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…with the release of the first three seasons on DVD. The Guardian provides a brief overview of this interesting new show from across the pond:

One episode is entirely set in a Chinese restaurant where the cast wait for a table, and George (Jason Alexander) confides his latest girlfriend disaster to Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld). He has had to leave midway through sex because he is too embarrassed to go to the toilet in his girlfriend’s tiny flat, where his every move will be heard, and he has ‘an intestinal requirement that surpasses by great lengths anything in the sexual realm’. So how to extricate himself? ‘The only excuse she might possibly have accepted is if I told her that I am in reality Batman, and I’m very sorry, I just saw the Batsignal…’

What? This has to be one of the most famous episodes of one of the most famous comedies ever; but apparently it just never took off in the UK, being shown intermittently by the BBC in the kind of timeslots occupied by the mysterious “Guthy-Renker” here. Apparently it’s part of the long-standing British snobbery about foreign comedy, which surely has grown increasingly misplaced since (in my view) The Young Ones and Blackadder.

The Brits seem to be back on track now, with recent things like Ali G, The Office and People Like Us—but it’s sad to think that they’ve had to go without Seinfeld and similar for so long. At the same time, there is of course almost no British comedy on US television. Maybe this is the lucky country after all.