Two years after announcing it acquired the global streaming rights to “Seinfeld,” Netflix NFLX has scheduled its premiere presentation of the 1990s sitcom for Oct. 1, 2021.
What Happened: Netflix inked a five-year deal for "Seinfeld" with Sony Pictures Television, a unit of Sony Corp SNE, in September 2019. The show had been streaming for several years on Hulu, which is co-owned by Walt Disney Co. DIS and Comcast Corp. CMCSA. The deal wasn't scheduled to begin until 2021, when the Hulu contract for the show expired in June 2021.
While the financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, the Los Angeles Times cited unnamed “people familiar with the deal” that it exceeded the $500 million that Comcast’s NBCUniversal paid to stream “The Office” on its Peacock service.
Netflix will present all 180 episodes of the series, which ran from July 1989 to May 1998 and won nine Emmy Awards.
What Else Happened: Variety reported that Jerry Seinfeld issued a jokey statement welcoming the return of the series.
“Larry [David] and I are enormously grateful to Netflix for taking this chance on us,” Seinfeld quipped. “It takes a lot of guts to trust two schmucks who literally had zero experience in television when we made this thing. We really got carried away, I guess.
“I didn’t realize we made so many of them,” he added. “Hope to recoup god knows how many millions it must have taken to do. But worth all the work if people like it. Crazy project.”
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