{"id":814069,"date":"2026-10-26T03:50:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T03:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/814069\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T03:50:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T03:50:19","slug":"larry-david-said-he-would-rather-do-time-in-prison-than-make-another-season-of-seinfeld-biographer-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/814069\/","title":{"rendered":"Larry David said he would rather \u2018do time in prison\u2019 than make another season of Seinfeld, biographer claims"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Larry David found it \u201ctorturous\u201d to run the Emmy-winning sitcom Seinfeld,<\/a> his biographer has said.<\/p>\n

Blake J. Harris, the author behind the biography Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David, said in a new interview that David put himself under extreme pressure<\/a> when working on the sitcom that launched his career in the 90s. <\/p>\n

Speaking to The Daily Beast\u2019s Obsessed<\/a> podcast, Harris said that ahead of the show’s fifth season, which started airing in 1993, David told some associates during a lunch date that he would \u201crather spend a year in prison than do another season of Seinfeld.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of it is shtick or him being kind of funny, but part of it hints at how torturous it was for him to run Seinfeld,\u201d Harris explained.<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cThat torture largely came from the pressure he put on himself to come up with good ideas, which is a constant theme in the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"LarryLarry David found it \u2018torturous\u2019 to run the hit sitcom \u2018Seinfeld,\u2019 his biographer has said (Getty)<\/p>\n

According to Harris, David\u2019s determination to make the show excellent was the source of his stress.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo him, every second of every episode needed to hit a certain caliber of quality and trying to clear that bar \u2013 day after day after day \u2013 seemed unsustainable,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr put more succinctly, as one of Larry\u2019s future Seinfeld colleagues would later tell The Hollywood Reporter, \u2018[Larry\u2019s] so consumed with perfection that doing episodes is as painful for him as passing kidney stones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris also recounted David reading a draft of the biography and saying, \u201cI think we\u2019ve done too much of this \u2013 of me being anxious and worried about coming up with ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris said: \u201cAnd I said, \u2018No, we haven\u2019t, because that\u2019s all that anyone talks about… you were always saying this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

David, who co-created the show with Jerry Seinfeld, served as the head writer and executive producer on the first seven seasons, and returned to co-write the series finale in season nine.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the biography, Harris reveals that David and the late director Rob Reiner nearly made a movie together<\/a>, but it never happened.<\/p>\n

Harris recalls in the book that David had been working on the 1983 unproduced screenplay Prognosis: Negative, and had asked Reiner \u2013 who was then known for his Emmy-winning performance as Michael Stivic in All in the Family \u2013 to produce it.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Reiner was busy working on his directorial debut, the acclaimed mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, about a fictional aging British heavy metal band on tour in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Harris wrote: \u201cAnd the project he wound up working on \u2014 his directorial debut \u2014 was a pretty risky venture: a fake documentary about a fictional rock band that Reiner co-wrote with three friends and then filmed over the course of only five weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}