Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David shared their favorite Seinfeld episodes and the backstories behind some of the show’s most iconic moments during a live taping of Ari Emanuel and Ben Persky’s The Rushmore Podcast on Monday night.

The event, which was part of the Netflix Is a Joke Festival, took place in front of a packed audience at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills that included Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos as well as Alan Horn, former head of Seinfeld producer Castle Rock Entertainment, and Warren Littlefield, former president of entertainment at NBC.  

The evening began with Emanuel running through a brief history of the show, which famously struggled in its beginning. The idea for the series came about after David and Seinfeld met as stand-up comics. They’d have conversations and began thinking, “if we put this in a show, it’d be hilarious,” Seinfeld said.

David shared that the show’s first episode order beyond the pilot — a meager four episodes — was the “smallest order in the history of television.” The money for the series came out of the same budget that NBC used for variety specials. When Seinfeld received the four-episode order, it became someone’s responsibility to tell Bob Hope he wouldn’t be able to do a Christmas special that year, Seinfeld shared.

The Playbill for the event featured a “research report” that detailed audience’s reaction of the pilot. Persky read aloud some notes from the memo, which noted that “no segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again,” while viewers called Jerry’s life “boring” and George a “loser” and said Jerry “needed a better backup ensemble.”

Early on, David and Seinfeld were told that the show wouldn’t be getting picked up — “and I was thrilled,” David said, noting that he felt like he had “no more stories left to tell,” a feeling he also had “after every season of Seinfeld and every season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Emanuel also reminded the crowd that the show kept shifting time slots before ultimately landing in the prime 9 p.m. Thursday period. “Can we just say we had a rocky beginning and move on?” Seinfeld quipped as Emanuel kept going through the show’s early challenges.

The duo also talked about the backstory of the character of Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Elaine was not in the pilot, which did feature a waitress at the restaurant that the characters frequented. However, it was decided that they needed a different female character. “We were single guys,” Seinfeld said. “We couldn’t write relationships. We didn’t know anything about it.” David shared that he had dated Monica Yates, daughter of author Richard Yates, and they remained friends. So they based the character on her. “If it was an ex, it [eliminated the element of] ‘will they or won’t they?'” Seinfeld noted.

Emanuel and Persky also asked about the origins of some of the show’s biggest moments and catchprases that became part of the pop culture lexicon, including:

Meanwhile, each episode of The Rushmore Podcast sees Emanuel and Persky hosting various guests from the worlds of sports, entertainment and culture to debate the “Mount Rushmore” (top four) of those categories. To that end, the quartet shared their picks for the top four episodes of Seinfeld, culled from 180 total episodes across nine seasons. Their choices, in no particular order:

David and Seinfeld shared some behind-the-scenes stories from some of those episodes.

In the end, the quartet decided that the four best episodes are “The Contest,” “The Opposite,” “The Puffy Shirt” and “The Marine Biologist.”

The night wrapped with an appearance by some super-fans who won a trivia contest and got to ask their own questions of David and Seinfeld. When one of the fans got a little too comfortable with the microphone and tried to crack a joke, David admonished him, with his characteristic yet charming brand of bluntness: “You’re letting this go to your head a little bit.”