George, for example, is perhaps the show’s most repulsive character, but the public empathized with him because they recognize in him all of the times they've been unable to escape their own limitations and weaknesses.

Thanks to the work of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the great comedic actresses of American television, Elaine could be both deeply weird and deeply feminine.

But at the beginning,  as it struggled in the ratings, it was not only kept alive because it earned critical acclaim and awards attention, but because the people who were watching it were more demographically desirable to advertisers: young white people with lots of money who live in cities.

Until then, a sitcom usually functioned like a filmed play, with multiple cameras in fixed positions capturing the action of a sitcom taping, usually in front of a live audience.

But as time passed by, Seinfeld inserted even more single-camera sequences into the action and it broke up its stories into smaller and smaller pieces, presaging the joke-a-second pace that most single-camera sitcoms run at today.