NBC censored at least two episodes of 'Seinfeld' for being politically incorrect.
It has been nearly a decade since 'Seinfeld' aired their series finale, and there are still things about the show that are being revealed to the public. Last year, during a Mike Ryan interview with larry Charles, it was revealed that an episode Larry Charles wrote, was so dark that the director and Julia Louis-Dreyfus refused to do it. It was called "The Gun,". Now according to a
New York Post piece, it was revealed about another unaired episode that was banned from airing:
NBC censors pretty much let Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David get away with whatever they wanted on “Seinfeld.” One of the few exceptions was a proposed episode in which George got in trouble for observing, “You know, I have never seen a black person order a salad.”
Uh-uh, said NBC. An entire episode on masturbation? Fine by us. But there will no joking about the dietary habits of African-Americans on this show. The script was nixed.
It seems to come down to the fact that the Seinfeld cast did not have any recurring black actors on the show making the topic taboo.
But the one taboo that Seinfeld conspicuously didn’t take on was race. Unlike 30 Rock, the show had no permanent black cast members. It was therefore poorly positioned to defy America’s ultimate no-no. Students of Seinfeld lore will know that the staff writer Larry Charles once pitched a storyline in which George got himself into trouble by observing that he’d never seen a black person order a salad. But the idea was deemed too controversial to proceed with.
According to
Uproxx, that was not the only episode that producers censored and banned."It surfaced in Dennis Bjorklund’s
Seinfeld Reference: The Complete Encyclopedia, first published in 2010. Interestingly, that book also reveals that Carol Leifer — another
Seinfeld‘s regular writers — also had two storylines nixed, one in which Kramer sued a bar over Ladies’ Night, and another in which Kramer played a guinea pig in a medical lab."
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