If you’re craving a brief break from the relentlessly weighty news, perhaps you’d be interested in a column about nothing. For instance, I was wondering: What would Seinfeld be like if it aired new episodes during Covid?
If you’ve never watched the show, you’ll probably want to click on something else. But if you are a devotee, these plots will surely strike you as nothing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Stressed by months of social isolation, the friends are mastering their domains three times a day. Bored for a real challenge, they do a Zoom meeting and take bets on whether any of them can be masterful while fantasizing about the virus. Elaine wins after she pins up a picture of Dr. Fauci.
After learning that essential workers are being hailed as heroes, George tells women that he’s lung specialist Art Vandelay. He’s suddenly dragooned to perform surgery, as Kramer watches in the surgical theater, but is saved when Kramer drops a Junior Mint into the patient’s lungs.
Jerry is meticulously wiping down all the cereal he buys, but Kramer pops in with a trash-picked “Covid-cleansing machine” that sanitizes groceries with the push of a button. The machine explodes the cereal boxes as Kramer slips on the crumbs and breaks Jerry’s couch.
The Soup Nazi hates masks and forbids them in his shop. Jerry and Elaine show up with face protection and are told “No soup for you!” Elaine pelts the Soup Nazi with muffin tops.
Elaine tells Jerry about her Covid-paranoid boyfriend who wore rubber gloves during sex, “and yadda yadda yadda, he never called me again.” Jerry asks why not and she says she was told she wasn’t “glove-worthy.”
The gang goes to a Chinese restaurant and waits forever for an outdoor table that’s farthest from everybody else. They’re worried they’ll miss their movie, until they remember that nobody goes anymore to the movies.
George eagerly grabs a free limo ride from the airport, only to learn that the intended rider is a Trumpist who’s in town to scrub “Black Lives Matter” off the street fronting Trump Tower – and that the BLM protestors have been tipped off that the limo is coming.
Kramer buys hydroxychloroquine in bulk, and gets booked on a TV talk show, wearing an ascot and puffing a pipe, to say that the Covid cure works best when swallowed with dog pills that make you bark.
At the bakery, Jerry tussles with a little old lady for the last marble rye, but when they both realize they’re not social distancing, they drop the rye and run screaming in opposite directions.
George frets in an elevator when a maskless neighbor breathes in his face, so he gets revenge by enlisting “Hello, Newman” to stop the guy’s mail. But Newman gets laid off by the post office as part of the government’s plan to stop delivery of mail ballots.
Jerry and Elaine visit Jerry’s parents in Del Boca Vista, where a hack-coughing old guy with a pen in his mouth tries to gift the pen to Jerry, but when Jerry refuses to touch it, the codger gets insulted. Jerry’s dad says they can all bury the hatchet with an Early Bird steak at 4:45, but nobody at the restaurant is wearing masks because Florida.
George swims in a cold-water pool on Long Island, and frets all night that his shrinkage is a Covid symptom. He goes for a test but leaves in a huff when they tell him it’s $5.
Jerry is upset that Poppie, the restauranteur who never washes his hands in the restroom, keeps lifting his mask to pick his nose. That’s the whole episode.
Elaine decides to get a Covid test after her dolt boyfriend Puddy parties with his buddies, but when she tries to bribe her way to the front of the test line, she’s punished with a two-month wait for results – a month longer than the norm.
Jerry is dating a very attractive low talker and wants to have sex with her, but every time he asks whether she has tested negative, he can’t hear her answer.
George’s fiancé dies from Covid (George bought her the cheapest hand sanitizer), and the gang happily shrugs it off by lunching outdoors at Monk’s. But Kramer, his mask dangling from an ear, has a cacophonous coughing fit, loses his footing, topples the tables, and all the patrons end up in quarantine.