10 Mistakes That Made TV Shows Better
1. The Car Doesn't Start - Seinfeld
Seinfeld's season three episode "The Parking Garage" is often held up as one of the series' best, yet its climactic payoff was actually a happy accident and the result of a malfunctioning prop. A dodgy car, to be precise.
The episode, set entirely in a parking garage, sees the gang trying to track down Kramer's (Michael Richards) car in a multi-level parking garage, all while each has a time-sensitive situation they need to attend to.
In the closing moments of the episode they finally locate the car and prepare to drive off, but when Kramer turns the ignition, the engine won't start. After a few seconds of Kramer frustratedly trying to get the car started, we fade to black and that's all she wrote.
Yet in Larry David's script for the episode, they were simply supposed to drive off after finding the car, but while filming the ending, the car straight-up failed to start for real.
If you pay close attention, you can even see Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander shaking with laughter in the back of the car, before we cut to a wide exterior shot of the parking garage.
This was such a perfect punchline to the episode-long search for the car that it seems almost impossible that it wasn't always intentional - especially coming from a writer as brilliant as Larry David - but it was indeed simply the happiest of accidents.