Jerry Seinfeld was so afraid a New York Post poll would show that “Seinfeld” had “jumped the shark” that he may have ended the sitcom prematurely.
Adam Buckman, The Post’s TV editor and TV columnist for 18 years, reveals in “Jerk: How I Wasted My Life Watching Television” how in 1997, he promoted “an innocuous fax poll.”
Seinfeld called the editor-in-chief that Friday to try to have the poll results killed.
“The editor refused on the basis that we had already promised we would publish them that weekend,” Buckman wrote. “So he got Seinfeld to agree to an interview that afternoon that we would run next to the poll results.”
“As for the poll results, they ran 50-50, and were largely meaningless. But just about two months later, Seinfeld made the famous Christmas Day announcement that he would end the show that spring. Our poll may or may not have had something to do with that.”
Buckman also reveals:
- How he went into the conference room before a meeting with David Letterman’s producer Robert Morton, who was intent on complaining about coverage, and raised all the seats except one, which he lowered as low as it would go. “Later, I led Morty to that chair and he sat in it — significantly lower than everyone — for the entire meeting. The meeting went well.”
- How he wrote three columns about William Shatner audibly breaking wind during a joint interview with Leonard Nimoy as they reminisced about “Star Trek.”
- How Buckman took on Howard Stern and started calling him “King of All Maggots.”
- The cover of the e-book, available on Amazon Kindle, was inspired by mail from an irate reader who tore one of Buckman’s columns out of the newspaper and scrawled the word “jerk” above his photo.