Susan's parents name George the head of Susan foundation, much to his dismay... George uses the photo of Susan to date other women for pity... Jerry is bothered that his new girlfriend has big, "man's hands"... Elaine hates "The English Patient", but everyone else loves it... Kramer cannot sleep due to too bright neon lights of a chicken restaurant seen through his window... Everyone feels Jerry's new girlfriend is terrible, but he himself cannot find a single flaw about her... When his dentist converts to Judaism and starts making jokes about Jews, Jerry is angered... Elaine inspires a man to make a cake shop selling only muffin tops, but the rest of the muffins need to be disposed off... In order to get pity from women and get a date, George pretends he is an Arkansas tourist in New York, working for Tyler Chicken. However, this gets George fired from his job, since his boss makes a deal to exchange him for food from Tyler Chicken.
Season 8 is creatively a big fall for "Seinfeld", making the season at times even weaker and overstretched than the 1st season, caused by the departure of co-writer Larry David. Indeed, it seems Jerry Seinfeld spends the entire first 13 episodes struggling to find David's "missing link" and make sense of his own show, yet he eventually does get a hang of it in the last nine episodes. Some early episodes are embarassing in its banal attempts at humor, with jokes so lame and silly they feel like an episode from some cartoonish sitcom. For instance, in episode 8.10 Kramer decides to take the cheaper dog medicine for his cough, but starts displaying dog-like behavior, resulting in several weak jokes such as the one where Jerry is driving him in the car and Kramer just escapes and acts like a dog. However, he character of George (great Jason Alexander) saves the episode: upon hearing that a committee will grant a lovely apartment to a man who survived Andrea Doria, George takes this as a challenge (!) and speaks in front of the committee to try to gain even bigger pity by listing all the misfortunes and tragedies that happened in his life, in a glorius "take that!" moment.
Episode 8.11 is somewhat better, but exclusively again thanks to George: a woman working in the photo store gives a photo of women's underwear to George, who interprets this as the woman trying to seduce him, so Kramer makes a photoshoot of him to give it to the photo store for development. The photoshoot sequence is hilarious, especially in an insane moment where George, in his underwear, randomly stretches his hand out towards the photo camera, in a pointless pose. Episode 8.11 involving a rooster trained by Kramer and Jerry for a fight is one of the weakest episodes, but other episodes still have that witty observations about life, from Kramer having trouble sleeping in the same bed with his girlfriend (Sarah Silverman) because she keeps tossing and turning, up to George complaining about hair growth at advanced age ("It's like puberty that never stops. Ear puberty, nose puberty, knuckle puberty..."). In the funny episode 8.15 Elaine is mistaken for "Susie" by a woman superior at work, but fails to correct it out of fear of sounding disobedient, culminating in the sequence where the boss and said woman call a meeting with both Elaine and "Susie", but since only Elaine is in the office, she carefully plays both roles without mentioning her own name. The following episode, 8.16, even tops it, featuring a great pay-off: sufficient to say it involves three random events (a sewing machine on the road; Newman hitting it with his truck; flammable tar on the road) merging into a perfect, hilarious disaster at the end. However, the last episode is an anticlimax, Seinfeld's opening and closing stand-up comedy bits are sadly absent (probably due to his exhaustion from too many episodes), whereas the first episodes are disappointing, all leading to the conclusion that "Seinfeld" seasons have a horshoe curve when it comes to quality.
Grade:++
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