If you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, then you shouldn’t judge a sitcom by its pilot. If you did, you’d only be able to spot a handful of the all-time greats (Cheers, Friends, The Mary Tyler Moore Show–the list of shows with perfect pilots is short). Most others, modern classics like The Office and Parks and Recreation, didn’t find a groove until way later. The same can be said for Seinfeld, which aired its own iffy pilot 30 years ago today.

Seinfeld would become a seismic game-changer, the sitcom that blew up the traditional multi-cam format and used the broken parts to lay a foundation upon which many hit comedies would build upon. The hang-out format of Friends and New Girl, the interwoven plots of Arrested Development, the mundane cringe humor of The Office, the misanthropic ‘tude of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia–you can trace all of it back to what Seinfeld pulled off during the heyday of blockbuster primetime television in front of a weekly audience bigger than any watching a single show today. The importance of Seinfeld cannot be overstated.

But, you know, you can’t exactly tell all that from the pilot.

The Seinfeld pilot, originally aired as The Seinfeld Chronicles, was a risk from the start. The show was born out of NBC’s desire to work with rising comic Jerry Seinfeld on a series of 90-minute late night specials. Seinfeld and his writing partner Larry David toyed around with that idea for a bit, and then shifted to writing a half-hour sitcom–something they’d never written before. And because their deal was with the special programming department at NBC, the show was produced by a bunch of people who had never made a sitcom before, either. That’s why Seinfeld debuted on the bizarre date July 5th, which ranks up there with December 24th, February 29th, or Black Friday on the list of weirdest dates to premiere a show. NBC just wanted to burn the pilot off ASAP and see how people reacted, and the show didn’t get a full season until Rick Ludwin, the head of the entertainment division, scrounged up the money from his own department and the budget from a scrapped Bob Hope special to fund an uncommonly short 4-episode Season 1 order. The rest was history.

So, what did Ludwin see in The Seinfeld Chronicles? He saw the seed of a great show, for sure, but he saw a completely different show from the Seinfeld we’ve all binged on repeat for 30 years. The pilot definitely executes Seinfeld’s “show about nothing” premise, as it’s quite possibly the most about nothing episode of the series. The whole episode centers around Jerry and George trying to figure out if the woman coming into town wants to hook up with Jerry. That’s it. They talk about it over lunch, at the laundromat, in Jerry’s apartment–at least “The Parking Garage,” a latter adventure in nothingness, gave Jerry a subplot about public urination and Elaine some goldfish to freak out about.

The driving plot focuses on the politics of word choice (“had to come in and maybe we’ll get together?”) and reading the body language of a greeting (if she covers your eyes and grabs both your hands while shimmying from side to side, who knows?), but it also includes some choice deviations. The episode opens up with a classic Jerry and George conversation about how the second button on a shirt “literally makes or breaks the shirt” (the convo would be repeated in the very last scene of the series finale). There’s also Jerry’s belief that “you can’t overdie and you can’t overdry,” a quote I think about at least once a week.

Here’s where things go really off the rails, making this seem like Bizarro Seinfeld. Instead of hanging out in a booth at Monk’s Cafe like in every other episode, Jerry and George grab a bite at Pete’s Luncheonette, a ’50s-style diner with a framed photo of Newhart’s Tom Poston on the wall. And instead of Elaine, the fourth character is a waitress named Claire played by Lee Garlington.

There’s no Julia Louis-Dreyfus in this one, and the lack of her legendary presence is felt. There have been a lot of conflicting reasons given for Garlington’s dismissal from the show in the year between the taping of the pilot and the rest of Season 1. NBC president Warren Littlefield said she was cut because as a waitress, she’d only ever be in diner scenes and would never be a real part of the gang. Seinfeld has echoed that statement, saying they wanted a character who would be able to mix it up. Jason Alexander, however, has said that Garlington rewrote her one scene and showed it to Larry David, who took it about as well as you would expect Larry David to take that. Anyway, Garlington’s sardonic, low-energy waitress has one scene and then disappears from the chronicles.

If you think the lack of Elaine is weird, just wait until you see what Kramer was like in 1989.

He knocks. And his name, BTW, is Kessler. And he has short hair and is a reclusive shut-in who also owns a dog. Richards as Kessler is still a loose cannon onstage, of course. He can’t not be. But it’s still wild to see the most recognizable Seinfeld character so unrecognizable.

And that is the deal with the Seinfeld pilot. It’s the show you know but not. There’s no Elaine, Kramer is Kessler, the diner’s all doo-wop, Jerry’s apartment is a studio with a skylight, and there is approximately 500% more standup material. You can definitely see that The Seinfeld Chronicles is trying something different, but you can’t yet tell that it’s doing something brilliant.

Stream Seinfeld "Pilot" on Hulu