Fans have spent decades re-watching Seinfeld and still have mixed feelings about THAT finale. It doesn’t take a Good Samaritan to know why fans weren’t exactly keen on the way the long-running sitcom chose to wrap things up. Most of the time, finales tie their characters up with neat little bows, but that's not what the NBC sitcom did at all. Now, decades later, the Seinfeld writers still don’t know what people were expecting from the finale. Larry David co-wrote the pilot with Jerry Seinfeld, so it was only natural that he was invited back to pen the finale. (Though it's something he says still gets him "grief" from fans.) Now, a new book about his life is giving us the inside scoop on the complicated legacy of the finale he wrote, and what others in the building at the time the show was wrapping up think about it. In an excerpt from the authorized biography Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David (via Esquire):, we learned the writers are still a little exasperated about what fans wanted from the long-running series. One of them, Jeff Schaffer, specifically discussed this idea that characters should always get their dreams or wishes when a show is wrapping up. He said of the ending itself and people's expectations: Looking back. I think those were the kinds of endings that people were expecting, which is crazy! Because at no point was Seinfeld ever a show like that—where the characters ‘grew’ or learned some sort of lesson. So why would it end like that?It’s true, Seinfeld was a show where the core group was selfish and pretty unchanging through the entire run, and this is what drove the show to have so many funny moments. In the finale though, for some reason this turned people off. For some, it was a full-circle condemnation for their poor behavior, such as mocking a man getting carjacked instead of helping him. This ultimately led to the group getting arrested under a local Good Samaritan law. (They were in Latham, Massachusetts at the time.) For other fans, the group being sentenced to a year in prison for this behavior felt like it contraindicated the show’s “no hugging, no learning” ethos and it’s cynical, guilt-free tone. This happens sometimes with sitcoms. A show goes on for so long and is a critical darling only to a divisive finale. It honestly reminds me of the reactions to the How I Met Your Mother finale, which also still gets brought up by fans. However, the idea was never meant to be controversial or create a divide. It originated when David saw an article, “We All Have a Duty to Help One Another” in the Opinion section of the newspaper, and that’s not a joke. The article argued “the US needs the equivalent of France’s Good Samaritan law." It wasn't that Larry David agreed. It was that he thought the idea was interesting. He wrote it down, and when the finale came up it became the crux of his idea for the episode. But at the time, the other writers were not in a room with David, and had no idea what direction this final episode would go in. Per Alec Berg: People had all sorts of crazy theories. As did we [the writers]. Because we didn’t know!David was at the production company, Castle Rock, writing the finale. So, the writers had no idea what they were writing toward. However, the biography notes that when David brought the script to Seinfeld, it was well-received by the cast. I thought it was a really good idea. So I brought it to Jerry and he liked it too. He was all for it.Now that we can watch the episodes with a Netflix subscription, it's easy to look back and be critical. Clearly people are fine telling David and co. the finale wasn't what they'd wanted, though now we know they'll clap right back and ask those fans what they expected from the show. All in all though, unlike these many fan questions left after the show’s ending, we at least know what happened with the finale, why the characters weren't going to grow, and how Larry David came up with the idea.