In one episode of Seinfeld, Jerry and George approach NBC with an idea for a sitcom. It has a premise but not much else. After committing some misdemeanour, a guy (George) gets sentenced by a judge to serve as Jerry's butler. "Where's the story?" asks the sceptical NBC exec. "There isn't one," George replies, airily. "What - you kidding me? What happens?" "Nothing. That's the point. Nothing happens."
NBC, unsurprisingly, doesn't commission the show.
And yet this is what happens from week to week in the real Seinfeld: every Thursday evening on NBC 30 million Americans cheerfully watch a show about nothing, or nothing very much anyway. A whole episode can be spun round a parking valet's vile body odour, or being banned from a greengrocer's, or having a date who mutters incomprehensibly, or finding a hair in a cake.
There are five characters: a stand-up comic called Jerry Seinfeld, whose apartment is his friends' spiritual home; Elaine, Jerry's former girlfriend, who has a job in publishing and attitude to spare; Kramer, the physical jerk across the hall with an enviable line in jazzy shirts and Cuban cigars, and a fondness for exploding the show's otherwise verbal wit with his bodily tics. And George. Poor deluded George, who still lives with his parents and can never get the right woman to love him. The fifth character? Jerry's refrigerator, as big as a British kitchen, and pillaged by his friends.
These unmarried, childless, happy screw-ups, with their full fridge and their empty lives, are the subjects of what has become - rivalled only by the Larry Sanders Show and The Simpsons - the most entertaining show on TV in the 1990s.
The very insubstantiality is part of the show's appeal: the petty concerns of the thirty-something New York singles suggests they live in a charmed world where the trivial becomes of obsessive interest - like older Friends but without the overweening narcissism.
Seinfeld's motto on the show has been "no hugs, no learning" - and that has spared the sitcom the mawkishness so inimical to comedy but which thrives in most American shows. Instead, the show has been bolstered by strong supporting actors who have developed their own comic personas in the show's eight seasons - the febrile slapstick of Kramer, the ballsy kookiness of Elaine, the self-pity and self-doubt of George (a man with much to be doubtful and pitiful about).
But the lack of substance conceals plotting that is sharp as a whip, comic absurdity that mocks translation. Like the best comedy, which is funny for its own sake rather than for its powers of social criticism, it dies a little by being re-told straight.
And for once being behind America gives us an advantage: we still have more than 40 episodes left to watch.