Which Sitcom Was More Expensive To Film, Seinfeld Or Friends? (2024)

There is an argument to be made that the modern era of television sitcoms was ushered in by two shows: Seinfeld and Friends. Both sitcoms were prominent in the ‘90s, perhaps more than any other series in the genre.

Seinfeld and Friends undoubtedly influenced other sitcoms that followed afterwards. For instance, there have been extensive fan theories that some storylines from CBS’ The Big Bang Theory were ‘stolen’ from Friends.

The success of those two pioneer sitcoms did not only come from great writing and impressive cast performances. NBC – which was home to both Seinfeld and Friends invested heavily in the respective productions.

A strong indicator of this would be the kind of money that the key cast members from either show earned in their heyday. While the main actors on Friends started out being paid $22,500 per episode in the first season, that figure had risen to around $1 million by the end of the show.

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Jerry Seinfeld is worth nearly $1 billion today, and a significant chunk of that was made while working on Seinfeld. NBC clearly spared no expense to make their two hit sitcoms, although Friends ended up costing much more than Seinfeld per episode.

Production Of ‘Seinfeld’ Cost $2 Million Per Episode

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld really started to make a name for himself in the 1980s. After impressing audiences and industry bigwigs with several late night show appearances, he worked on his first ever stand-up special, which aired live on HBO in September 1987. The special was titled Stand-Up Confidential.

As he gained more and more exposure, he was approached by NBC with the opportunity to create a sitcom for the network. To do this, Seinfeld enlisted the help of his close friend and fellow comedian, Larry David, and they got about the process of creating Seinfeld.

The premise of the sitcom revolved around Seinfeld as a fictional version of himself. Other cast members included Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine Benes, Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer and Jason Alexander as George Costanza.

The character George was influenced by the real life of Larry David, and his actual friendship with Seinfeld.

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Seinfeld lasted a total of nine seasons on NBC, by the end of which each episode was costing around $2 million to produce.

‘Friends’ Cost Five Times More To Produce Than ‘Seinfeld’

The inflation adjustment from 1998 – the year of the final Seinfeld episode – to date is about 79% cumulatively. This would mean that the value of one dollar in 1978 equates to about $1.79 today.

From this, it could be estimated that towards its tenure on NBC, one episode of Seinfeld cost around $3.58 million in today’s value.

Friends debuted on NBC in September 1994, about five years after Seinfeld had first started broadcasting on the network. The David Crane and Marta Kaufmann-created sitcom went on to last another six years – until May 2004 – after Seinfeld’s final episode aired in May 1998.

According to an estimate by Screen Rant, in the final seasons of Friends, the cost of producing one episode was amounting to around $10 million – five times more than it took to make a single episode of Seinfeld. Adjusted for inflation, that amount would translate to around $15.5 million today.

RELATED: How Much Money Is The Cast Of 'Friends' Still Making Today?

Despite spending a lot more money comparatively, Friends could still not quite topple Seinfeld as the most popular NBC sitcom of all time.

The sitcom sub-genre of comedy has become perhaps the most popular, and this is reflected in the amount of money being injected into production costs.

How I Met Your Mother was created for CBS by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays. It ran for nine seasons on the network between 2005 and 2014, and – like Seinfeld, reportedly cost an estimated $2 million to make per episode.

Another famous modern sitcom is Arrested Development, starring Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi and Will Arnett, among others. The show originally aired for three seasons on Fox, before a reboot by Netflix for another two seasons between 2013 and 2019. In this latter iteration, an episode is said to have cost around $3 million to produce.

The Big Bang Theory is one of the most expensive sitcoms of all time, with one episode hitting CBS’ pockets to the tune of about $9 million.

That significant amount is nonetheless dwarfed by the $25 million per episode pumped by Disney+ into their Marvel miniseries, WandaVision. The series paid homage to various old sitcoms, with each episode being done in the style of a famous sitcom from the decade in which it was set.

NEXT: 'WandaVision': What Does The Future Have In Store For The New And Improved Vision?