TVSquad

A lot of you probably read that headline and got confused, because the first season DVD set for Seinfeld has already been released - twice, once as a separate set and once as part of the mega, collectible complete series set. But it's true, another version of the first season is coming out on September 16.

Actually, this will be the first time that the first season is released on its own. The first set released was a combination of season one and season two, because season one was only five episodes long. Now Sony wants to release the first set on its own at a cheap price (around $15.00) so TV fans who are thinking about getting the later full season sets can sample the DVDs. You get all the extras from the season one set (gag real, deleted scenes, commentary, etc) and a $5.00 rebate for one of the larger sets.

Eh, I'm just going to buy the complete series set.

(S03E18) " I got shoulder-humped by a doberman...to completion." - Tiffany Henson

I was wondering when the hospital would get around to giving Earl the boot. It only makes sense that Camden County's health care facilities are run just like everything else in the area. I love the idea of Camden Cash. I think I'll pitch the idea to some of our overcrowded hospitals here in Los Angeles.

Remember a few weeks ago, when I said how much I envied Jason Lee? Well, after seeing him wedged in that shopping cart and bounced around in that wheelchair, I am forced to rescind that statement. It's good to see Mr. Lee is still willing to work for a living.

Ask Men has a list of 5 Things You Didn't Know about Seinfeld. I don't consider myself the biggest Seinfeld fan on the planet, but I do think I've seen every episode, and I didn't know any of this stuff. Maybe you die-hard fans will scoff at the list and proclaim your knowledge of all those little known facts and more.

For instance, did you realize that we never got to meet any of Jerry, George, or Elaine's siblings? We got to meet their parents, but each of them referenced siblings during several episodes and we never, ever saw or met them. That's actually a cool little insight to their characters--that they really don't want to see their siblings. In case you were wondering, Elaine has a sister (her nephew was the one who was obsessed with the nipple slip Christmas card), Jerry has a sister, and George has a brother.

A lot of words and phrases from Seinfeld have made it into our everyday language. Yada yada yada, not that there's anything wrong with it, close talker, hipster doofus, to name just a few.

TBS has a contest at their site. They've created a poster that includes 38 references to the show. Can you find them all? The answers are available at a link just below the poster. Some of them are hard to figure out, but you can enlarge the poster.

Well, you knew this would happen sooner or later. I'm just glad I haven't gone crazy buying the single season sets.

On the same day that the ninth and final season of Seinfeld is released (November 6), Sony will also release Seinfeld: The Complete Series. Not only will the set contain every single episode, there will be tons of extras for fans too. One of the more intriguing extras is a 226 page coffee table book ("a coffee table book about coffee tables!") that will come in the box, with cast memories, photos, trivia, yada, yada, yada.

Question: is it OK to joke about rape when you're talking about insects?

That's what some people are wondering this afternoon as Jerry Seinfeld is getting a little heat from anti-rape groups (hmmm...I would hope that every group is anti-rape, but I digress...) for a remark he made to the New York Daily News promoting his Bee Movie flick:

"Bees have the only perfect society on earth ... They have no crime, they have no drugs, they have no rape. A little rape, but it's not that bad."

Our corporate siblings at AOL have a fun interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus posted to their "TV Tattler" site. My colleague Geoff Bennett asks her some questions about her Emmy win for Old Christine -- she took the statuette to work the next day and placed it on the craft services table -- casting Blair Underwood as a love interest, and what it's like to play a working mother while being one herself.

But the question that got my attention was when Geoff asked Julia about her reaction to the Michael Richards incident. While she wouldn't condemn her friend and Seinfeld co-star, Julia was pretty truthful about how she felt at the time it happened: "At first I thought someone was kidding. I couldn't believe it. The whole thing was just so profoundly sad and heart-breaking. I was just really devastated by it."

This is a public service announcement to Jason Alexander.

Life after Seinfeld has been really tough for you has it? I mean not as tough as Michael Richards who should follow Isaiah Washington into "pottymouth rehab", but you haven't exactly parlayed your existence into other gigs like Julia Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of Old Christine. Our enthusiasm for the dimwitted loveable man has been curbed towards Larry David, who helped you become a star. Even the virtually unknown Seinfeld writer Spike Feresten has been able to translate writing his soup nazi episode into his own talk show.

All you have to work with is your short lived marriage to Britney Spears. Oh wait. That wasn't you either.

Is this the "ultimate collectible" or just kinda gross?

Someone has put on ebay a piece of gum that Jerry Seinfeld supposedly chewed. I don't really know how you'd check something like that. The owner (owner?) of the gum says that he and a friend were walking near Central Park West about a year ago, spoke to Seinfeld, and then Seinfeld threw something shiny into a trash can. It was foil wrapper, and inside was the gum. So they took it.

If you win the gum (bids are at $6.99 right now), you also get a photo of Seinfeld and Michael Richards taken on the Seinfeld set, and a picture of the trash can.

But as the ebay auction says, it's "NOT INTENDED FOR CONSUMPTION." Something tells me that if the show was still on the air, this would make a good episode.

[via TV Tattle]

Even though watching reruns of Seinfeld is now considered lame, it's still fun to see the old episodes where now-famous actors had bit parts. Pete McEntegart over at Sports Illustrated is talking about Seinfeld again and he has listed the Top 10 before-the-were-famous Seinfeld guests. Some of them are actually in classic episodes with some classic quotes that we've been saying for years.

His list includes Teri ("They're real and they're spectacular") Hatcher as Jerry's well-endowed girlfriend, Mariska Hargitay as an actress auditioning for the role of Elaine, Marcia Cross as dermatologist Dr. Sara "Pimple-Popper" Sitarides, Michael Chiklis as a party host, and Courtney Cox as Jerry's girlfriend who claims to be his wife to get discounted dry cleaning. Missing from the list (even the honorable mentions) is Bryan Cranston, who played the dad on Malcolm in the Middle for 7 years. On Seinfeld, he played Dr. Tim Whatley, the dentist who converted to Judaism just so he could make the jokes.

Who is your favorite guest on Seinfeld?

Related:
Jerry Seinfeld is bee-utiful -- VIDEO
Real Kramer says he's not fake Kramer
Kramer has a Mel Gibson moment

A couple of more TV celeb-related incidents post-Michael Richards rant have been making the news. First up, Andy Dick. You know him from News Radio, Less than Perfect and his MTV series The Assistant. He jumped on the stage at the Improv during Ian Bragg's set and, in an attempt at "too soon" humor, brandished the n-bomb. He's been apologizing ever since.

A legitimately funny and meaningful use of the "n-word," however, came from Damon Wayans' of Showtime's The Underground. Wayans took the stage at the now famous Laugh Factory last night with a stack of twenties. Since Richards' rant, the club owner has banned the word - levying a $20 per usage fee and three month ban on any comedian who uses the word. Wayans proceeded to drop the n-word sixteen times saying, "I'll be damned if the white man uses that word last." That's $320 price tag for a little freedom of speech, if you're counting.

When I was a bright, young journalism student back at Rutgers University (Go Scarlet Knights!) I remember a mantra that my professors bore into our brains each and every week: check your sources. If you verify your facts with at least two or three other sources you are good to go. Apparently, the news editors over at WJZ, Baltimore's CBS affiliate, missed that day in class. And, because they did they ended up in an extremely embarrassing situation.

Earlier this week they reported that Michael Richards appeared in blackface at a roast honoring Whoopi Goldberg. They reported this as breaking news not once, but twice, and attributed the story to the website Dateline:Hollywood. Well, it seems that the news department over at WJZ didn't realize that the site satirizes Hollywood. Needless to say, they were red-faced about the entire blackface situation (place groans here) and they ran a brief correction during their 11 p.m. newscast. What they should have really done was fired the staff member(s) who discovered that information and didn't read further about Britney's private areas wanting to talk to the press. They may have gotten and idea that it wasn't a legitimate news site then.

Oh, and someone's internal alarm should have gone off when they saw that story, since it is so familiar to something that happened back in 1993. That's when Ted Danson, who was dating Whoopi Goldberg at the time, appeared in blackface at a Friar's Club roast. Really, it wasn't that long ago, newsies.

Michael Richards' recent experimentation with Tourette's Syndrome has one fortunate outcome -- it provides a good excuse for me to introduce myself to the readers of TV Squad! I've been a professional stand-up comic for the last four years, and as TV Squad's newest writer I've been asked to give an insider's take on Michael Richard's use of the "N word."

I think the most important fallout from what I will from this point forward call "the Kramer incident" is that Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory where the Kramer incident took place, has banned the N-Word from his club. A club owner has the right to ban any kind of speech he'd like from his stage (I've worked places where you had to be Disney-clean and places where every foul word on the planet was not only acceptable, but encouraged), but Masada's PR move is fear-driven and wrong.

The Mayor of Television (hey, they had an election for Mayor of Television? Why didn't anyone tell us??) has invented the Law and Order Fantasy League Game. Basically, you guess which "ripped from the headlines" story one of the Law and Order shows (the original, Criminal Intent, and Special Victims Unit) is going to ripoff write an homage to. Will it be Michael Richards? The O.J. Simpson book controversy?

But you can't just guess which show is going to do which plot and be done with it. You have to tweak it a little bit, so it's "original" (cough cough). So, maybe a former sitcom actor says some nasty racial remarks, only this time it's not at a comedy club, it's at a private party. Or maybe a former pro baseball star (not a football star! accused of killing his parents (not his ex-wife and her friend!) decides to create a web site (not publish a book!) showing pics of the murder scene and how he might have done it.

The Mayor's idea for a Michael Richards-inspired story is more elaborate than mine, and would fit the L&O world nicely.

[via TV Tattle]

If you've been following the Michael Richards apology tour, you know that the actor made an appearance on the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Keep Hope Alive radio program in which he claimed to be "shattered" by his own remarks. That wasn't good enough for the Rev. The day after Richards' appearance, Jackson called for a boycott of the recent seventh season Seinfeld DVD release to punish the actor where it really hurts - the pocketbook.

How boycotting the Seinfeld DVD set would actually hurt Richards is beyond me. Between syndication points and a series-run as Kramer, I think Richards is pretty set financially. As a symbolic act or even one motivated by publicity, I suppose a boycott makes a bit more sense -- but not much seeing as Richards' words were spewed without the consent of the entire cast and crew of Seinfeld. (I've linked to it in the past, but if you want a better reason to hold Seinfeld suspect, check out hip-hop artist Danny Hoch's monologue about his scheduled appearance on the show.)