Why Seinfeld Decided To Kill Off George Costanza's Fiancée Susan

The Season 7 finale of "Seinfeld" pulls off perhaps the darkest joke of the entire series: Susan (Heidi Swedberg) dies suddenly, and her fiancé, George (Jason Alexander), doesn't really care. George responds to the news with what the ER doctor would later describe to a courtroom as "restrained jubilation." Among his friends, only Kramer (Michael Richards) can manage a genuine show of sympathy for Susan, although he mistakenly calls her Lily again in the process. While controversial at the time, "The Invitations" is now often considered one of the best episodes of "Seinfeld" ever. 

In a 2015 interview with Howard Stern, Alexander explained that Susan was killed off largely because her acting style didn't gel with the rest of the main cast's: "I couldn't figure out how to play off of her. Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine, were always misfiring." Alexander offered the same explanation in a 2014 interview, noting that co-stars Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus struggled in a similar way after they first shared an extended scene with Swedberg.

Jason Alexander recalled Julia Louis-Dreyfus saying about Heidi Swedberg's character, "Don't you want to just kill her?" Alexander explained further, "And Larry David went, 'kebang!'" 

"That's how that decision got made," Alexander said. He added that killing Susan provided the writers a surprising way to resolve George's relationship with her. "They didn't know when we started that season, was I going to marry her? Was she going to leave me? Or was I going to leave her? Those are the only three possibilities, right? They found a fourth. Sorry, Heidi."

Jason Alexander apologized after his 2015 explanation for Susan's death went viral and was interpreted by some as a mean-spirited attack towards Swedberg. He clarified that Swedberg was a "kind, lovely person who undoubtedly worked really hard to create Susan and that character was clearly what Larry and Jerry wanted her to be for George." He added, "People clearly liked the interplay even though I believed I was 'off.'" 

The constant awkwardness between Susan and George was a big reason many fans liked the pairing, as well as why Heidi Swedberg herself found the two such a fun couple. "She's like George inside out. He verbalizes all his neuroses, she keeps hers inside," she said in a 1996 interview with Indianapolis News. She even praised the handling of her character's death, and didn't consider George's blasé reaction too cruel to be funny.

"The four main characters are very self-centered and often do mean things to other people," she said, a statement mirrored by Larry David's own comments on the controversial Season 7 ending. "It would have been dishonest to make [George] upset, and that's why it's funny," David told Vulture. 

"The Invitations" was the final episode David wrote before the controversial series finale, and he clarified that Susan's death was not written with any sort of ill will towards the network. "Somebody showed me something in some magazine where they wrote that this was a 'f*** you' to the network," David said. "Why would I do something like that? Why a f*** you, when all they did was let me do whatever I wanted for seven years?"