If anything so emphatically and inescapably present as television could be said to have a history, the final episode of “Seinfeld” is destined for an honored place in its oxymoronic annals, if only because of the record $1.5 million and upwards it was said to have charged for thirty seconds of advertising. Who will care about this astonishing number in a few years’ time, when it is as meaningless as the rates charged by “The Honeymooners” are today? Yet the “show about nothing” may deserve a special place among the hits of yesteryear because it has refined to its essence the art of television—which is also about nothing. Even things that are something, like world news events, are reduced to the status of nothing when they become television. Just as the tornado that flattens your house is not the one that was on TV, so the one that is on TV is by definition the one...

 

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