10 Episodes That Turned Good TV Shows Into Classics

Now here’s a potentially controversial one. “The Bubble Boy” doesn’t show up until Season 4, so does this mean I’m writing off the first three seasons? Absolutely not - though the first season is undoubtedly slow-going, there are certainly some real gems scattered across the second and third seasons. Indeed, for most sitcoms those would be defining moments for most sitcoms. Problem is - Seinfeld is not most sitcoms.

What Seinfeld did best was create small inciting incidents and build them to inspired levels of insanity, with each character’s individual storylines beautifully and hilariously tied together. It was a formula that the writers were beginning to perfect by season 4 - the “show about nothing” became surprisingly complex in its execution. In “The Bubble Boy”, George and his girlfriend Susan plan a romantic trip to her family’s lakeside cabin. It quickly becomes a trip from hell as George gets in a legendary altercation with the bubble boy over a game of Trivial Pursuit, Jerry loses a fan after he and Elaine argue with a waitress, and Kramer manages to burn down the family cabin with a misplaced cigar.

It’s twenty-odd minutes of madcap brilliance, the kind that no other sitcom before or since has really gotten close to. The show continued to push the envelope and got funnier and funnier, but it was “The Bubble Boy” that really proved to audiences that Seinfeld was the true master of it’s domain.