There's also a Wall in Game of Thrones' ratings

A few months back, I looked at the evolution of various metrics (viewership, metacritic ratings, IMDB ratings) for the critically acclaimed TV show Game of Thrones, and also compared overall ratings for the show with Breaking Bad and The Wire which also obtain top ratings from critics and viewers. As I was doing this, I stumbled across the fact that the last Game of Thrones episode (the analysis being done in the middle of the fifth season) had a rating of 10 on IMDB. I had never seen that before. Not a single Breaking Bad or The Wire episode had notched this rating, Breaking Bad did manage to get two 9.8. But after checking back a few days later, the rating of 10 had fell to 9.8, and would continue to fall the next few days.

I had done another post on the evolution of movie ratings and had also noticed that ratings are typically at their highest when the movie comes out and then drop in the following weeks. Does the same phenomenon apply to TV series, albeit on a much shorter time scale?

I pulled IMDB ratings for the final three episodes of the fifth season of Game of Thrones every 15 minutes. There are no spoilers it what follows, unless you consider ratings a spoiler of some kind. While ratings won't tell you what happens (or in Game of Thrones' case, who gets killed!), it might yield insight as to how intense the episode is (or in Game of Thrones' case, how many people get killed!). Consider yourselves warned...

So here's the raw data:

And the total number of voters:

So here's what stands out:

• all episodes go through a phase when their rating is 10, this occurs in the few hours before the episode airs (horizontal grey lines) and typically based on a few hundred voters only;
• ratings don't start at 10, that's only the peak value right before air time;
• rating drops very quickly as the episode airs and right after;
• value after a few hours is essentially the final stabilized value (maybe another 0.1 drop a few days/weeks later), but much much faster than what we had observed for evolution of movie ratings which typically stabilized after a few months;
• approximately 80% of voters voted during the first week after the episode was aired;
• there are bumps in the number of votes when the following episode airs: I'd guess that it's either people who missed the previous episode and do a quick catch-up so they are up-to-date for that evening's new episode, or people who realizing that a new episode is airing that evening and are reminded that they did not vote for the previous week's episode

Now the real question is who are the few hundred people who rated the episode a 10? HBO employees trying to jumpstart the high ratings? Mega fans able to access an early version of the episode? Mega fans already voting without having seen the episode and assuming that all episodes are worth a 10? But then who are the handful of people who voted less then 10 before then?

I myself have not watched the fifth season but VERY intrigued by that eight episode. As of today, the rating is still 9.9, the highest of the entire series, but also higher than any Breaking Bad or The Wire episodes...

Game of Thrones Season 5, is the best behind us? [NO SPOILERS]

[This post does NOT contain any spoilers. The reason is very simple, I myself have not yet started the fifth season (OK this might be the only spoiler, there are at least 5 seasons...), so I am only focusing on number of viewers and ratings for each episode aired.]

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?

Visualizing the quality of a TV series

I love TV series. Like many people, my first addiction was Friends. Only 20 minutes, 4 jokes-a-minute, it was easy to fit in your schedule.

Then came the TV series revolution, with more sophisticated scripts, each episode becoming less of an independent unit but one of the many building blocks in the narration of ever increasing complex plots. Skipping episodes was no longer an option, even more so given the cliffhanger of the last episode.
The first such series I remember were 24 and Lost.

I'm not going to list all my favorite shows, nor try to compare them or do any advanced analyses. I just wanted to share some visuals I created allowing quick summarization of the quality of a series, episode after episode, season after season.

Here is the visual for Friends:

The blue line displays the IMDB rating of the episodes within each season - notice the break between seasons and the gray vertical bars delimiting seasons. There is a lot of data represented, so I've added some summary stats at the very top of each season:

• the number at the very top is the average of the IMDB rating for all the episodes of the season. The color on a red-green scale compares the seasons to each other: the seasons with highest averages are green, those with worst ratings are red.
• the arrow under the season average represents the evolution of ratings within the season: if episodes tend to get better and better the arrow will point upwards and be green, if they get worse the arrow will point downwards and be red. If the ratings remain approximately average over the season a horizontal orange arrow is displayed.

Revisiting the Friends visual, we observe spectacular consistency in ratings over the ten-year period. The summaries on top allow us to see through the noise, and that seasons 8 and 9 were among the worst in average episode rating as well as the only two that got worse over the season. But the tenth and final season was the highest-rated one, and had a strong positive trend until the series finale.

Although not a huge fan, I had to look at the Simpsons' incredible run. The visual highlights the surprising drop and plateau of the season average starting around the ninth season.

Now looking at some of my favorite series:

I have to agree here that the first seasons of 24 were the best. I also love the way ratings evolve in the final season, when people had very low expectations and thought it would be the same old jack-bauer-aka-superman-prevents-nuclear-attacks-every-thirty-minutes but soon realized this was Jack Bauer on a revenge rampage without any rules.

Breaking Bad is the perfect example of the TV series that keeps getting better, throughout the seasons and throughout the years. Can't wait for the second half of the fifth season!

The last few seasons of Dexter aren't rated as high as the first ones, but ratings remain high.

I loved the first season of Prison Break but clearly it should have been a one-season series, you jsut couldn't top the suspense and originality.

Game of Thrones started really high but just kept getting better à-la-breaking-bad. The seesaw effect in the third season is rather impressive!