The Only Main Seinfeld Star To Not Win An Emmy For The NBC Show

More than 25 years later, the NBC sitcom “Seinfeld” continues to endure as one of the greatest and most cherished series of all time. The story of the show’s success has been documented before, countless times, but it’s good to remind ourselves that while other big-hit shows of the 1990s, like “Friends” and “Frasier,” were hits straight out of the box, the same wasn’t true for “Seinfeld.” The show’s first season was just a handful of episodes airing in the late summer, and things were ultimately hanging on by a thread until its third season. But these days, it’s much easier to look at the show for its massive influence, how audiences continue to return to it in the age of streaming, and how it wasn’t just a hit with audiences, but big with critics and the industry, too. That said, you can’t win every plaudit, something that applies to “Seinfeld” as well as any other awarded hit. The show’s title aside, Jerry Seinfeld was just one part of what made the sitcom so special, as he was one of four main players, along with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander. Three of these key players won Emmys for some aspect of their work on the show. Who was the odd one out? Jason Alexander.

Yes, somehow, of the quartet, the only one who never won an Emmy for “Seinfeld” was Jason Alexander as George Costanza, a stand-in for co-creator Larry David. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either; across the nine-season run of “Seinfeld,” Alexander was nominated seven times for Best Supporting Actor at the Emmys. Technically, only two of the show’s co-stars won for acting. Louis-Dreyfus was nominated seven times as well, but won the Best Supporting Actress Emmy in 1996, while Richards was nominated five times for Best Supporting Actor and won three awards. Seinfeld himself was nominated five times for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy and won zero times … but he did win a couple Emmys for the show itself, leaving Alexander as the only odd man out, in a baffling turn of events.

With hindsight, we can only wonder one question: how is it possible that Alexander was, essentially, always a bridesmaid and never a bride at the Emmys? In three of the seven years in question, the answer was exceedingly simple: Alexander was competing against his own co-star and came up short. It’s not as if Kramer and George weren’t similarly wild and broad characters in their own right, but as “Seinfeld” continued to gain in popularity, it was obvious that Kramer was an audience favorite. (The youth of today may find it hard to believe that there was once a time when a character could simply walk into a room on a sitcom and be greeted with a burst of spontaneous-seeming applause from the studio audience, but it’s true, and you can hear it when you watch old episodes of the show.) In two of the other four years, Alexander lost to the breakout co-star of another NBC sitcom favorite: David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane on “Frasier.” The other two times, Alexander came up short against the late Michael Jeter of the CBS sitcom “Evening Shade,” and then against Rip Torn of “The Larry Sanders Show.”

It’s a difficult awards-giving situation here. On one hand, Alexander not having an Emmy for playing George seems ridiculous, much the same as the fact that Steve Carell never won an Emmy for playing Michael Scott on “The Office” or Amy Poehler constantly coming up short for her work as Leslie Knope on “Parks and Recreation.” There are plenty of other examples of excellent performers and/or shows losing out at the Emmys, sometimes never even getting the honor of being nominated. (Think of HBO’s excellent “The Wire,” which had a whopping one Emmy nomination across its five seasons. One nomination!) On the other hand, when you look at the men against whom Alexander competed, the only potential criticism to levy here is that people won the awards more than once. Richards, as eccentric and outlandish as Kramer was, absolutely deserved the Emmy. The same is true of Pierce and Torn (and for this writer, based on his hazy childhood memories of “Evening Shade,” so too did Jeter). But as the saying goes, deserve’s got nothing to do with it sometimes.

Awards don’t mean everything, and the Emmys are particularly guilty of honoring the same shows and performers in the same categories for years and years. In the case of the aforementioned “Frasier,” it won the Best Comedy Series Emmy for each of its first five seasons, meaning that other notable shows of the era, like “Seinfeld,” were left out in the cold. (“Seinfeld” won that award just one time.) And as much as “Seinfeld” has rightfully been held up as one of the exemplars of ’90s-era comedy, both at the time and in retrospect, it was more often than not an Emmys loser. In fact, the only two performers, period, who ever won for their acting were Louis-Dreyfus and Richards, meaning that so many of its notable guest stars were either never nominated, or in the case of Jerry Stiller as George’s dad, lost out on the Guest category.

What all this means is that Jason Alexander is in exceedingly good company for not having won the Emmy. Not too long ago, also, he finally did win an Emmy at the Daytime Emmys (and prior to co-starring on “Seinfeld,” he’d won a Tony Award for his work in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway”). And again, though we’re more than a quarter-century removed from the end of “Seinfeld,” the show has endured beyond belief, thanks as much to its appearance on Netflix as to the extended lifespan of Larry David’s HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and its own satiric in-show revival of “Seinfeld.” It may no longer be the Summer of George, and Alexander may have had to shout “serenity now” when he kept coming up short at the Emmys, but in the end, he got a lot more than a single trophy to place on his mantelpiece.