Seinfeld

He was into Scientology. He's never been true to his school. He used to spend hours preparing his face for a shave. He has control issues, is remarkably focused and has rarely made a misstep in his ascent to America's comedy pantheon. And, says one author, Jerry Seinfeld made every effort to persuade people not to cooperate with the unauthorized biography that contains such facts. Seinfeld: The Making of an American Icon (HarperCollins) by Jerry Oppenheimer, chronicles the childhood, early career and phenomenal rise of the man who created, in the guise of "a show about nothing," the gotta-watch-it sitcom that TV Guide called "the No. 1 comedy of all time."

Writer-director Nicole Holofcenere debuted with Walking and Talking, the 1996 female-bonding movie about what happens when one of two gal-pals decides to get married. The filmmaker's work pivoted on the "observational humor" Seinfeld thrived on, and on minimalist motifs Seinfeld had already done to death, like a date hearing an answering-machine message referring to him as "the ugly guy." Based on that film and her new one, Lovely & Amazing, I think Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies.

Watching Ellie, the new Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitcom that premieres on NBC tonight, should be titled Watching That Stupid Little Timer in the Lower Left-hand Corner of the TV Screen Tick Down From 22 Minutes. In a misguided effort to make this series about a Los Angeles nightclub singer named Ellie Riggs (Louis-Dreyfus) feel different from standard network sitcom reality, executive producer Brad Hall - the star's husband - has a timer onscreen ticking down from 22 minutes, the running time of a half-hour sitcom minus commercials.

POSTVILLE, Iowa -- This is a town where on one side of the street, an Israeli can get halvah, while on the other a Mexican can wire money back home. A town where you can hear both the Norwegian uff da and the Yiddish oy vey in a single office. A town of just 2,300 residents, but more than 20 ethnic groups. Welcome to the United Nations of Iowa. How this community in the northeast corner of the state became the United Nations in miniature is in some ways the story of America, circa 21st century, writ small.

After three years of near-silence -- except for the occasional American Express ad -- Jerry Seinfeld told several thousand of his newest friends this past week that he expects to be out of television for good. "This is really what I like to do more. This is my job, I did that for 25 years," Seinfeld said toward the end of his new stand-up act at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall Thursday night. "The show -- I don't know what that was -- it just sort of happened to me." Thursday night's appearance was just his second big stand-up concert with new material since leaving the television show that transformed his much ado about nothing into something big. And a lot more has happened to him between then and now. In the past few years, Seinfeld has broken up with his much younger girlfriend, married a woman who had just married someone else, and become a father.

IT'S TIME to celebrate. Baltimore's football team, the Ravens, has made it to the National Football League's playoffs - quite an achievement for a team that arrived in town five years ago as a dreadful also-ran. The loudest cheers came from the region's loyal football fans, who lost their beloved Colts two decades ago, adopted a relocated team from Cleveland, supported it even in dark days and are now savoring the Ravens' successes. The team's quotable coach, Brian Billick, banned players from using the word "playoff" until it was a fait accompli.

Men's corduroy pants that bunch up at the groin area when you sit down, people sitting at the movies who won't move their legs when you're trying to get past, friends who put you on the speaker phone when you think you're having a private conversation. These are the things that trouble the waters in the life of Larry David, creator and star of the new HBO sitcom, "Curb Your Enthusiasm." They might sound like nothing more than life's little irritations, but David is the guy who co-created the great sitcom about nothing, "Seinfeld."

Our TV creator, David E. Kelley, who produces and writes all daily network programming (except Saturday's), now gives us another creation in the skinny form of "Ally" -- a half-hour version of his hourlong dramedy "Ally McBeal."The stripped-down versions of previously aired "McBeal" episodes even have a catchy show business name: "repurposed materials," as Fox calls them. David E. Kelley -- whose repurposed name could be just "Kelley" -- can't help but find more creative ways to enhance our television pleasure.

Jerry Seinfeld may have starred in the show about "nothing," but the guy notices everything.Razor blade dispensers in airplane bathrooms, the abundance of consonants in New York cabbies' names ...These are just a couple of the random details the former sitcom sultan addresses in his CD, "I'm Telling You For the Last Time."The CD is a recording of the live stand-up act the cereal-obsessed comedian performed on Broadway shortly after "Seinfeld" went off the air.It's clear from the material that Seinfeld's eyes and mind are working constantly.

NBC was a big winner and an even bigger loser at last night's 50th annual Emmy Awards.Andre Braugher, of the NBC drama "Homicide: Life on the Street," and stars in three of the network's key sitcoms won the major acting awards last night.But the network was also saddled with the longest and one of the least memorable Emmy telecasts ever -- four hours of flat clip packages, tedious standing features and a couple of lame musical numbers.The win for Braugher and "Homicide," produced in Baltimore, was especially sweet after six years of the show's being shortchanged by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences because it's made outside Hollywood.