Member-only story
POP CULTURE
Why Seinfeld is Better Than Friends
or Why a Friend’s fan became a Seinfeld Addict
When I was born in 1990, Seinfeld had already been on the air for a year. When the sitcom ended in 1998, I was just a kid in third grade, and, according to Jerry Seinfeld, the only thing I had on my mind was candy. He wasn’t far off. Especially considering I was born and raised in the countryside of Portugal, and sweets were not something easy to come by.
In a time of scarcity in the country, the only sugar available was some very simple biscuits that every child covered with their mother’s homemade marmalade. So it was normal for me to go nuts whenever an old neighbor, an emigrant in France, brought sweets that no one had ever seen before!
My excitement was so great that my mother had to hide the bags around the house and give me some sugar only when I deserved it. (Thanks, Mum!) . So childhood did indeed revolve around sugar and not so much series, let alone Seinfeld.
Later, when I was about 14, my brother recommended me Friends. The more-than-popular series came to me during a very disturbing and lonely period of my life. The connection between my loneliness and the television show is directly associated.
