A fan video created by Dominick Nero, which imagines a Seinfeld revival in the style of Twin Peaks: The Return, has garnered a lot of attention on YouTube, even catching the eye of Jason Alexander, most famous for his role as George Costanza on the NBC sitcom. The video was posted Tuesday and went viral gaining over 30,000 views in its first day.
Both Twin Peaks and Seinfeld have dedicated fans and both had untraditional reunions over two decades after they aired. The seventh season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm involves the making of a Seinfeld revival and reunites Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Wayne Knight, while Kyle MacLachlan and a large number of other cast members from the original Twin Peaks series appear in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s miniseries Twin Peaks: The Return.
There are a lot of subtle references in Dominick Nero's passion project: Jason Alexander in a wig stands in for Bob, the set of The Merv Griffin Show serves as the iconic Red Room and anyone who has seen the memorable “Part 8” of The Return will have a flashback when “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” plays over galactic black and white images. The Seinfeld theme is slowed down in one portion of the fan video as a clever nod to the unique way composer Angelo Badalamenti recycled and distorted his recording of the Twin Peaks theme to fit the mysterious moods of the show.
Twin Peaks: The Return challenged viewers by radically expanding the scope of the original series while also having a dramatically different tone from the network melodramatic feel that made the original a nostalgic classic. Twin Peaks used and subverted soap opera elements while Seinfeld, often referred to as “a show about nothing,” utilized and subverted the sitcom genre in its own way. The NBC comedy, with its cheesy and catchy theme song, its existential comedy, and the nostalgia surrounding it, is well-suited for this Twin Peaks: The Return-style revival.
It doesn't seem likely, given the selective nature of David Lynch’s direction, that there would be any kind of crossover between Twin Peaks and Seinfeld. It is nice to see actors like Jason Alexander and Kyle MacLachlan engaging with fans who dream of these fandoms intersecting. MacLachlan, who plays Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, retweeted a post by the fan Twin Peaks/Seinfeld crossover meme account "@seinpeaks", saying, “maybe this should exist.” It seems he also thinks there is something to this odd-couple TV show pairing.
Seinfeld will be available on Netflix in 2021 and Twin Peaks: The Return is available on Hulu.
Source: Dominick Nero/YouTube