Seinfeld, Sherlock Holmes, and Much Ado about Nothing
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Seinfeld, Sherlock Holmes, and Much Ado about Nothing “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That is the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. Learning from the absence of information seems to require a particular knack. How many of us see the polar bear in the snowstorm each time we pick up a blank piece of white paper? My favorite detective has always been TV’s Columbo, not Dr. Watson’s mentor. I used to intently concentrate on the television screen trying to see the same clues Lt. Columbo found when he visited the scene of the crime. Since the clues he saw were only written down in his notepad and not communicated to the TV audience until the mystery was solved at the end of the hour-long show, I was hooked. I can still vividly see a pair of sneakers on the victim’s feet and I wondered what Columbo was so fascinated with. The victim had not tied his shoes on his feet himself (we later learn) because evidently they had been tied by a right-handed person facing the victim. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Mystery of the Silver Blaze, Sherlock Homes picks up on something that did not happen. A quiet dog in spite of a crime can only mean the dog knew the perpetrator very well. TV mystery crimes with key clues being the absence of information make for rather unusual cinematography. In the days when Columbo was originally broadcast, there were no remotes for televisions, and only 3–5 TV stations were available to most people. TV screenplays were written for audiences who watched the show from start to finish—now I assume screenwriters have to allow for general channel surfing. A level of willingness to concentrate seems to be sorely missing in today’s broadcast smorgasbord. Maybe I’m wrong, and it’s too much to expect to
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draw much of a crowd to a museum filled with blank white canvases. The writers of the overwhelmingly popular situation comedy Seinfeld leveraged the suggestion that the show was “about nothing” to great advantage. It wasn’t that their scripts focused on the visual or psychological absence of information, but that compared to all previous and contemporary sitcoms, their scripts were made entirely of exceptionally unpredictable bits that were independent temporally within a particular show. I bring Seinfeld into this because, in the short space allocated for this piece, I cannot do the topic of “nothing” justice. Instead, I wish to point out examples of “nothing” in the sciences and to chall
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