All about @SeinfeldToday, your new favorite Twitter parody
So someone started this “Seinfeld” parody Twitter account, yada yada yada, it’s pretty great.
Enter @SeinfeldToday, the feed you and everyone else were obsessed with Monday. The brilliant parody imagines what “Seinfeld” episodes would look like in 2012, suggesting bizarrely believable plotlines that work both in the “Seinfeld” universe and as Life Problems of 2012.
The underlying genius of the account mimics one of the things that made the show such a tremendous phenomenon: Whether we’d like to admit it, these are all problems that are only just outside the realm of possibility for our own lives. (If we were so bothered by such minutiae, of course.)
For example:
Jerry breaks up with his girlfriend (Rashida Jones) because she Instagrams everything she eats. George tries to get a job with the Nets.
— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) December 10, 2012
Who doesn’t know an obsessive Foodstragramer?
BuzzFeed Sports editor Jack Moore (pictured above with the rest of the cast) is behind the account, which topped 73,000 followers Monday night, just a day after it launched. The idea started with Moore tweeting plotlines back and forth with his friend Josh Gondelman, and Moore soon decided it warranted its own account.
It quickly gained traction and media attention, with seemingly unanimous approval and enthusiasm.
“I think the show is still beloved and people wish there was more of it,” Moore told me Monday night. “This taps into that basic desire that many fans have. The ‘Curb’ season definitely showed how good those people can be when they’re working together.”
Moore, a Seinfeld fanatic who keeps the series on a thumb drive with him at all times, said he just wants to envision “what those characters’ lives would look like today.”
Looking at Seinfeld through a modern lens has been done before, most notably when Gawker archly explained how cell phones would have negated the plots of 10 classic episodes.
But picturing the entirely new well of problems that constant communication and modern luxuries would bring is part of what makes @SeinfeldToday so oddly endearing.
“Sure there are a lot of episodes with problems that cell phones would solve,” Moore said. “But the Internet would add in a whole new bunch of issues for them to deal with.”
Serenity now, Twitter.
-th
