During the nine years that Seinfeld was on the air, there were a number of ideas that didn’t end up making it from script to screen. One of the better-known examples was a story about Elaine buying a gun. She argues with Jerry about it before getting a fake one as a gag and accidentally pulls it out at an airport. About 20 minutes into the table read, the cast decided not to do it, and a new script had to be written in just two days.
Other ideas were similarly rejected because there were concerns that the shows might be perceived as racist. According to an article in the New York Post, one unfilmed script involved George getting in trouble after saying he’d never seen a black person order a salad. Not much else is known about the story, other than that it was written by Larry Charles, who’d also penned the axed gun episode.
Simply put, NBC censors reportedly weren’t comfortable with the salad premise and prevented it from being filmed.
The Two ‘Seinfeld’ Episodes That Were Scrapped Before They Could Spark a Race Controversy
In a 1993 interview with Playboy, Jerry Seinfeld shared details about another proposed episode that never made it to air. This show was about Elaine missing her stop on the subway and realizing that the next stop was in Harlem. The writers wanted to explore her fear of having to get off there, but weren’t able to make it work. “We couldn’t find a way to do it without people getting the wrong impression,” Seinfeld explained. “It was coming off as racist. It was too small a needle to thread, so we abandoned it.”
It turns out they were right to be concerned: the Season 9 episode “The Puerto Rican Day” proved controversial due to a scene in which Kramer accidentally lights a Puerto Rican flag on fire. Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who’s Puerto Rican, said that the episode “crossed the line between humor and bigotry.”
NBC issued an apology the next day, saying that they didn’t intend to offend anybody. The show was subsequently left out of the syndication package until 2002.
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