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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 21, 1990
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Seinfeld, “The Stock Tip” (Season 1, Episode 5). [Stream on Hulu.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The five episodes that comprised Seinfeld‘s first season were aired over an improbable eleven month period. The story about how much patience NBC showed as Seinfeld built its audience has by now become legendary. But they also were unbelievably stingy when it came to actually letting audiences see these episode.
“The Stock Tip” was the final of these first five episode, and it’s a fairly standard one when it comes to Seinfeld finding its voice. One particular scene, however, stands out as emblematic of what helped Seinfeld catch on with a public as a slice-of-modern-life observational sitcom par excellence.
In what was to become classic Seinfeld fashion, Jerry airs out the pent-up frustrations of the modern city-dweller. At least the modern city-dweller who can afford dry-cleaning.
