At last! A reunion to get me excited

Strange things, reunions. Our very favourites bands, particular football pairings or television acts can reunite after years of hiatus, but, really, is it ever that exciting?

Great bands have reunited this year. Pavement and Magazine for starters. Both fantastic bands in their day, but, great as they once were, now isn't their time. Real Life was released 31 years ago, and Crooked Rain Crooked Rain was, somewhat remarkably, 15 years ago. One of the main reasons anything can be considered so good is its timing. Never Mind the Bollocks isn't technically a great album, if it was released in the early 1980s at the same time as the Bunnymen et al. it'd passed by without so much as a whimper. But 1977 was just perfect. Maradona's current stint as Argentina boss also typifies it - his time has been and gone, now his fannying about is just fucking up that reputation as one of the greatest ever players. He's added to that being one of the most hopeless coaches of all time, on the brink of failing to take a team consisting of Messi, Riquelme, Tevez and Mascherano amongst others to next years' World Cup.

Which is entirely the point. Bands, sportsmen, they have their era. Reunions usually just reek of a post-prime cash cow being milked to death, don't they?

But how about a television show? Surely most shows which reunited years down the line for that one off special, or final series, have inevitably been shit. Many British comedies have demonstrated that everything has a shelf life - The Office and Fawlty Towers have only two six-part series each, plus that fantastic Office Christmas special which signed the series off for good just perfectly.

My favourite sitcom ever happens to be Seinfeld. Seinfeld ran for 9 series from 1989 to 1998, consisting of around 20 episodes each. At its pinnacle it's the finest sitcom not just of its generation but of all time, while at its lows - notably after Larry David departed the show in 1996, plus the difficult early years, it is a pretty average sitcom. Yet, unusually, I find myself wanting more. Ever since I found out about this mere 30 minutes of screen time with Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer (Larry David helps too), I've been simply itching to see this episode. The ongoing will-they-won't-they sagas of whether the Smiths or the Stone Roses will reunite are boring, but the prospect of one final Seinfeld reunion has me foaming at the jowels.

Firstly, it's not a reunion in the traditional sense, but a story arc in David's outstanding Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which the Seinfeld creator yearns to reunite the cast for one final episode. I'm yet to see it, it's in my downloads folder just waiting to be watched and enjoyed. But why do I want more Seinfeld but no more Smiths? The key, to me, seems to lie in endings. The Smiths signed off with Strangeways Here We Come, similarly Pavement with Terror Twilight, but the Seinfeld ending was somewhat disappointing - a nostalgic trip down 9 years of gold which ended with recurring and memorable cameo roles being reprised to testify against the Fab Four (yes, that's right) in a court case which would see them consigned to prison. A massive, massive anti-climax.

Still, many great things have had acrimonious and disappointing endings - The Libertines and the Stone Roses for a start, yet rumours of their reunions still just make me tut and sigh, and reel out the old "it'll never be the same". Then why Seinfeld? Honestly, I've no idea.


Dan.