Ever wondered what episodes of your favorite TV series faced a poor reception? Interested in seeing which ones are the most loved? I occasionally see articles or social media posts where someone has compiled these answers, however they either apply to a single series or the data is not interactive. What if I wanted to visualize this data for any given series, immediately find the worst rated episodes and then cozy up on the couch to watch a glorious train wreck?
Fortunately, the popular movie site IMDb has various avenues for accessing their database. Using a combination of public APIs it is quite simple to extract and wrangle the data into an interactive dashboard. See below. Note: It may be easier to view in landscape.
To create it, I wrote a Python script that incorporated both the IMDbPY and OMDb libraries, accessed the material, formatted it and wrote it into a local SQL database (mySQL). From there I could sort the data as desired, then send it to a power BI dashboard where it can be visualized. A combination of APIs were used as each one pulled slightly different content (OMDb for example has poster images).
It goes without saying that IMDb reviewers don’t represent everyone’s opinion, however there were some interesting trends. Fans for any given series would be more inclined to login and vote if they were happy with the episode they just watched. See Friends as an example:
The exception to this case is shows with “bad” endings, where all hell breaks loose on IMDb and people flock to the website to smear a myriad of dissatisfied reviews. The forever textbook example being Game of Thrones:
In terms of episodes that were some of the worst rated on the planet, I’ll leave that up to you to find for your series of interest. I have considered shows that sit somewhere in the Top 100 on IMDb, so there will certainly be others. In saying that it’s worthy to note that the Top Gear series scored among some of the worst when they replaced the original cast, with Season 23 having every episode score below 2.5. Big shoes to fill when you compare that to the prior season, which had an average of 8.7!
In summary, if you slide a lackluster episode into a regular season your fans will turn a blind eye. Deny them a well written finale or replace their favorite characters and they will gather with pitchforks.
