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Comment by bruceb | Hacker News Reader

"found the odds of Seinfeld were better than sports or weather as a hurdle breaker. The combination of a personal like for a cult classic..."

This dinged the credibility. Not sure how mainstream show Seinfeld can be thought of as a cult classic. Unless this is thrown in there to spark conversation here on how he is wrong.

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To be fair, it's obvious the author is a non-native speaker. It's totally reasonable to miss the subtlety that a "cult classic" usually implies that it's not mainstream. Google doesn't even make that obvious in it first result: "something, typically a film or book, that is popular or fashionable among a particular group or section of society."

I don't really see how that hurts his credibility, since it's clear what happened and what the author meant. If your interpretation was that the author was trying to highlight his niche 90s sitcom tastes, then I think you were the one committing the communication error here.

While mainstream at the time, it's been ~25 years. Stingy IP holders share some of the blame, although I hear the show is coming to Netflix soon.

It's been on Hulu for a few years, just FYI.

All old shows should be everywhere.

All seasons are on Amazon prime! I love to put on Seinfeld as a background show

See I would define cult classic as something that was not popular at the time of release, but then slowly gained popularity several years on to the point of becoming mainstream in the present. The movie Office Space is a canonical example for me.

Even 25 years later I see Seinfeld is on 11 times tomorrow with my cable package.

His point was to learn the weird nuances and other "pointless" quirks of foreign cultures.

It's worth it, because you get judged for not knowing trivial, cultural-specific rules and knowledge.

Like, hypothetically, how popular a foreign TV show really was in the 90's.

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