Those characters we’d been enjoying all those years, these people we’d embraced as our own, were in fact social criminals.

It seems telling that NBC has to turn to one of its old shows to get ratings on a night when American families, gorged on turkey and various complex carbohydrates, are sure to be camped in front of their TV sets.

That pieces of the special are included in the DVD package makes this particular television event a kind of infomercial -- and unintentionally a program that betrays how far NBC’s Thursday night “Must See TV” lineup, which “Seinfeld” once anchored, has fallen.

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‘The Seinfeld Story’

Where: NBC

When: 10 to 11 p.m. Thursday

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

Executive producers Jerry Seinfeld, George Shapiro, Howard West.