Graphs of Joss Whedon TV Shows

A few days ago, Wired published an article on Kevin Wu’s new project called “Graph TV.” The name of the website is self-explanatory. It graphs a television show based on its IMDb ratings…AND IT IS AWESOME. Please visit the site if you haven’t. Just type in a TV show then internet magic will make a colorful data visualization of your show appear. EXCITING!!! Excuse my overuse of capital letters but I get easily excited by representations of data! After graphing some of my favorite shows, I decided to look more closely at shows by auteurs, like Joss Whedon. The result was an interesting side-by-side look at Whedon’s shows. Aren’t they pretty?!

I included the highest and lowest rated episodes in the graphs not considering the season finale because finales are typically rated highly. All Buffy and Dollhouse seasons had an upward trend, while the first and last episode ratings of Angel’s seasons 2 and 3 saw little change. Not much can be said about Firefly‘s trend line because the episodes were graphed in the order they premiered, instead of the true order. The lowest rated episode of any Whedon show was Buffy’s “Where the Wild Things Are” (6.1) in which Riley and Buffy have a marathon of sex. Other stuff happens but this pointless plotline really stands out. Buffy also takes the crown for having the highest rated Whedon show with a glorious 9.6 for the musical. Other interesting facts are that 28 percent of the lowest-rated episodes occurred during episodes 11 through 13 and 24 percent of the highest-rated episodes occurred during episodes 6 through 8. Like Firefly, Dollhouse was a short-lived show however its overall series rating was the lowest of any show (7.8). And do you know the show that received the highest overall rating? You guessed it. Firefly. I would say congrats Browncoats but the Whedonites are the real winners here. Whedon shows had ups and downs but all of them ended with high overall ratings.

-Mary

Illustrations by Kevin Wu/Graph TV