The Sitcom About Nothing: Why ‘Nothing’ Is Doing All the Work
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The idea that Seinfeld “is a show about nothing” is one of those phrases that sounds profound until you stop and think about it for more than ten seconds.
It’s catchy. It’s clever. And it’s only half true.
When Seinfeld first aired, it really did feel like nothing else on television. There was no sentimentality, no moral arc, no neat emotional resolution. Nobody learned anything. Nobody improved. Episodes didn’t build towards growth or change, they simply… ended. At a time when sitcoms still felt obliged to reward the audience with a lesson, Seinfeld calmly opted out.
That refusal alone makes it important.
Watching it years later, though, I struggled. Not because it isn’t funny, but because its influence is now so total that it’s impossible to see it cleanly. The early episodes, in particular, feel like a delivery system for Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up. That influence never quite disappears. Episodes often resemble carefully structured routines rather than stories that grow organically from character want or need.
Elaine only really arrives after the pilot, and even then the point of view remains narrow. Much of the comedy is driven by a very specific, very American, middle-class anxiety where small social irritations are treated as personal crises. Someone doesn’t follow the rules. Someone eats the wrong thing. Someone behaves incorrectly. This is elevated to the level of moral emergency.
Seen alongside Curb Your Enthusiasm that instinct becomes clearer. Curb takes many of the same observations and applies sustained pressure. The awkwardness escalates. The consequences compound. The world actively pushes back. In Seinfeld, the characters mostly move sideways. They are protected from consequence by the design of the show itself.
For that reason, I don’t think Seinfeld is actually a show about nothing.
It’s a show about social minutiae. About ego. About the invisible rules people invent in order to get through the day. Those things are not nothing. They’re small, yes. But something is always happening.
The original concept for Seinfeld was famously minimal: two men talking, observing the world, and discussing trivial details of everyday life. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were deliberately uninterested in traditional sitcom engines. No romance. No aspiration. No long-term growth. They also wanted control, shaping the material themselves rather than handing it over to a room that would smooth the edges.
In that sense, Seinfeld can be called a show about nothing at the level of premise. There is no external goal driving the characters forward. No overarching problem to solve. The focus is on conversation, on observation, and on the tiny irritations that normally pass without comment.
What made this work was confidence. The show trusted that observation, timing, and structure were enough. It trusted the audience to recognise themselves in the pettiness. By refusing sentimentality or resolution, it created a space where small incidents could be treated with absurd seriousness. That disproportion is where the comedy lives.
Which brings me to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,
Like Seinfeld, Sunny is often described as a show about nothing. No growth. No progress. No emotional development. Characters remain trapped in the same patterns, making the same catastrophic decisions, convinced they are right.
But again, that description doesn’t quite hold.
What Sunny does brilliantly is remove external correction. Paddy’s Pub isn’t important because it’s a workplace comedy. It matters because it’s a sealed environment. A place where the characters can exist without meaningful interference. Much like Jerry’s flat or the diner, it allows behaviour to escalate unchecked.
The characters are left alone with their own ideas. That’s the joke.
The comedy comes not from plot, but from pressure. The dialogue is relentless, character-driven, and rooted in internal logic. The silliness works because it’s treated seriously. Charlie can live in filth and eat paint and still function within the world because the world itself never questions it.
The fact that the main actors are also the primary writers gives the show a singular voice. They are, in effect, workshopping their own social observations through exaggerated versions of themselves. Nothing changes, and that stasis is the engine. The characters age. They do not grow.
So again: not nothing. Behaviour.
Which raises the obvious question.
Is there a UK sitcom about nothing?
We don’t really frame our comedy that way. British sitcoms tend to disguise their nothingness behind class, domesticity, or social embarrassment. But several come very close.
The Royle Family is probably the purest example. On paper, nothing happens. People sit on a sofa. They talk about what’s on telly. They eat crisps. The drama is microscopic. And yet it’s one of the most emotionally precise sitcoms ever made.
It isn’t plotless. It’s observational. The humour comes from rhythm, interruption, and what’s left unsaid. There is no aspiration, no forward motion, no sense that tomorrow will be any different from today. The characters don’t grow. They endure.
British comedy rarely advertises itself as being “about nothing” because we tend to dress ours up differently. We call it realism. Or social observation. Or kitchen-sink absurdity. But the principle is the same.
The idea of a sitcom about nothing only works if you expect television to reward you with progress. These shows don’t. They don’t offer growth, redemption, or the illusion that tomorrow will be better. What they offer instead is behaviour, observed closely and without apology. People sitting in the same places, having the same conversations, making the same mistakes, convinced this time it will be different. ‘Nothing’ isn’t the absence of content. It’s the refusal to dress it up. And once you see that, you realise these sitcoms aren’t about nothing at all. They’re about us, stuck in our habits, talking rubbish, carrying on anyway.
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