"The Puerto Rican Day" is the 176th episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld. It aired on May 7, 1998, and was the 20th episode of the ninth and final season. It was the show's second-highest-rated episode of all time, with 38.8 million viewers, only behind the series finale. The episode aired one week before the two-part clip show and the two-part series finale aired. Because of controversy surrounding a scene in which Cosmo Kramer accidentally burns and then stomps on the Puerto Rican flag, NBC was forced to apologize and had it banned from airing on the network again. Also, it was not initially part of the syndicated package. In the summer of 2002, the episode started to appear with the flag-burning sequence intact.