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Throughout its nine-season run from 1989 to 1998, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s sitcom “Seinfeld” upended every conceivable norm society could throw its way. A sitcom landscape once dominated by family-oriented fare was taken over by four perennially single friends—Jerry (played by himself), George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Kramer (Michael Richards)—whose Manhattan-based misadventures made for some of television’s most memorable moments.
It’s no wonder the show still endures through reruns and streaming services like Netflix, which paid $500 million for the rights to “Seinfeld” for five years, from 2021 to 2026, after Hulu’s $180 million deal expired. The series’ cultural relevance is alive and well, too, with events like the Elaine Dance Contest amusing audiences at an August 2025 Brooklyn Cyclones game. And, as noted in a December 2024 report from CNN, many “Seinfeld” fans still celebrate Festivus, a Christmas-adjacent holiday made famous by a 1997 episode.
Frequently advertised as a show about nothing, “Seinfeld” was, in fact, quite the opposite. Specifically, the 180-episode series knits together multiple seemingly unrelated storylines to masterful effect within any given episode, ultimately leaving no subject unexplored. One might even say that “Seinfeld” was so adept at layering plots and jokes within jokes that it can be hard to remember which joke came from which episode.
Here, Stacker ranked the 50 best “Seinfeld” episodes of all time. The list was curated using IMDb user ratings as of April 2025; if multiple episodes have the same rating, they were sorted by the number of user votes. Counting down from #50 to #1, here are the best episodes from one of the most celebrated television comedies of all time.
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NBC
#50. The Cheever Letters
-IMDb user rating: 8.5
– Director: Tom Cherones
– Season 4, episode 8
– Air date: Oct. 28, 1992
Jerry gives dirty bedroom talk his best shot and upsets his date in the process. Similarly out of her ele