19 TV Seders, Ranked by Mishegoss

This article was originally published in 2019 and has been updated to include more Passover Seders.

Why is this list different from all other lists? For one, it rounds up Passover episodes, a rare and under-examined breed of holiday special. I’m happy to be corrected (I do self-identify as a Simple Child–Wicked Child cusp), but Passover representation in television was pretty sparse until the Rugrats special came along in 1995, giving parents a way to entertain the kids’ table and parting the sea for future Passover specials to get real, messy, and culturally specific.

Like a Thanksgiving episode, Passover specials gather characters in that most explosive of tragicomic setups, a dinner party, for dialogue-rich ensemble scenes marked by familiar-to-some holiday traditions and beats. But like a hostage situation, the best Seder episodes play up the gathering’s inherent, inevitable claustrophobic tension, as bitter, increasingly hungry family members pass through the stages of boredom to simmering irritation to inebriation to chaos. And that’s the fundamental paradox of the Seder, that most of these episodes tease out: They acknowledge that the tradition is both so boring, and somehow so prone to histrionic family mishegoss. So hide your phone behind your Haggadah, sit back (recline, even), and take a look at these19TV Seders, ranked in order of accuracy — which is to say, ranked by how much shit goes down at the table.

19. Sesame Street, “It’s Passover, Grover!” (2011)

It’s not surprising that the Sesame Street Passover special is the least realistic based on our metric of Shit Going Down, as it primarily aims to be an educational special based on a very convenient rhyme. The primary conflict is that Grover and his friend Shoshannah (played by a Muppet and not Zosia Mamet) can’t find the maror, which isn’t the end of the world — but hey, preschool stakes — so they go searching for it with Anneliese van der Pol, of That’s So Raven and Cameo fame. Presumably most of the episode’s drama happened offscreen, as Jake Gyllenhaal is in attendance but Maggie’s nowhere to be seen.

18. Northern Exposure, “The Body in Question” (1991) and “Fish Story” (1994)

Way back in the Old Testament days of television, CBS dramedy Northern Exposure aired not one but two different Seders over the course of its run. Of course, Passover would be the perfect holiday for this magical-realist series to explore with its ghostly apparitions, storytelling traditions, and philosophical bent. In season three’s “The Body in Question,” fish-out-of-water rural Alaskan doctor Joel Fleischman falls asleep in a freezer where the body of a French explorer is being kept preserved in ice. In his dream, he sees a Seder in turn-of-the-century Poland, where his namesake great-uncle is a young boy reading the Four Questions. Much more interesting, and more drama fueled, is season five’s “Fish Story,” an episode that begins with love-hate interest Maggie O’Connell wanting to host a Seder for Fleischman. He’s uncomfortable with the gesture, and I can relate to that discomfort because it’s the same one I feel watching some of these TV Seders; there’s something very othering and performative, and a little bit uncanny, about seeing these things acted out. But then Fleischman communes on some kind of astral fishing plane with his rabbi, played by Jerry Adler, who wisely points out that his objection to O’Connell’s Seder offer may stem from a fear of intimacy. The Seder scene itself is pretty tame and by the book, though. Still: Are we due for a Northern Exposure comeback?

17. The O.C., “The Nana” (2004)

It’s always “Chrismukkah this and Chrismukkah that” with The O.C., and granted, Seth Cohen and his hybrid holiday really helped carry the Cute Jewish Boy torch forward from Paul Rudd into the new millennium. But whither the lowly first-season Passover episode? Most of the drama happens pre-Seder here: Marissa runs away after finding out about her mother sleeping with Luke, Ryan goes after her, and to top it all off Sandy’s mother (the titular Nana) is in town, and she’s dying. In the background of all of this, Passover preparations are swirling, with Summer learning the Four Questions (in English and Hebrew, no less) to impress the Nana, for Seth’s sake. The actual dinner comes at the end as a cute moment, with Sandy leading the proceedings as an Aqualung song plays.

16. Homeland, “Why Is This Night Different?” (2013)

In which a kinda-creepy child actor sings the four questions as Mandy Patinkin and Miranda Otto (or as I like to call them, Mirandy Pottonkin) gaze on in contemplation. The absolute chaos of the drama befalling Claire Danes in the cutaway scenes only underscore how peaceful and orderly this Seder really is, but it does end in the host questioning whether or not Saul (Mandy, of course) is a “true friend to Israel.” The geopolitical talk is kept very quiet and polite, but it is about CIA involvement in Syria, and it did give me too-real flashbacks to heated screaming matches with conservative extended family members at Seders past.

15. The Nanny, “The Passed-Over Story” (1997)

Fran has the Sheffields over to her mother’s place for a Seder when she’s all farmisht over Maxwell casting a hottie in his latest show. Wall-to-wall jokes ensue with the humor feeling authentic and culturally specific (and true to the characters) throughout: Sylvia puts Niles to work immediately even though he’s a houseguest (“If she thinks I’m coming for Rosh Hashanah, she’s got another thing coming”) and slips a fifth question for the youngest child, Grace, to read: “When is Daddy gonna marry my daughter already?” When the family’s all stuffed and in gastrointestinal distress after the meal, Fran explains the true meaning of Passover: “What do you think we wandered the desert for 40 years? We were walking off the meal!” Ba-dum-tss!

14. Sports Night , “April Is the Cruelest Month” (2000)

On paper, this is a low-drama Seder. The Sports Night crew has to work late on Passover, and so Jeremy and Danny host a Seder for the gang in the conference room, complete with a Passover story script that the team rehearses during commercial breaks. Josh Charles gives a speech about rumors about setbacks and firings and shares a hug with Peter Krause, and most of the episode’s drama has been resolved. But none of this accounts for watching this episode in 2019, and the sheer, invigorating thrill of seeing Felicity Huffman speak about justice and freedom as the Voice of God.

13. Transparent, “Exciting and New” (2013)

The Pfefferman clan served us everything we’d expect from them at this point in their season-three finale Seder: honesty, drama, dysfunction, and mess. Ali and Sarah improvise a cruise ship Seder plate from choice selections at the buffet (I think that’s a pork rib standing in for the shank bone), and the family gathers around it on the carpeted floor of the ship’s empty chapel to appease Ali’s whim of starting a new tradition. Joshie and Shelly storm off before long but not before Ali leads a prayer, stating they’ve been “invited by the feminine spirit, she who holds space,” which is so very orange-on-the-Seder-plate coded.

12. We Were the Lucky Ones, “Radom” (2024)

The Holocaust Seder on this list is oddly one of the less-dramatic ones, at least by our mishegoss rating system. That’s because, in part, this takes place in 1938, on the precipice of World War II, and the show uses the family dinner to illustrate a baseline of normalcy and dignity for the Polish-Jewish family before they’re ravaged by the war. So we get a montage of all of the usual traditions, with sentimental violin music playing overtop. Worth noting: Joey King and Logan Lerman talk in thick, Gru-like accents throughout.

11. Family Guy , “Family Goy” (2009)

Lois finds out that she’s Jewish on her mother’s side (her mother had hidden her heritage so that the family could join a country club) and decides to host a Seder. Peter shows up to stop it dressed as the Easter bunny, but Jesus appears to talk him down. Also, the animators slap some payas on Stewie, which is very cute in an off-model Bart Simpson T-shirt way,and he rips out Meg’s heart. Lots of mishegoss here, so … a low-key episode of Family Guy.

9. Saturday Night Live, “Elijah the Prophet/Seder” (1992)

Jerry Seinfeld plays the prophet Elijah in this Adam Sandler–era SNL sketch, and he plays him as a real nob. Dressed in school-play-quality white beard and robe, he insults the wine (Manischewitz? Yeuch!), does some Borscht Belt insult comedy about the soup (it’s as salty as the Dead Sea), and hits on the family’s teen daughter. By the end, he summons his buddy Jesus (Phil Hartman) to show up. That guy always has to make everything about him, huh? He can’t even give us onemeasly sketch for ourselves!

8. Extrapolations, “The Fifth Question” (2023)

The third episode of this climate-change-themed anthology series — like Black Mirror but “smog bad” instead of “screens bad” — takes place in Miami Beach. The year is 2047, and Daveed Diggs is a rabbi trying to petition the U.S. government to mark his synagogue for historic preservation to save it from flooding. (I think this would involve airlifting it inland or something?) David Schwimmer plays a new congregant, a rich dude gentrifying Little Haiti because it’s high above sea level, whose moody, extremely serious, extremely annoying daughter is being bat mitzvahed. After reading the Four Questions at their Seder, she essentially asks, “Why is God doing this to us?” and storms off. Meanwhile, Rabbi Diggs hosts a Seder for the unhoused as a storm rages outside. Dramatic but sort of all over the place, though major points for Judd Hirsch as Schwimmer’s father.

7. GLOW, “Outward Bound” (2019)

On a camping trip in the desert — nice job with the biblical parallels there, GLOW — Melrose puts together a makeshift Seder around the campfire, complete with graham-cracker matzo. Melrose displays a type of Jewish humor here that’s kind of cliché and cringe, but thankfully, the episode does something interesting when Jenny (Ellen Wong) puts the language of the Seder, about the Jewish people’s ancestral suffering and trauma, in the context of more immediate lived trauma — in her case, how her family escaped Cambodia when she was young, with many not making it out alive, and the pain of her having to perform a racist stereotype in the wrestling ring. This is something I haven’t seen other shows do. The scene is a really complicated journey through conflict, soul bearing, and mutual understanding that takes something really thorny and handles it deftly. There’s a real tension that’s not played for laughs here, and like so many barely funny streaming “comedy-dramas” of the past decade, it’s better at the dram than the com.

6. Nancy Drew, “Sinner’s Sacrifice” (2023)

Leave it to the CW to reach new heights of mishegossbeyond your wildest expectations. Coming into this episode cold was a true interdimensional cable experience, but I’ll try to break this down as best I can. Teen detective Nancy Drew’s friend Ace is leading his family-and-friends Seder in the town diner, the very un-kosher sounding the Claw. All of a sudden, a supernatural wind blows everything around, the lights flicker, and a vengeful ghost barges in. This would have been enough, dayenu, but on top of it all, the ghost and Ace are sort of boyfriend-girlfriend; he has been communicating with her over transistor radio because this show runs on Riverdale logic. The icing on the matzo-meal cake is in Ace’s mom’s reactions: She’s all like, “Is that Elijah?” and “But we haven’t even gotten to the brisket!” Queen.

5. High Maintenance, “Elijah” (2013)

High Maintenance began its life as a web series, and this episode was a high-water mark of its pre-HBO run as it signifies what the series does best: letting us peek into the lives of others, suggesting how much lies beyond the ten minutes we get with them through a thousand little character moments. We get the goyishe caterer pronouncing karpeth the way your worst friend pronounces Barcelona (for more of this, skip ahead to No. 2). There’s bacon fat in the matzo balls. There’s the train-wreck daughter and the asexual magician son, there’s a child walking in on a double hand job, and when Elijah appears, he takes the very Brooklyn-appropriate form of the family’s dealer. Seder with the Waxmans feels like a fully realized short film, and it achieves Top Mishegoss Points.

4. Gossip Girl,“Seder Anything” (2011)

The Gossip Girl Seder episode may be the Servant of Two Masters of this generation. It’s Noël Coward; it’s commedia dell’arte; it’s a study in human folly, what with the high-society secrets, the couplings and recouplings and misunderstandings, the Upstairs Downstairs class comedy, and Wallace Shawn just trying to get through the blessings. Dan takes a job as a cater-waiter for a gig that turns out to be a Seder at the Waldorfs’, until Serena drags him into her drama. She married a man named Gabriel (like the angel! Like the herald!) in Spain, and her mother simply cannot find out. Gabriel looms over the episode’s first act like Elijah the ghost-prophet, and when he appears, he takes the human form of Armie Hammer himself, who is not content to interrupt and derail the ceremonial candle-lighting of a nice, quiet, Jewish holiday in Call Me by Your Name alone. Chairs swap, lies abound, and Serena gets into Brown. But the entire episode solidifies itself as canon when Armie first appears and Gossip Girl’s voice-over rewards us with this precious gift: “Baruch atah ay dios mio!” All in all, this whole Seder is much too Dayenu!

3. Difficult People, “Passover Bump” (2017)

This episode opens with Billy and Julie protesting a production of a Sondheim revival starring the cast of the Big Bang Theory — called Bazinga in the Park With George — so its mere, precious existence feels like a perfectly calibrated Passover miracle. When Billy takes a job as a warm-up comic for Larry Wilmore and her husband gets assaulted at a PBS conference in Jupiter, Florida, Julie has to attend Seder hosted by her passive-aggressive mother (Andrea Martin) solo. It’s a challenge of biblical proportions, because, as she puts it: “I haven’t had to sit through a family Seder by myself since I was a witch in college.” To make matters worse, the walk-in clinic in the back of a Quizno’s refuses to prescribe her anymore meds, so as an alternate coping mechanism, she sneaks away from the table to listen to a meditation app in which Danny Aiello hypnotizes her into wiring him $700. One Freaky Friday mother-daughter swap and one aunt with an “on-again coke addiction” played by Stockard Channing later, and Julie has made it through another Seder, in one piece. Bazinga!

2. Rugrats,“Passover” (1994)

This is the Passover special that started it all, and while most of the nostalgia goes to the Ten Commandments-but-with-babies reenactments, weaving through this episode are cutbacks to maybe the most realistic depiction of a messy family Seder to date. Charlotte Pickles has to put her cell phone away (and the Sultan of Brunei on hold) for a few hours; grandparents Boris and Minka argue over which of their parents’ spotted old wine glasses from the shtetl they’ll unpack and use; and Drew and Stu are irritable and bored. Real ones who had the bright-orange Nickelodeon VHS tape know: These levels of whining and kvetching are unparalleled in children’s animation. Representation matters!

1. Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Seder” (2005)

Larry plans to host Seder mostly for his father’s sake, and as with all classic episodes of Curb, the situation quickly spirals out of control as Larry commits social plague after social plague. The first of the offending invitees is Jeff’s Dubya-loving brother-in-law. There’s a surgeon played by Rob Huebel who may or may not be stealing Larry’s newspapers. There’s the elderly woman who lives across the street, Larry’s star witness, who faints shortly upon arrival and spends the Seder splayed out on a bed upstairs (leading to a great visual gag of kids looking for the afikomen under her unconscious body). There’s a severed hand thrown into the mix somewhere along the way. But worst of all is the registered sex offender, played by Rob Corddry, whom Larry feels compelled to invite. He sits through the Seder as the episode’s Chekhov’s gun, pulled at exactly the right moment for one depraved beat. Because this list wouldn’t honor the chaotic magic of Passover if it didn’t all lead to an episode where Susie Essman screams her head off.

Rebecca Alter , 2024-04-23 23:30:00

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