Did anyone hear about that lost Seinfeld episode, "The Warning"?
Supposedly it was this episode that was supposed to air sometime in mid season two, but they pulled it from the schedule abruptly. They’ve actually been very good about keeping this a secret; it can’t seem to be found anywhere online, and there’s hardly any physical record of its existence. But I have a buddy who used to work over at NBC and was close with Larry David. He was around during the supposed filming of this episode. He recalled Larry suddenly acting strangely during this time; apparently, he was far more paranoid than usual and allowed no one in the studio other than himself, Jerry, and Jason Alexander (neither Elaine nor Kramer were even in this episode). But my friend got an early cut from one of the cameramen and was able to watch it before the tape could be destroyed. Now, he only watched it once before NBC got to it, but this is what he could tell me:
When it starts out, there’s no opening with Jerry doing standup: it just goes right to the apartment. This may just be because my friend saw an early cut, but the picture quality is a little worse than usual, and the sound doesn’t quite sync up right. Jerry is in his kitchen making a sandwich, and while he looks normal, there’s something “off” about him. All my friend could tell me was that when you look at him (especially into his eyes) he seems human but “foreign” somehow.
After a few minutes, George rings the doorbell. He comes in and starts complaining about something, although the audio is so low that you can hardly hear him. He’s white as a sheet and looks more distressed than usual, like something is seriously wrong. This goes on for a few minutes, and after a while he’s just babbling incoherently before the picture cuts out.
The next act is just Jerry and George sitting on the couch, but it’s no longer in color. This time, they both look “foreign,” not just Jerry, and they’re staring off blankly into space. They start talking with the same low audio quality, but now it’s impossible to hear because the opening bass riff comes in suddenly and just starts looping, making it so you can’t hear anything else. But Jerry seems to be in pain, and George is starting to sob. Apparently, my buddy could just make out George saying something like “don’t let it through, don’t let it come in” over and over again. This just repeats until the episode ends. All the while, the bass riff is getting more and more distorted, and after a few minutes, it just abruptly cuts to some super high frequency square wave.
I guess this made my friend nauseous, so he left the room to vomit but came back as fast as he could so he wouldn’t miss much. Since it was close to the 22 minute mark already, the episode had ended, but he caught a glimpse of the last image before the credits: just a still, black and white extreme closeup of Jerry’s face. There was some very small text superimposed, but it seemed like the end of a larger portion of text, since the words just said “THEN IT WILL BE TOO LATE.” I guess my friend tried to take the tape with him, but an NBC exec confiscated and destroyed it before he could leave the building.