The late legend Rob Reiner didn’t just change the landscape of American comedy through his many hit films – he also talked some sense into NBC when they nearly made the biggest mistake in the history of the sitcom genre.
This past weekend, the entertainment world lost one of its most clear and unique voices when Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner died in an apparent double homicide. The tragic loss of the iconic multi-hyphenate talent and his partner now casts a pall over the entirety of show business, and the titans of the industry have spent the last few days attempting to put Reiner’s impact, both professionally and personally, into words that encompass the sheer weight of his legacy.
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In his Instagram post about Reiner’s passing, Jerry Seinfeld, star and co-creator of the smash-hit sitcom bearing his last name, revealed that Reiner had the largest impact on his career “next to Larry David and George Shapiro,” in large part because Reiner convinced Seinfeld‘s network that all-time classic episodes like “The Chinese Restaurant” weren’t grounds for cancellation.
“Next to Larry David and George Shapiro, Rob Reiner had the biggest influence on my career,” Seinfeld began, “Our show would have never happened without him. He saw something no one else could. When nobody at the network liked the early episodes, he saved us from cancellation.”
On a personal note, Seinfeld said of Reiner, who co-founded the production company Castle Rock Entertainment that helped create Seinfeld, “That I was working with Carl Reiner’s son, who happened to be one of the kindest people in show business, seemed unreal. I was naive at the time to how much his passion for us meant.”
“Rob and Michele married right as our show was starting and they became an imprint for me of how it’s supposed to work, each one broadening the other,” Seinfeld added of the couple, “Their death, together, is impossibly sad.”
In 2016, Reiner went on The Howard Stern show and explained just how close NBC came to pulling the plug on Seinfeld before he talked some sense into the network. “We knew we had a great show, and they wanted to take it off the air,” Reiner recalled, “The first few shows – there was one episode where they were waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, and (NBC) said, ‘We can’t have this show! What is this show? It’s just people sitting around talking!’”
Of course, that was the entire conceit of Seinfeld – not so much a “show about nothing” than a show about the minutiae of day-to-day life – but back in the second season, before the series would become a ratings powerhouse, NBC couldn’t conceive of its massive future success. “They were going to take it off (the air), so I went in there and I had a screaming crazy thing with (NBC executive) Brandon Tartikoff at the time, and I begged him, ‘Please, I promise you, there will be stories, it will be one of the greatest shows you ever had.’”
As was often the case, Reiner was absolutely right, and his fight to keep Seinfeld afloat led to one of the greatest comedy success stories in the history of television. Just like Seinfeld himself, sitcom fans everywhere owe the late genius a debt of gratitude.
