“Saturday Night Seder,” the Passover celebrity charity fundraiser that ran April 11 on YouTube, is making a bid for the Outstanding Variety Special Emmy Award. Featuring appearances and performances by a host of Jewish celebrities including Ben Platt, Idina Menzel, Fran Drescher, Jason Alexander, Henry Winkler, Beanie Feldstein, Bette Midler, Dan Levy, Pamela Adlon, Finn Wolfhard, Alan Menken, Ilana Glazer, Nick Kroll, Judith Light, Julie Klausner, Mayim Bialik, Judy Gold, Michael Zegen, Harvey Fierstein, Skylar Astin and more, the special has raised $3.5 million for the CDC Coronavirus Emergency Response Fund.
Writer-producer Benj Pasek thinks the Zoom-created program is worthy of Emmy consideration, and spoke to Variety about its significance.
“For a lot of Jewish people and people who are not even in the Jewish community, Passover is a really special holiday because it’s the one that most people celebrate with their families,” he said. “That week people were trying to do virtual Passovers, which is so depressing. The holiday is so special to me because it’s one of the tenets of why Judaism is a really progressive community. Passover, itself, sort of mirrors so much of what we were going through in COVID. It’s this holiday about going from oppression to freedom, from confinement to space, from winter to spring. We decided very early on that we wanted to do something that would have impact and benefit the fight against the epidemic that was happening in real time.”
The DIY indie project was made “with love and duct tape,” Pasek said, talking about putting it together on no budget and remotely. With exception of editors hired at the end, “Everybody donated their time and their labor. The submissions that people sent were very personal to them.”
Nominations for the Emmy Awards will be announced July 28, and ABC will broadcast the award ceremony on Sept. 20
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