Seinfeld is not without its share of controversial episodes, chiefly by design. But one episode that was conceived in late 1990 was deemed too dark to even film by the show's cast, leading to it being scrapped at the last minute. The story behind that never-made episode, "The Bet," was first recounted by the cast and writers on the DVD commentary for season two. More recently, the writer of the episode, Larry Charles, and its would-be director, Tom Cherones, reminisced about what went wrong to ScreenCrush.

As Charles explains, the episode's central storylines centered around Elaine buying a gun from a black market salesman, and Kramer telling Jerry and George he joined the "mile high club" with a flight attendant. The titular "Bet" was one between Jerry, who believed Kramer's story, and George, who did not. Charles said that during the course of the episode, Kramer's first name was revealed to be "Conrad," not the "Cosmo" that was exposed later on.

But the most incendiary scene — the one that had both Julia Louis-Dreyfus and director Cherones vocally objecting to filming the episode at all — was one in which Dreyfus's character Elaine would have pointed the gun at her head in various places, mimicking shooting herself while referencing Presidential assassinations such as "the Kennedy." To this day, both Charles and Cherones disagree about whether or not Seinfeld ever could have gotten away with an episode poking fun at gun ownership in such fashion. Luckily for the series, the episode that was hastily written to replace this one — the series ninth — was the beloved one "The Phone Message." Read the full story behind the story at ScreenCrush.