What TV show has the best of the best episodes on IMDb?
By: Mubarak Ganiyu
Tags: Data Science, TV Series, Data Visualization, Entertainment, Television

What TV show has the best of the best episodes on IMDb?

Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones

“Next episode starts in…”

Your mind has not processed all the insane plot twists, newly revealed information and characters’ elevated significance. You’ve just watched a jaw-dropping episode of your favorite show on Netflix and you’re being told the next episode starts in a few seconds.

Before you know it, you are tweeting about why the show is the best thing on earth. Next, you’re googling that episode to read articles on it. Finally, you go on IMDb and rate it a 10/10.

Episodes are rated on IMDb daily and some episodes’ rating stand out because these episode left the viewers lost for words. An analysis of the Top 200 IMDb rated TV show episodes has been carried out to find out which TV show produces the best episodes among these incredible episodes.

Top 200 rated episodes on IMDb

Information was collected manually from IMDb and filled into google sheets under six columns: TV show, Episode, Genre, Rating, Year and Votes. This dataset was later transformed into a csv file to be used for data analysis.

A snapshot of the google sheet file containing the top 200 rated episodes on IMDb

Data Visualization was used to create multiple graphs based on the csv file to show how the columns relate with one another.

What Year did people vote the most?

A line plot graph was created to display the total number of votes that outstanding episodes got on a yearly basis on IMDb.

Total Number of Votes vs Year

It turns out that it was the time period between 2015 and 2020 that got the most votes. The graph also infers what period of time people started utilizing IMDb’s rating feature a lot which is 2013. Here is an in-depth analysis of the graph showing us what year had the most votes and its number.

Total Number of Votes vs Year from 2015 to 2020

A tabular dataset of the top five years with the most votes.

It was discovered that 2016 recorded about 456,505 votes for outstanding episodes. It was also revealed that Game of Thrones produced two episodes that contributed to this enormous number. Battle of the Bastards got 181,164 votes and the Winds of Winter got 125,599 votes. Game of Thrones season 6 must have produced formidable episodes.

Top five episodes with the most votes.

Drama was the most rated genre

A lot of genres such as adventure, action, crime and others were in the data set. Most of the TV shows having at most three genres.

A horizontal bar chart showing the frequencies of each genre

Drama was the highest occurring genre. It was featured 143 times in the dataset. The probability of rating a drama related TV show is 0.283 which is higher than that of any other genre.

Highest rated episode

Another analysis that was conducted was to find out which episode had the highest rating on IMDb.

Top five episodes based on rating

Well, it turns out Attack on Titan season 3 episode 17, Hero, is the undisputed champion with a rating of 10/10. As an Attack on Titan fan, I am highly contented.

Most Frequent TV shows

Some TV shows appeared multiple times on the list while others appeared once or twice. One of the criterion for a TV show to be considered as one that produces the best of the best episodes is by having multiple episodes in the dataset. Thus, the dataset was shortened to include mainly TV shows with more than three appearances.

A horizontal bar chart showing the most frequent TV shows

Attack on Titan takes the win again for the TV show that appears the most on the dataset with 16 appearances. Game of Thrones was second place with 14 appearances. The third was Code Black with 9 appearances. Person of Interest and Breaking bad came in fourth and fifth place respectively.

The newly formed dataset was further analyzed to find out TV shows’ average number of votes per episode and TV shows’ average rating per episode.

A horizontal bar chart showing the most frequent TV shows’ average votes per episode

A horizontal bar chart showing the most frequent TV shows’ average rating per episode

Among the outstanding episodes, Game of Thrones registered the most votes per episodes with 65673 votes per episode. Breaking Bad had the highest average rating of 9.7800 per episode.

Game of Thrones vs Breaking Bad

Based on the numbers and rankings in the graphical visualizations in the previous section, it is right to say that the winner is going to be between Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad.

Top five episodes based on frequency

According to the truncated table, Attack on Titan has the highest frequency among the big five episodes but it has an average of 5154 votes. With this number, it is extremely behind both Game of Thrones and Breaking bad which both have averages of 65673 and 53357 votes respectively.

Moreover, it is also behind both Game of Thrones and Breaking bad in terms of average rating with a score of approximately 9.73. Breaking bad and Game of Thrones both have 9.78 and 9.74 respectively.

It is accurate to say Attack on Titan sits in third place because it has the most episodes in the dataset. This makes Game of Thrones and Breaking bad the top two TV shows among the best of the best episodes on IMDb.

When it comes down to Game of Thrones vs. Breaking bad, Game of Thrones has more average votes per episode than Breaking bad but Breaking bad has a higher average rating than Game of Thrones.

The decisive factor is their frequency which sees Game of Thrones win by a landslide. Game of Thrones has 14 episodes among the top 200 rated episodes on IMDb while Breaking bad has 5 episodes.

In conclusion, Game of Thrones has the best of the best episodes on IMDb.

The full version of the code that was used to conduct this research can be seen here.