After that grand spiel I would like to say that the ninth season is a favorite of mine and that the good folks of "Seinfeld" went out with an ultimate bang. Unfortunately I think the ninth season was the weakest of the series, and you could really see it coming as the show began to lose what made it so great around the middle of season eight. The storylines were beginning to get a little too outrageous and a dependency on characters outside of the core four began to bog down the production.
The ninth season started off strong with three episodes I love in "The Butter Shave," "The Voice" (hellloooooooooooo) and "The Serenity Now", but episodes like "The Blood" in which Kramer decides he is going to store his own blood in his refrigerator as opposed to at the blood bank and "The Junk Mail," another Kramer story in which he decides he is going to try and stop getting mail were the first signs that the ninth season was a good place to call it quits.
The season does still have a few gems including "The Dealership" (High five!) and "The Burning" in which Pudy's religious side comes to the surface, but other than that this is a season filled with "okay" episodes and a few real failures such as "The Puerto Rican Day", which was eventually pulled and never to air again because it was deemed offensive. In all actuality it shouldn't have been shown again because it was bad, something the writers on the commentary are quick to realize and continue to say why... "They never should have gotten out of the car." Gotta agree with that one, because once they did the episode went way over the top, and it carried over to the finale.
Something like 90 million people tuned in for the final episode of "Seinfeld" and the day after it aired everyone began chatting about what a bummer it was. A couple of the featurettes in this set deal with this being the final season and they say that there really was no way of creating an episode that would match public expectation, and while that is true, the reason people didn't like it wasn't because they expected something "out of this world", it was that they expected more of what had made them laugh in the early seasons. When you have 90 million people tuning in they aren't tuning in because of the over-the-top outrageous crap you did in seasons eight and nine. These are people that are coming back because they remember laughing at seasons 3-5 when the show was hitting on all cylinders.
No matter how you look at it, I can watch any episode of "Seinfeld" at any moment, and while I know that the ninth season is the weakest there would be no way I would have not bought it. While there may be some bad episodes, there is always something worth a laugh in each.
As far as special features go with this final season you get the usual amount of animated "Sein-Imation" clips, the commentaries, deleted scenes, text commentaries and behind-the-scenes Inside Looks. On top of that, disc one has a featurette called "The Last Lap" interviewing the cast and crew about this being the final season. Disc two has a feature where you can play "The Betrayal" (you know, the backwards episode that started at the end) from start-to-finish. It is a cool little feature, but it actually makes you appreciate just how innovative it was to do it backwards, which works much better.
Disc three has the much loved bloopers, which are always great and disc four has a couple more featurettes; "Scenes from the Roundtable" as Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Julie Louis Dreyfus, Michael Richards and Jason Alexander sit back and reminisce a bit about the show. The messed up thing here is that you have to buy the "Complete Collection" to get the full hour long discussion. Uh, what about the people that have been giving you money all along Sony? This is easily one of the biggest bullshit moves that studios pull on consumers. Oh well... It isn't that interesting any way since none of them seem to actually want to be there and really don't have a lot to say.
Overall, I recommend you buy season nine as well as seasons one thru eight... If you haven't bought any of them yet then buy the Complete Collection and get the extra disc that I will never own and rub it in my face. Either way I think this television show is a must own on every level. The only people I know that don't love this show are those that somehow have never seen it. Yeah, I don't get it either.