Larry David said he would rather ‘do time in prison’ than make another season of Seinfeld, biographer claims
Larry David said he would rather ‘do time in prison’ than make another season of Seinfeld, biographer claims
Ellie MuirSun, October 25, 2026 at 2:45 PM UTC
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Larry David found it “torturous” to run the Emmy-winning sitcom Seinfeld, his biographer has said.
Blake J. Harris, the author behind the biography Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David, said in a new interview that David put himself under extreme pressure when working on the sitcom that launched his career in the 90s.
Speaking to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed podcast, Harris said that ahead of the show's fifth season, which started airing in 1993, David told some associates during a lunch date that he would “rather spend a year in prison than do another season of Seinfeld.”
“Part of it is shtick or him being kind of funny, but part of it hints at how torturous it was for him to run Seinfeld,” Harris explained.
He continued: “That torture largely came from the pressure he put on himself to come up with good ideas, which is a constant theme in the book.”
Larry David found it ‘torturous’ to run the hit sitcom ‘Seinfeld,’ his biographer has said (Getty)
According to Harris, David’s determination to make the show excellent was the source of his stress.
“To him, every second of every episode needed to hit a certain caliber of quality and trying to clear that bar – day after day after day – seemed unsustainable,” he added.
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“Or put more succinctly, as one of Larry’s future Seinfeld colleagues would later tell The Hollywood Reporter, ‘[Larry’s] so consumed with perfection that doing episodes is as painful for him as passing kidney stones.”
Harris also recounted David reading a draft of the biography and saying, “I think we’ve done too much of this – of me being anxious and worried about coming up with ideas.”
Harris said: “And I said, ‘No, we haven’t, because that’s all that anyone talks about... you were always saying this.’”
David, who co-created the show with Jerry Seinfeld, served as the head writer and executive producer on the first seven seasons, and returned to co-write the series finale in season nine.
Elsewhere in the biography, Harris reveals that David and the late director Rob Reiner nearly made a movie together, but it never happened.
Harris recalls in the book that David had been working on the 1983 unproduced screenplay Prognosis: Negative, and had asked Reiner – who was then known for his Emmy-winning performance as Michael Stivic in All in the Family – to produce it.
Ultimately, Reiner was busy working on his directorial debut, the acclaimed mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, about a fictional aging British heavy metal band on tour in the U.S.
Harris wrote: “And the project he wound up working on — his directorial debut — was a pretty risky venture: a fake documentary about a fictional rock band that Reiner co-wrote with three friends and then filmed over the course of only five weeks.”
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
