By Robert Scucci
| Published 26 seconds ago

Self-censoring in the name of self-preservation is often seen as a sign of weakness, but sometimes it’s a necessary evil, especially when it comes to network television. What might sound like a great idea in the writers room can quickly turn into a liability once it’s read out loud, and the cast and crew of Seinfeld knew they were flirting with trouble if they ever greenlit “The Bet,” a Season 2 episode that was scrapped before entering active production because of its controversial approach to gun violence.

In this case, completely nixing the episode during a table read wasn’t the result of an overbearing standards and practices board stepping in at the last minute. It was the Seinfeld cast itself deciding that the entire episode crossed a line and felt wrong.

Written by Larry Charles, who remained with Seinfeld through Season 6, “The Bet” never fully materialized and was ultimately replaced by “The Phone Message,” which Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David famously wrote in just two days to make sure an episode still made it to air. Ironically, “The Phone Message,” despite its critical praise, was a ratings failure and ended up putting the show on a two-month hiatus anyway.

Had “The Bet” been fully realized, any backlash could have very well killed the show outright. Seinfeld didn’t truly find its footing until Season 3, and at that early stage, the margin for error was razor thin.

“The Bet” Broken Down

Reading the synopsis today, the scrapped episode’s premise doesn’t sound especially outrageous on paper. The structure follows the familiar A and B story format most sitcoms rely on, but the A story is where things went off the rails. Elaine deciding she wants to buy a gun is what made everyone involved reconsider filming the episode. Larry Charles, who worked on the series through Season 6, wrote the script with the intention of pushing Seinfeld into darker territory.

The B story involves a bet between George and Jerry over whether Kramer hooked up with a flight attendant while traveling to Puerto Rico, and it’s all fairly standard stuff. There’s no controversy there, just classic Seinfeld material that feels perfectly in line with the show’s usual rhythm.

During the table read, Julia Louis-Dreyfus recoiled when she got to one scene in particular. In it, Elaine holds a gun, to be purchased with Kramer’s help, to her own head and asks Jerry, “Where do you want it, Jerry? The Kennedy? Or The McKinley?” while pointing the gun at her head and stomach, respectively.

Louis-Dreyfus immediately voiced her concerns to Jason Alexander and Tom Cherones, who were slated to co-direct the episode. After talking it through, they all agreed the plot line pushed things far past the point of discomfort. The episode was shelved indefinitely, and with the show needing to go on, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David got to work writing a replacement.

An Appropriate Amount Of Restraint

While I don’t generally agree with censorship for its own sake, I side with the Seinfeld camp for shelving “The Bet” before it caused real damage to the series. Today, it’s easy to forget just how fragile the show was early on. We now recognize Seinfeld as the cultural juggernaut it became, but that success was anything but guaranteed at the time of the initial table read.

The series limped through its first two seasons, which would be unheard of by today’s standards. NBC saw potential and allowed it to continue far longer than most new shows would ever be given now. At such a critical moment in its run, shelving an episode that could have alienated audiences was a smart move. It saved the show from shooting itself in the foot, pun fully intended.

Seinfeld writer Larry Charles has since admitted that he pushed the premise too far, and he’s never expressed any bitterness over the decision. It’s hard to imagine he would have continued working on the show if there had been lingering resentment. He has gone on record saying the idea likely would have been better received in a later season, once Seinfeld became a household name and had the clout to get away with more controversial episodes like “The Contest.”

The Funny Has To Outweight The Controversy

Following one of comedy’s oldest rules, Charles loved the darker elements of “The Bet,” but acknowledged that if you’re going to lean that hard into discomfort, the material needs to be disproportionately funny. By his own admission, it simply wasn’t. That’s the measuring stick all comedy lives and dies by. Shock value on its own almost always earns mixed reactions unless it’s paired with something genuinely hilarious.

Ironically enough, Jerry actually gets gunned down in exaggerated fashion when he imagines the consequences of stealing cable in a later Season 2 episode, “The Baby Shower,” which only reinforces the point. It’s a self-contained sequence of imagined violence that exists entirely within the show’s heightened reality and plays as absurd rather than provocative. That kind of cartoon logic is a far cry from Elaine making light of assassinated presidents, which would have put the show under far harsher scrutiny.

“The Bet” was written with the wrong voice at the wrong time. Had Seinfeld been a runaway success from the start, it might have gone down as a daring classic. Instead, it stood a real chance of killing the show before it ever had the opportunity to become what we now remember it as. In the end, everyone involved arrived at the same conclusion organically, without a top-down mandate telling them to pull the plug.

Seinfeld is streaming on Netflix.