I'm not even going to present the TV series Game of Thrones. Merchandising for it is perhaps not as overwhelming and invasive as it is for Frozen, I doubt many of view have no idea what this show is about.
As mentioned previously, we are currently midway in the fifth season, and I figured it might be a good time to figure how good of a TV show Game of Thrones is, and how it is performing from a viewership and rating point of view.
Viewership
The following graph displays the evolution of viewership for each episode of each season for the initial airing on HBO on Sundays at 9pm.
Two things clearly stand out: there is a strong steady rise corresponding to the series huge success. But, as is the case with any rise, when does it stop. Well, after reaching an all-time max with the first episode of the current fifth season (8.0 million), viewership has rather dramatically dropped with "only" 6.2 million for the sixth episode. This value is less than each episode of the previous fourth season. Will the decrease continue, or did we just have a few below-expectation episodes. Each season does have a small mid-season dip, somewhat due to the way each season is constructed as a highly-strategic chess game, with the different groups carrying out their tactics. The second half of the season should provide some element of response as to where we are headed.
To really put into perspective the importance of the decline in viewership from the last episodes, I forecasted viewership until the end of the fifth season once using all the available data (including the decrease, in blue), and once ignoring data for the fifth season (in green). The difference in forecasts are quite dramatic:
Metacritic ratings
Let's now turn towards metacritic ratings. According to the site that has made a name for itself by aggregating a wide range of critics into a single value ranging from 0-100, we observe a striking similarity in ratings and viewership:
Again, we observe a steady increase throughout the first four seasons, and the first decrease for the current fifth season.
IMDB ratings
Metacritic also contains user ratings, however I preferred to turn towards IMDB for individual episode ratings. Sample sizes were larger and extraction was easier.
Here is the evolution of the ratings for each episode:
The values for the last few episodes should be taken with a grain of salt. Episode 7 of the fifth season had a rating of 10.0 before it aired, but has now reached a rating more on par with the rest of the series, 9.3.
The trend here is somewhat different from what viewership and metacritic were indicating: it appears that season 5 episodes are rated just as highly as those from previous seasons.
Best series ever?
As indicated previously, I noticed that the last episode of Game of Thrones was briefly rated 10.0 right before airing. This led me to wonder whether episodes had ever been rated a perfect score of 10. It turns out that four of them had, all Dragon Ball Z episodes!
Relaxing to ratings above 9.8, I found 448 episodes (a little under half being Dragon Ball Z!). In the mix, two Breaking Bad (from the fifth and final season) and a Six Feet Under (series finale, also season five). No Game of Thrones, the top-rated episode has 9.7.
Looking at all these series and ratings, one can't help but wonder if there is some sort of agreement on the best show ever. There are naturally many ways and sources to compare them, but everytime, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Wire seem to top the list:
- best overall IMDB rating (secret IMDB formula): Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are tied at 9.5, The Wire has 9.4
- average IMDB rating of each individual episode: The Wire has an average episode rating of 8.7, Game of Thrones an average of 8.5 and Breaking Bad an average of 8.3
- metacritic season-by-season rating (critics): The final season of breaking bad got a 99 (5th highest all-time), The Wire seasons 3 and 4 each got 98 (8th/9th highest all-time), the best Game of Thrones season (fourth) had a 95 which is 20th highest all-time
- metacritic season-by-season rating (users): This is where Breaking Bad dominates: all five seasons are in the top 12 all-time (positions 1, 3, 4, 11 and 12), the best Game of Thrones season comes in at position 20 only, while the Wire does rather well with three seasons in the top 10.
So no clear overall winner, but Game of Thrones however is the only one still running. But for how long?
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