The Stake Out (Seinfeld)

At a video store, Jerry jokingly shows Elaine a porno film. Elaine gets it as a gag birthday gift for her friend Pamela and invites Jerry along to the party. Despite forgetting that he met Pamela while dating Elaine, Jerry agrees in exchange for Elaine going to a family wedding with him. Arriving empty-handed at the party, Jerry is intrigued when an attractive woman banters with him. Since they both have companions, they struggle to flirt. Jerry tunes out Elaine telling him about her dream in which he had wooden teeth, but only manages to memorize that the woman works at the law firm "Sagman, Bennett, Robbins, Oppenheim and Taft" before she has to leave. Elaine takes offense at Jerry's distraction during the party. Jerry's parents, Morty and Helen, are visiting for the wedding, and Jerry has yielded his apartment to them, sleeping at Kramer's. Jerry asks for advice on tracking down the woman from the party, while his parents judge him as picky for breaking up with Elaine. Jerry confesses he could ask Elaine for the woman's number, but that he never talks about other women with her. Morty suggests that Jerry catch the woman at her office by "staking out" the lobby. George comes along on the stakeout and brainstorms cover stories with Jerry. George wants to pretend to be an architect despite Jerry's skepticism, and they make up a lunch meeting with importer-exporter "Art Corvelay", which George impulsively changes to "Art Vandelay". Their excuse works, and Jerry learns that the woman, Vanessa, is single. Jerry chats her up as George slinks away. Kramer advises Jerry's mother to play the non-word "quone" in Scrabble against Jerry. She relays a phone call from Elaine, who knowingly namedropped "Art Vandelay". Jerry is anxious to find out how Elaine reacted to being left out. When she arrives for the wedding, they awkwardly address the elephant in the room, agreeing that they need to talk openly about seeing other people. Elaine turns out to be more relieved than Jerry, as this frees her to taunt him about having met a Wall Street financier who is "hilarious" to boot—by going on a stakeout of her own. ==Production==

"The Stake Out" is based on a real life incident in which David was with a woman that he had dated previously named Monica Yates (daughter of author Richard Yates). They then went to a restaurant and David met another woman. However, he could not flirt as much as he wanted due to the presence of Yates. David did find out the name of the building where she worked at and staked her out. The names of the people in the title of the law firm are friends Larry David made at college. This episode prompted running gags that were used in later episodes. These were the phrase "importer-exporter", George's ambitions of becoming an architect and the name "Art Vandelay". The character of Vanessa (named after a woman David once went out with) also reappears in a later episode from the first season, "The Stock Tip". The opening scene caused some problems because it featured a woman walking off the set and taking one step down to get off it. Gleen Forbes, the set designer, thought that this made the show look cheap. In this episode Kramer greets Morty by name. Unlike later episodes featuring recast characters, this episode featuring Phil Bruns' scenes were not re-filmed for syndication with Barney Martin substituting for Bruns, as the characters had aged too much in the show for that to be an option. ==Reception==

When "The Stake Out" was first broadcast on May 31, 1990, the episode attracted a Nielsen rating of 16.2/24, meaning that 16.2% of American households watched the episode, and that 24% of all televisions in use at the time were tuned into it. Mary Kay Shilling and Mike Flaherty of Entertainment Weekly also liked the episode but had some doubts, saying it was, "A painfully realistic take on the lovers-to-friends transition that should have been more comically fruitful." However, some reviews of the episode were critical, both now and at the time. When first broadcast, Matt Roush from USA Today wrote: "Lacking much in the way of attitude, the show seems obsolete and irrelevant. What it boils down to is that Seinfeld is a mayonnaise clown in the world that requires a little horseradish." ==References==