Calculating “Peak” Seinfeld

The Seinfeld Recap Podcast is one of my favorite podcasts on Post Show Recaps and if you’re a Seinfeld fan, I highly recommend it. Recently I wrote about how I extracted 20 questions from the The Seinfeld Recap Podcast.

One of the hosts, Akiva Wienerkur, has ranked all 180 episodes of Seinfeld. In each episode, he lets us know where the episode falls in his rankings. In the last episode recapping The Secretary, the two host’s, Rob and Akiva, mentioned that since they are now on the back half of the total Seinfeld episodes, they should pay attention to trying to figure out when Seinfeld “jumps the shark”.

There is a point with every great show, movies series, or performer when they go from peak performance to becoming kind of a caricature of that peak. I’d argue this happens to the Rocky series in movie #4 when Rocky fights the Russians. Music performers like James Brown, Elvis, Rod Stewart, etc, all eventually stop innovating and basically keep the same haircut, clothing style, and songs for the rest of their career past their prime. This inevitably happens over time if you keep pushing out content.

With regards to Seinfeld, it’s interesting to think about when did Seinfeld jump the shark? Or another way of phrasing this is, when did “peak” Seinfeld happen?

In this blog post, I go through my attempt to quantitatively answer this question. I first dive into how I collected data for this experiment, then I walk you through the results in terms of the best and worst episodes and finally dive into the best and worst seasons.

Collecting The Data Set

Ideally, I’d love to have a full ranking of all 180 episodes from hundreds of different sources. Then I could look at the average rankings of each episode, the variance in that ranking, and really have a comprehensive set of data to work from. Unfortunately, such a thing does not exist.

However, there are quite a few top 10 best episode lists out there and this is what I based most of my calculations on. I collected data from 15 different sources for top 10 lists as well as 5 different sources of the worst 10 episodes of Seinfeld.

Armed with this data, I built episode rankings and season rankings to see if we can determine the Seinfeld Peak.

The Best of Seinfeld

The next graph displays all episodes appearing in the top 10 lists more than once. The bottom of each vertical line represents the best ranking position for that episode, while the top of the line represents the worst top 10 ranking. The triangle is the average ranking. The longer the line, the larger the disparity or variance in the rankings.

For example, The Yada Yada has both a first place ranking and a 10th place ranking across all the top 10 lists while The Old Man is ranked 8th overall in two different lists. The episodes with the smallest variance between their min and max rankings are:

• The Old Man – Season 4
• The Pen – Season 3
• The Secret Code – Season 7
• The Parking Garage – Season 3
• The Fire – Season 5

Episode Ranking Power Law

The graph below lists all 54 episodes that appear in the top 10 lists ordered by how many appearances they make. The interesting property of this graph, is that it appears to roughly follow The Power Law. The law applies when there’s a functional relationship between two quantities and a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional change in the other quantity.

Similarly, with these Seinfeld rankings, a small number of the episodes are consistently ranked in the top 10, but after a few, there’s a long tail of possibilities.

The Worst of Seinfeld

• The Outing – Season 4
• The Mango – Season 5
• The Betrayal – Season 9
• The Secret Code – Season 7
• The Parking Garage – Season 3
• The Chinese Restaurant – Season 2
• The Invitations – Season 7
• The Limo – Season 3