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The top Jewish (and Jew-ish) TV of 2022

By Mira Fox

This week, we're reviewing the best 2022 had to offer. Today: The TV shows that brought Judaism to the mainstream with a new degree of complexity and confidence.

Rarely has there been a glut of Jewish TV like there was in 2022, a year that saw new, increasingly nuanced takes on Jewish themes and moved away from the pat jokes, overdone stereotypes and Holocaust lecturing we’ve seen in the past.

This year the small screen brought us a Talmud-quoting detective, a time-traveling granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and even a non-Jewish child pretending to be a real Jewish child who was pretending not to be Jewish. There was also a new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — but you'll forgive us for finding the arrival of a Jewish Marvel hero even more exciting.

Which show was best may depend on your taste, but these were definitely the most Jewish.

Eight of our favorites are below.

Read our roundtable discussion on Jewish TV in 2022 here.

The Patient

Streaming on Hulu.

The Patient had no real need to be Jewish. Starring Steve Carell as a Jewish therapist whose serial killer patient kidnaps him, the show had plenty of psychodrama to work with before it added interdenominational Jewish tensions and hallucinations about the Holocaust. But the show's insightful investigation of deeply specific Jewish tensions made it richer viewing. And the main plotline is plenty Jewish too, taking on the stereotypes non-Jews often hold about Jews — and particularly about Jews and therapy. Read the review ➤

The Rehearsal

Streaming on HBOMax.

When Nathan Fielder released an experimental new show about helping people rehearse for difficult conversations, it seemed likely to be more uncomfortable than insightful. But then Fielder himself stepped into one rehearsal, playing the husband to a fundamentalist Christian woman practicing to raise a child, and found himself yearning to share his Jewish culture and heritage with his (fake) child. Perhaps unintentionally, The Rehearsal became a telling examination of the experience of Jews in America. Read the review ➤

Russian Doll

Streaming on Netflix.

The first season of Russian Doll was Jewish the way a lot of TV is: a few offhand references to yeshivas, a Brooklyn accent, a Holocaust joke. The second season is an entirely different animal. Like the acclaimed first season, it's about time-traveling, but this time into Nadia’s mother’s and then grandmother’s pasts — and bodies — in 1970s New York and Holocaust-era Hungary. It’s a dizzying, surreal exploration of inherited trauma, and while it doesn’t always make literal sense, it somehow makes a lot of emotional sense. Read the review ➤

Fleishman is in Trouble

Streaming on Hulu.

Set on the swanky Upper East Side, Fleishman Is In Trouble adapts Taffy Brodesser-Akner's acclaimed book by the same name. Jesse Eisenberg plays Toby Fleishman, whose successful ex-wife — played by Claire Danes — has disappeared, saddling him with their kids. The show, like the book, focuses its commentary on issues of gender and power, but its insights into the perilous world of Manhattan Judaism are nearly as sharp. Puns like “Camp Marah” — like Camp Ramah, get it? — and jokes about gap years in Israel abound. Read the review ➤

Moon Knight

Streaming on Disney+.

The Jewish superhero Moon Knight has a complicated backstory, defined by two things: Judaism and mental illness. In a miniseries devoted to him, it seems that the former may have even caused the latter, with the hero’s dissociative identity disorder first appearing on his way to his mother’s shiva. Perhaps it’s not the representation we’d have picked for ourselves, but it’s the one we got, along with mezuzahs on the hero’s doors and a Star of David on his neck. While criticism abounded about the portrayal of Judaism in the Marvel show — and the casting of the non-Jewish Oscar Isaac — it also accrued some billions of minutes streamed. Read the review ➤

The Calling

Streaming on Peacock.

This is not your usual prime-time crime procedural: The lead detective’s name is Avraham Avraham, and he says kaddish over murder victims. Jeff Wilbusch, of Unorthodox fame, plays Avraham; he grew up Satmar in Jerusalem, and he uses his background to add a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish to the show. The Calling might not be TV's most consistent representation of Judaism, but it’s still pretty big to have a network TV show centering a religiously observant Jew. Read the review ➤

My Unorthodox Life

Streaming on Netflix.

The second season of this reality show, which follows the trials and tribulations of fashion designer Julia Haart, was a lot less Jewish than the first, which focused on Haart’s transformation from an Orthodox wife into a high-fashion girlboss. This season took on more classic reality TV subjects: family dysfunction and divorce. It didn’t give nearly enough attention to the latter — anyone watching reality TV is in it for the drama and mess, after all — but Haart’s son Shlomo, in taking the opposite path to the rest of his family by becoming more religious rather than less, provided a thoroughly Jewish angle to the family dysfunction side of things. Read the review ➤

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

The fourth season of the hit show, about a Jewish woman who decides to leave her wealthy Upper West Side life and go into comedy, isn't its best, and it’s probably its least Jewish. There’s no schmatta factory, and we don’t get to go on vacation to the Catskills. But it’s still full of Jewish New York detail, including Jewish socialist rabble-rousing and the show’s established assortment of nagging mothers, neuroticism and even an intermarriage plot. Read the review ➤

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