Melissa Blake is a freelance writer and blogger from Illinois. She covers disability rights and women's issues and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and Glamour, among others. Read her blog, So About What I Said, and follow her on Twitter. The views expressed in this commentary are solely hers. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) Early on in the fourth season of "Seinfeld," Jerry Seinfeld and his friend George Costanza go to pitch a sitcom to NBC. George's idea? A show about nothing. The idea is swiftly met with confusion. No plot? Nothing happens?

Melissa Blake

It's the quintessential self-referential moment of the NBC sitcom, which ran from 1989 to 1998, and, in that poignant scene, poked fun at itself for its absurdist premise. But the joke is on those fictional TV executives, because this telling episode is the exact opposite of art imitating life.

In reality, "Seinfeld" -- which is celebrating its 30th anniversary -- helped define a generation, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Though it was the show about nothing, it was also the show about the everyday experiences and conversations that animate our lives. Simply put, the show was genius.

And it meant everything to my teenage self. It was the show I'd watch in the evening and then talk about with my friends in school the next day, because they had all watched, too. It was also the one that I watched with my family every night and the one that never fails to remind me of my father, who died in 2003 -- a few years after the show ended. In fact, when I think of "Seinfeld," I think of family dinner where we laughed at the time Elaine Benes gained weight from mismarked frozen yogurt, or the time the whole gang -- Kramer, Elaine, George and Jerry -- spent 22 minutes trying to find their car in a parking garage.

"Seinfeld" fever is still going strong, propelled even now by its wide syndication. But it's not the only cultural touchstone of an earlier time -- my time, as it happens -- that you can still find every night on TV, and that is having an anniversary. "Friends" is celebrating its 25th anniversary next month. And indeed, just this week, pop culture devotees took to Twitter to debate one of the great questions of our generation: Is "Seinfeld" or "Friends" the better TV show?

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