The Mary Sue reported this interesting TV informatics website today. Graph TV uses episode ratings of just about any television show (on a 10-point scale) and graphs them in seasonal groupings. You can see at a glance if a show is doing well with viewers who scored the episodes on IMDB. These numbers for X:WP are fairly high, most 8 or above, though some interesting outliers do occur. The lowest-scores were garnered by Adventures in the Sin Trade, Parts I & II. Those triple dots in Season 6 are the Norse Trilogy, hmmm (great costuming, so-so story line). Also, the lowest ep in Season 5 was Them Bones, Them Bones and for Season 6, Send in the Clones. You almost get the idea that IMDB users don't care much for Claire Stansfield. However, these scores do not look like they came from original fans -- those who watched the show as it was being originally broadcast, beginning back in 1995. Because, no original fans would score A Friend In Need (either part) as highly as this graph suggests. My evidence? Here. And here. And also, here. A Friend in Need consistently rated one of the Top 12 Worst X:WP episodes as shown at Whoosh!. And to continue the same type of argument, the lowest scoring episodes for Season 1 and Season 2 are Callisto and Return of Callisto, respectively, two episodes listed on the Top 12 Best X:WP episodes. Any why, why, why would so many Season 5 episodes (that hated Season 5) rate consistently so high?
The data is interesting. Why the difference? I think it's a generational difference, but what do you think?
2 comments:
I would like to see ratings from first and second airings of eps. My guess is, the original HCNB's would score things differently. Very interesting, though!
I can find Nielsen ratings from Kym's WHOOSH! website -- they regularly posted them (though these are not about what a viewer thought about an episode, but how many households watched it).
But I agree with your point, HCNBs would have a different take on the story lines and rate the episodes differently. For SCXF6 we had ticket buyers answer a survey about best/worst Xena episodes and I made a poster with the data in graphic form. Those results were quite similar to the list of best/worst on Whoosh.
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