For the past three and a half years, each week, I’ve been listening to the Seinfeld Recap Podcast. If you are unfamiliar with the podcast, each week, the hosts, Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur, recap one episode of Seinfeld.
Our Seinfeld Recap heroes, Rob and Akiva, are closing in on the series finale and I wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion.
Starting in episode 81, The Wife, Rob and Akiva started giving letter grades to each of the core four based on their story lines for an episode. For example, in The Wife, Akiva gave George an A and poor Kramer an F.
I thought it would be interesting and fun to go back over all their story line grades and see what that might say about their season rankings, episode rankings, strength of individual cast stories, and ranking styles.
Just as Kramer and that other guy went further past the E on their fuel gauge than any other human, we are about to go further into a deep analysis of a podcast that goes further into a deep analysis of Seinfeld than any other source in the world. So strap in, and let’s start the insanity.
Gathering the Data
To gather the data, I grabbed all podcast episodes from 81 and onwards, converted them from audio to text and then found the part in each episode where the story lines were discussed. This is pretty simple because they usually start these segments by saying things like “Let’s grade out the episode…” or “Let’s do our letter grades” or some other similar variation.
I recorded the letter grades they assigned to each of the core four across the 90 or so episodes. I then converted their letter grades to GPA scores so I could calculate averages, minimums, maximums, etc. Occasionally a story line for a character was not meaty enough to warrant a grade and they would give an incomplete. For these anomalies, I just ignored that cast member’s non-grade from each of those episodes in my calculations.
The raw data is available here.
Alright, enough of the boring stuff, let’s get into the good stuff.
Season Rating Breakdown and Analysis
Below is Rob and Akiva’s average story ratings for each of the core four by season and by podcast host. I highlighted Rob’s top rating for each cast member in yellow and Akiva’s in red.
I am presenting the ratings as percentages. This is because a letter grade hides too much about the difference in ratings since it can represent a range of GPAs making the differences disappear when rounding grades up or down to letters.
Also note, that since they started this part of the podcast on episode 81, Season 5 only consists of 5 episodes.
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| Rob’s Season 5 Avg. Grades | 97.0% (GPA: 4.20) |
69.3% (GPA: 3.00) |
57.7% (GPA: 2.50) |
63.1% (GPA: 2.73) |
| Akiva’s Season 5 Avg. Grades | 93.9% (GPA: 4.07) |
86.2% (GPA: 3.73) |
75.0% (GPA: 3.25) |
72.4% (GPA: 3.13) |
| Rob’s Season 6 Avg. Grades | 86.2% (GPA: 3.73) |
60.5% (GPA: 2.62) |
71.0% (GPA: 3.08) |
67.4% (GPA: 2.92) |
| Akiva’s Season 6 Avg. Grades | 93.9% (GPA: 4.07) |
62.3% (GPA: 2.70) |
72.0% (GPA: 3.12) |
71.1% (GPA: 3.08) |
| Rob’s Season 7 Avg. Grades | 86.5% (GPA: 3.75) |
63.0% (GPA: 2.73) |
61.1% (GPA: 2.65) |
74.0% (GPA: 3.21) |
| Akiva’s Season 7 Avg. Grades | 83.6% (GPA: 3.62) |
71.0% (GPA: 3.07) |
71.1% (GPA: 3.08) |
75.9% (GPA: 3.29) |
| Rob’s Season 8 Avg. Grades | 87.5% (GPA: 3.79) |
67.8% (GPA: 2.94) |
66.7% (GPA: 2.89) |
71.4% (GPA: 3.09) |
| Akiva’s Season 8 Avg. Grades | 86.4% (GPA: 3.74) |
77.8% (GPA: 3.37) |
74.5% (GPA: 3.23) |
78.4% (GPA: 3.39) |
| Rob’s Season 9 Avg. Grades | 77.4% (GPA: 3.35) |
58.7% (GPA: 2.54) |
66.9% (GPA: 2.90) |
65.0% (GPA: 2.82) |
| Akiva’s Season 9 Avg. Grades | 77.4% (GPA: 3.35) |
59.6% (GPA: 2.58) |
67.7% (GPA: 2.93) |
71.4% (GPA: 3.09) |
Let’s dig into these individual seasons and episodes a little more by addressing a few questions.
Which season is the best and worst based on the rated episodes?
If we take season 5 out of the mix (since there were only 5 rated episodes), Rob and Akiva have season 8 as the best season based on their story line ratings. If we include season 5, then Akiva has that season has his highest rated, which also corresponds to my “Peak Seinfeld” calculations based on Internet ratings of episodes.
There’s a ton of great episodes in both seasons. I love The Marine Biologist from season 5 and The Summer of George from season 8. Seasons 5 through 8 were peak Seinfeld. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have story line ratings from seasons 1 through 4 because I think we’d see some higher variance. I’m sure if we factored in Akiva’s actual episode rankings, the majority of his top 50 episodes would be from these seasons.
In terms of the weakest season, Rob and Akiva both have season 9 as the weakest in terms of story lines. Both George and Elaine had their overall weakest story line rankings this season.
I think if you were to say Seinfeld jumped the shark at any point, I’d say it was season 9. There’s a lot of funny scenes and moments, and I’d rather watch it over the first few seasons, but they start to get away from what I think Seinfeld is. It’s more wacky, there’s less of a through line throughout an episode and from episode to episode.
What are the best & worst episodes?
Let’s start with the best.
Below, I have Rob’s top 5 and Akiva’s top 5 based purely on their highest average story line rating per episode across all four characters.
These are all great episodes and for the most part, Rob and Akiva saw eye to eye. The biggest discrepancy is with The Hamptons episode. Rob hated Kramer’s story line, giving him a C- while Akiva gave Kramer an A-. They scored George, Elaine and Jerry the same.
| Rob | Akiva | |
| 1. | The Jimmy | The Jimmy |
| 2. | The Fusilli Jerry | The Hamptons |
| 3. | The Bizarro Jerry | The Fusilli Jerry |
| 4. | The Comeback | The Bizarro Jerry |
| 5. | The Rye | The Comeback |
Next, let’s check out the worst episodes based on the story line grades.
Here, four of the episodes are in both bottom fives, and the two differences were both rated poorly by both Rob and Akiva, but one host graded slightly higher taking that particular episode out of their bottom five.
| Rob | Akiva | |
| 1. | The Junk Mail | The Junk Mail |
| 2. | The Kiss Hello | The Kiss Hello |
| 3. | The Scofflaw | The Doll |
| 4. | The Mom & Pop Store | The Scofflaw |
| 5. | The Wigmaster | The Mom & Pop Store |
Individual Story Lines Analysis
Let’s take a look at answering some questions related to how Rob and Akiva rated each of the main character’s individual story lines.
Whose story line quality fluctuates the most?
If we look at the variance in story line gradings for each of the core four, we can see who according to Rob and Akiva have the biggest fluctuations in terms of how good their story’s are.
Based on Rob’s gradings, Kramer has the largest fluctuations in terms of good and bad story lines. Kramer received the most grades of D or lower from Rob, but besides George, Rob awarded Kramer the most grades of A- and above. It seems that Kramer’s stories are either home runs or strike outs.
However, based on Akiva’s gradings, he has Elaine as the character with the most variance in terms of story lines. He has Elaine with the least grades of A- and above and the most D’s and below.
What cast member has the strongest and weakest story lines?
Quite clearly, Akiva and Rob have George as the MVP of the show with an average story line grading from both of about an A-. George is an amazing character with so many iconic moments and lines, this is not too surprising.
In terms of LVP, both hosts have Elaine with the lowest overall rating in terms of story lines. Rob has her coming in with an average of about a B- and Akiva has her at about a B. Elaine is fantastic, but her individual story lines do lack the major iconic moments that George’s or even some of Kramer’s have. Between the story lines with some of her bosses, Mr. Pitt and J. Peterman, and some of her one off boyfriends not being that interesting, her stories often lacked huge laughs.
Rob and Akiva’s Grading Analysis
Finally, let’s take a look at some questions centered on the differences between Rob and Akiva’s ratings.
Which episode did they disagree the most on?
The biggest disagreement in story ratings came in episode 95, The Secretary. Akiva liked the stories more, giving out quality marks of B- and above. However, Rob disliked Elaine’s story about skinny mirrors at Barney’s and Jerry’s story about his mother’s fur coat, giving both of them C’s. Also, where Akiva gave Kramer an A- for his story involving Uma Thurman’s phone number, Rob only gave his story a B.
Akiva felt that while the episode had no iconic moments, there wasn’t a bad scene in the episode. On the other hand, Rob felt that Jerry’s story line was not Seinfeld. He had a legitimate, normal person’s reaction to his mom’s fur coat being worn by the dry cleaner. The story line was only saved by Bania.
Who grades harder?
If you have listened to the episode of Akiva’s other podcast, 32 Fans, where Akiva and Alex Chester had a “Hot Take” competition with Rob as the judge, it should come as no surprise that Rob is a harsher judge than Akiva.
On average, Rob grades about 5% harder than Akiva.
Below I show the number of each grade given by Rob and Akiva. If we consider any grade of a C+ or below a bad grade, then Rob gave a total of 78 bad grades while Akiva only gave 55.
| Grade | Rob’s Total | Akiva’s Total |
| A+ | 14 | 11 |
| A | 83 | 93 |
| A- | 30 | 70 |
| B+ | 44 | 36 |
| B | 66 | 61 |
| B- | 28 | 18 |
| C+ | 14 | 11 |
| C | 35 | 26 |
| C- | 18 | 7 |
| D | 7 | 6 |
| F | 4 | 5 |
Some grading fun facts
Starting in episode 158, The Voice, Rob and Akiva started mixing up the way they grade the story lines. Instead of letter grades in this episode, they instead talk about turning their chair.
In The Blood, they grade based on pints of blood. In The Junk Mail they grade based on types of junk mail: bills (D’s), catalog (C’s), magazine (B’s), and paychecks (A’s). In The Merv Griffin Show they graded on a tic tac (the candy/mint) scale and finally, in The Betrayal (the backwards episode), they grade based on number of saris in a sock.
Final Thoughts
Rob and Akiva have done a deeper analysis into every episode of Seinfeld than anyone associated with the show ever thought possible and I’ve now done a deeper analysis into the podcast that covers the show than anyone thought possible or reasonable for a human to do so.
Hopefully some poor soul out there enjoyed this.
Great job Rob and Akiva and I’ll hopefully see you at the live Seinfeld finale!
