- Unfrosted
- Directed by Jerry Seinfeld
- Written by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder
- Starring Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy and Jim Gaffigan
- Classification N/A; 90 minutes
- Streams on Netflix starting May 3
What’s the deal with Jerry Seinfeld? Over the past few months, one of the most successful television stars of all time seems hellbent on torching any goodwill that his NBC sitcom delivered over nine untouchable seasons. As he’s been making the rounds to promote his feature directorial debut Unfrosted, Seinfeld has adopted the disposition of Frank Costanza, railing at a world that he no longer cares to understand.
“It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, MASH is on.’ You just expected, ‘There will be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.’ Well guess what – where is it?” Seinfeld said in a recent interview with The New Yorker. “This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
Max Greenfield as Rick Ludwin and Amy Schumer as Marjorie Post in Unfrosted. Unfrosted is a feature-length riff on a Seinfeld stand-up joke about Pop-Tarts.Netflix
Leaving aside the fact that Seinfeld seems to forget the existence of Curb Your Enthusiasm – the most deliberately offensive sitcom ever made, run by his old Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, in which Jerry himself appeared several times, including the series finale that aired just the other week! – the comic fundamentally misunderstands the concept of crap. Because Netflix’s Unfrosted is one big steaming pile of it, a distressingly laugh-free affair that is, as Larry might say, pretty, pretty, pretttttyyyyyyy bad.
Jim Gaffigan as Edsel Kellogg III, Seinfeld as Bob Cabana, Fred Armisen as Mike Puntz and Melissa McCarthy as Donna Stankowski in Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.Netflix
A feature-length riff on a middling Seinfeld stand-up joke about Pop-Tarts (“How did they know that there would be a need for a frosted fruit-filled heated rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in, and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in?”), Unfrosted traces the entirely fictional creation of the breakfast food.
It is 1963 in Battle Creek, Mich., the very real locale nicknamed “Cereal City” as a result of housing both the head offices of WK Kellogg Co. and Post Consumer Brands. Toiling away in the Kellogg lab is Bob (Seinfeld), a Ward Cleaver type trying to best his rivals across town, headed by the proto-Trumpian Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer). With cereal innovation at an all-time low, Bob needs something fresh to keep Post off his tail – as well as the nefarious dairy cartel that’s nipping at his heels, led by the sinister milkman Mike (Christian Slater). After recruiting the world’s greatest scientific and culinary minds (including Bobby Moynihan’s Chef Boyardee and Melissa McCarthy’s NASA scientist), Bob slowly builds his way to creating the breakfast treat that will go on to increase the risk of childhood obesity by an exponential number.
The above logline might sound mildly amusing were it a Saturday Night Live skit. But Unfrosted is instead stretched out to an intolerable 90 minutes, like a long-lost Lorne Michaels-produced SNL feature from the ‘90s, à la It’s Pat or Stuart Saves His Family. To put in more Seinfeldian terms, the jokes are so hacky that Kenny Bania wouldn’t touch ‘em, and the pacing so slow it rivals Elaine’s experience enduring The English Patient. It’s not about nothing, but it is nothing special.
Hugh Grant plays Thurl in Unfrosted.Netflix
Seinfeld, who seems to have made the film mostly to indulge his well-documented love of cereal – as if he was the Tim Whatley of breakfast gags! – tries to compensate for the script’s endless eye-rollers by stuffing the film with as many cameos as Pop-Tarts have calories. The film’s trailer has already spoiled most of them, though I’ll give Seinfeld a smidge of credit for engineering two decent surprises toward the end, even if the moment only underscores how another production handled Unfrosted’s 1960s Americana nostalgia in a far more clever way. Serenity now, Jerry. Serenity now.