Jerry Seinfeld: Reimagining his show's infamous finale may be in the works

Massapequa-raised comedy icon Jerry Seinfeld hinted at an upcoming reimagining of the poorly received “Seinfeld” finale during one of his two shows Saturday at the Wang Theatre in Boston’s Boch Center.

“Did you like the ending?” an audience member is heard asking him in an Instagram video snippet posted by Linda Henry, CEO of Boston Globe Media. The final episode of the Emmy Award-winning 1989-98 NBC sitcom, titled simply “The Finale” and airing May 14, 1998, was largely an hourlong parade of characters from all nine seasons testifying against friends Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine (Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Michael Richards, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) at a trial.

“Well, I have a little secret for you about the ending,” responded Seinfeld, 69. “But I can’t really tell it,” he joked, to audience laughter, “because it is a secret. Here’s what I’ll tell you, OK? But you can’t tell anybody. Something is going to happen that has to do with that ending. Hasn’t happened yet. And just what you are thinking about, Larry [David, the series’ co-creator] and I have also been thinking about it. So you’ll see. You’ll see.”

The finale had been widely panned, with Entertainment Weekly TV critic Ken Tucker, in a comment generally echoed by others, calling it “off-key and bloated.” Seinfeld himself has been mixed in his thinking about it.

In a 2014 Reddit Q&A, he said, “I was happy with the Seinfeld finale because we didn't want to do another episode as much as we wanted to have everybody come back to the show we had so much fun with. It was a way to thank all of the people who worked on the show over the years that we thought made the show work. I don't believe in trying to change the past but I'm very happy with it.”

But at the 2017 New Yorker Festival, he reflected that, “I sometimes think we really shouldn’t have even done it,” adding, “There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy.”

The seventh season of David’s HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which David plays a heightened version of himself, contained a running storyline about a “Seinfeld” reunion. The Nov. 22, 2009, season finale, titled “Seinfeld,” included scenes from that apocryphal reunion, in which George had an ex-wife named Amanda and had made and lost a fortune with a public-bathroom-finding app.

Seinfeld has not commented further publicly, and David has no evident social media.

Seinfeld's next upcoming area performance is Oct. 18 at Carnegie Hall, in a fundraiser for the Good+ Foundation’s Fatherhood Leadership Council, which he chairs.