Five Sitcoms That Were Accused of Being ‘Seinfeld’ Clones
“Everybody’s ripping me off!”
That’s what Jerry shouts in Season Nine of Seinfeld when Elaine cons him into buying her lunch. While it fit perfectly within the context of “The Dealership” episode, it may also have been a bit of meta-commentary. This was the first episode to air after it was announced that the show would be ending, and Seinfeld was so popular at the time that other sitcoms were popping up left and right that seemed custom-designed to try to capture some of Seinfeld’s success.
The most obvious Seinfeld clones were the uninspired — and usually unsuccessful — low-premise sitcoms about friends who sit around and talk. But plenty of genuinely good shows that have since become TV classics have also been accused of ripping off Seinfeld.
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Here are five such shows, some of which were successful while others struggled to find an audience of their own…
The Single Guy
When describing the long-forgotten 1995 sitcom The Single Guy in 2013, Vulture writer Margaret Lyons described it as “Seinfeld-lite.” The show centered around the dating escapades of its lead character Jonathan Eliot (Jonathan Silverman), whose life looked pretty darn similar to Jerry’s. Jonathan also had a neurotic best friend who he hung out with at a coffee shop to discuss his dating life. At the time, the show was accused of being both a Seinfeld rip-off and a Friends rip-off, which was only exacerbated by the fact that NBC gave it a cushy timeslot between those two shows’ air times. Because of this, The Single Guy was renewed for a second season, but after it was moved elsewhere on the schedule, it quickly flopped.
It’s Like, You Know…
Even when compared to other Seinfeld writers, Peter Mehlman was an enormous part of Seinfeld’s success. He wrote several of the show’s best episodes and coined phrases that are still part of the popular lexicon, including “shrinkage,” “yada yada yada,” “spongeworthy” and “double-dipper.” It was no wonder then that when Mehlman created the 1999 L.A.-based sitcom It’s Like, You Know… that there would be some similarities between the two shows.
Writing about It’s Like, You Know… for Entertainment Weekly back in 1999, Ken Tucker said he originally hated the show, dismissing it as a “sunny Seinfeld,” but soon began to enjoy its familiar rhythms. Still, he openly admitted that it was a Seinfeld rip-off containing “non-sequitur small talk that’s blatantly Seinfeldian.”
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
“The magic rarely materializes in this Seinfeld-clone,” The Buffalo News’ Alan Pergament wrote almost 20 years ago in reference to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s second season. To his credit, Sunny creator Rob McElhenney has always cited Seinfeld as an influence, and the show leaned into the similarities very early in its run. As the BBC explained, “In 2008, Jonathan Storm of The Philadelphia Inquirer described the show as ‘like Seinfeld on crack,’ which FX adopted as a tagline.” In Season 13 of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the show even played up the comparisons by re-enacting a scene from the Seinfeld episode “The Contest” with Charlie as Kramer, Dee as Elaine, Frank as George and both Mac and Dennis as Jerry.
Mulaney
Over 10 years before Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, comedian John Mulaney starred in the one-season flop Mulaney, which followed the Seinfeld formula to the letter. In Willa Paskin’s review of the show in Slate, she wrote, “Mulaney is very deliberately constructed in Seinfeld’s image: Not only are there bits of Mulaney’s tame, quibbling stand-up interspersed throughout each episode, the show, like Seinfeld, is a multi-camera sitcom with (a) laugh track. This is an overt strategy by Mulaney — and his executive producer, Lorne Michaels — to attract the kind of big audience that Seinfeld and other laugh-track shows once commanded.”
But rather than attract a Seinfeld-sized audience, Mulaney quickly failed because it left out one key Seinfeld quality. As Paskin wrote, “Mulaney is just like Seinfeld, except it’s not funny.”
Friends
Because Friends was set in New York City and revolved around people who mostly sit around and talk, many Seinfeld loyalists have accused it of being a Seinfeld clone, including Jerry Seinfeld himself. Most recently, in a promo for his Netflix film Unfrosted, Seinfeld is dragged into the office of the fictional head of Pop-Tarts who scolds him for making Unfrosted without the permission of Pop-Tarts. The fictional CEO then reveals that the Pop-Tarts company has stolen the Seinfeld characters Schmoopie, Jackie Chiles and the Soup Nazi. The CEO proceeds to ask Seinfeld, “How does it feel when people steal your ideas and then do whatever they want with them?” Seinfeld, while chewing on a Pop-Tart, responds, “You mean like Friends?”
Less playfully, Seinfeld also described how he felt about Friends to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, saying, “We thought, ‘They wanna do our show with better-looking people.’” And, reportedly, Lisa Kudrow once said “Hi” to Seinfeld at a party, to which he simply replied, “You’re welcome.”
Whether or not Friends is a Seinfeld rip-off is a matter of opinion, but it’s impossible to deny that Friends became a success in its own right, which is more than anyone can say for Unfrosted.
