The law of series

Succesful TV shows is a rather closed system

The millions of users from the website IMDb (Internet Movie Database) can add and edit content related to movies and TV shows such as actors, directors, movies descriptions, based on the same principle as Wikipedia. More importantly they can also rate content they have watched in a scale from 1 to 10. This rating system allows IMDb to generate a recommendation system depending on users' preferences. Each movie or TV show has up to 12 recommendations. The following graph describes the recommendation network generated by the IMDb top 15 television shows (as of March 2015) represented in red. A link between a show from the top 15 and another show exists if the latter is referenced in the recommendations of the former.

There seems to be a hard "core" around blockbuster TV shows that have been discussed a lot both in social media and regular media. Examples include shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards and the likes, which are very central inside this network. There are some relatively isolated shows. This could be explained by several factors : the country of the show ('Leylan and Mecnum' is a Turkish show that somehow made it to the IMDb top 15) or a specific genre directed towards a certain audience (age group, etc.), like Japanese animes, American animated shows. The drama genre seems to be predominant on this network.

Use your mouse to zoom and move around the network

Budget and popularity

We represented below a scatterplot based on TV shows of which we could get an estimate of the average budget per episode. We found a small evidence of a link between the logarithm of the amount spent per episode and the show's rating on IMDb. We the made 3 categories based on the difference between their expected rating and their actual rating. CSI: Miami is an example of disappointment considering the budget invested, although such a low rating would be a disappointment no matter how low the budget would have been. On the other side, 'It's always sunny in Philadelphia' fared extremely well with a relatively low budget. An important note is that IMDb ratings do not indicate at all whether the show was a commercial success or not.

Longer is...

Better ? Not necessarily. Longer is more dramatic. Indeed as we look at the dominant TV shows' genre depending on their average episode duration, several trends appear. To each its own.

Animated shows, comedies and other content designed for families are generally shorter : it can be both because one can find harder to create a funny episode longer than 40 minutes or because these type of shows cater for a younger audience. On the other hand longer TV shows are generally dramas and more 'serious' stuff. This time it's easy to imagine that a shorter duration may not allow for the development of the plot and the suspense.

US audience by network

The following diagram represents the audience in millions of viewers of the most popular TV shows at the time of release, for 3 different years and categorized by their respective cable network. Like the IMDb score, these figures do not give a very good estimate of a TV show's popularity but probably give a better idea of a show's commercial success, that can lead to the renewal of the show every single year.