Entertainment
The Seinfeld Episode So Controversial It Was Never Filmed
By Robert Scucci
| Published
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.
Entertainment
macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.
You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.
A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.
The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.
Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.
Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.
Mashable Light Speed
However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.
Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.
If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.
Entertainment
X-Men ‘97 Just Secretly Connected Itself To The Raunchiest Marvel Movies
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
As a longtime Marvel fan, one of my favorite things about X-Men ‘97 is how many fun Easter eggs are stuffed into every single episode. Sometimes, these are winking references to earlier episodes. More often than not, they are connections to the comics and to the larger Marvel universe. Of course, these references are often of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them variety. Because of this, you sometimes need to be as fast as Quicksilver on the remote control if you want to catch every wacky bit of trivia that pops up onscreen.
That was certainly the case with the recent episode “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs.” This episode follows up on an earlier Animated Series episode (“Weapon X, Lies, and Video Tape”) and has Wolverine and a team of oddballs discovering major secrets about Weapon X. It’s an episode filled with some jaw-droppingly weird X-Men lore, including an appearance from everyone’s favorite xenomorph knock-offs, the Brood. However, that’s not the weirdest thing about this terrifying tale. The episode provides a list of characters attached to the Weapon X program, and if you pause at the right moment, you’ll see names from the raunchiest, bloodiest Marvel movies ever made: Deadpool and Logan!
The Ultimate In ’90s Media Technology
In Marvel Comics, it’s revealed that Weapon X wasn’t actually the name of the program. Instead, it was the Weapon Plus program, and Wolverine was referred to as “Weapon X” because he was the tenth experiment created by the program (X is the Roman numeral for 10). Incidentally, Weapon I was Captain America, who was turned into the world’s greatest soldier through an experimental super-serum. Later, the project switched to experimenting on mutants, with the goal of creating weaponized warriors who would be easy to control. There have been many characters experimented on or otherwise connected to the program, which is why so many names appear in “Weapon X, Lies, and DVD.”
The episode doesn’t get into the full tangled history of the program, which is consistently referred to as Weapon X. However, the characters do find test subject data on DVDs, all of which are helpfully labeled with the name of the person who was experimented on. One set of DVDs is very easy to view, and the other appears for only a brief moment. With the help of the pause button, though, you can identify some major names. This includes Bucky Barnes, better known to MCU fans as the Winter Soldier. It also includes characters who have only appeared in the comics, including the creepy villain, John Sublime.
The X-Men Get Raunchy
Unsurprisingly, Wolverine and his crew from this episode (including Maverick, Garrison Kane, Sabertooth, and Lady Deathstrike) all appear on the DVDs, as do other characters from Wolverine’s past, including Silver Fox. But for fans of the live-action movies, the most notable names that appear in the episode are Ajax and Deadpool (the villain and hero, respectively, of the first Deadpool movie) and X-23, who appeared in both Logan and Deadpool & Wolverine. Amusingly enough, this effectively connects the (mostly) family-friendly X-Men ‘97 with some of the raunchiest and most vulgar Marvel movies ever made!
Deadpool effectively paved the way for modern, R-rated superhero movies with a film that combined over-the-top ultraviolence and hilariously crass dialogue. It was also unapologetically raunchy, with a naughty Morena Baccarin sex scene that likely made the pre-cancerous Wade Wilson wish that his booty had a healing factor. Logan, meanwhile, was more serious but no less brutal, connecting X-23 (who was created for the kids’ show X-Men: Evolution) to a violent and heartbreaking film where we bid farewell to both Logan and Professor X. Now, that same character (who made a fan-favorite return in the wonderfully offensive Deadpool & Wolverine) is permanently tied to X-Men ‘97.
Does that mean we’re likely to see X-23 onscreen? Not really: even if X-Men ‘97 runs for several more seasons, there are so many ‘80s, ‘90s, and early ‘00s stories to adapt before the writers would ever get to her story. Deadpool might be likelier to appear: after all, he appeared in X-Men: The Animated Series via things like flashbacks and Morph transformations, and Morph continues to take on this appearance in X-Men ‘97. Is all of this leading up to a proper appearance from the Merc With a Mouth? Maybe. Somehow, though, I think Jean Grey will be too busy fighting Apocalypse to help Deadpool properly celebrate International Women’s Day!
Entertainment
Raunchy Stargate SG-1 Episode Is So Bad Even The Show Made Fun Of It
By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
Once any show has been on the air for five years, it will start to wobble under its own internal logic, lore, and mythology. Stargate SG-1 was on the air for a decade, which means those early Season 1-3 episodes sometimes contradict what becomes canon later. In the case of Season 1’s “Hathor,” it’s unclear why a Goa’uld Queen needs male DNA to produce more larvae. Later episodes show that it’s not needed, and they can reproduce asexually, but that’s the least of the issues with “Hathor.”
Stargate Goes Full Species
“Hathor” centers around the unearthing of the Egyptian Goddess of Love, Hathor (Suanne Braun), who emerges from a sarcophagus after 3000 years, speaking English. Drawn to the Stargate, she shows up at Cheyenne Mountain and quickly starts bringing the men within the base into her thrall. Starting with Daniel (Michael Shanks), then General Hammond (Don S. Davis), O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) is the next to succumb, though Teal’c’s (Christopher Judge) Goa’uld renders him resistant to her power.
That sets up a showdown between the men and the women (all five of them), led by Captain Carter (Amanda Tapping) and Dr. Frasier (Teryl Rothery) in the locker room where Hathor is preparing to use a hot tub to birth a new generation of Goa’uld larvae using Daniel Jackson’s juices. That’s how the show refers to it. It’s as awkward as it sounds.
The Writers Chose To Ignore The Episode
Stargate SG-1 would eventually mock “Hathor” in the Season 8 episode “Citizen Joe,” a clip show that highlighted the ridiculousness of those early season episodes. “Hathor” was the first episode in the series where the team didn’t travel through the Stargate, and the only one written by David Bennett Carren and J. Larry Carroll. Hathor herself would come back two more times, as a much more formidable (and better written) villain, particularly in Season 2’s “Out of Mind.”
Ever since Homer introduced the concept of Sirens in The Odyssey, the “beautiful woman mind controls all men” trope is widely used in sci-fi and fantasy shows. Stargate SG-1 had no problem recycling classic tropes and often doing them incredibly well, from time loops (“Windows of Opportunity”) to “that old man can kick everyone’s ass” (Bra’tac), but “Hathor” was a misfire.
Teryl Rothery wasn’t even able to deliver the line “there’s five women in here, and we’re very lonely” while keeping a straight face. The more series re-watches you do, “Hathor” sticks out more and more like one of the worst episodes of the series. Unlike “Emancipation,” which was so bad it caused the writers to rework Carter’s character, “Hathor” has no silver lining, other than the self-styled goddess having more character, personality, and better lines in her later appearances. Her debut episode could be erased from the timeline, and you’d still know everything about her within minutes of her second appearance.
They can’t all be winners, and with a decade of episodes to get through, Stargate SG-1 was going to have some episodes you don’t have to bother watching.
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