I agree with the graphic.
However, I recently completed a straight watch-thru of every Simpsons episode, and while watching the lackluster episodes from seasons 20-30, I have to acknowledge one thing:
Quality of the show and its writing have noticeably improved since around Season 32.
The most recent episodes feel more centered on the family and much less on bizarre cameos and really outrageous situations. It actually feels like a show about the Simpson family and treats the characters more age-appropriately.
I don’t like that they lost/recast established voices of minority characters (Apu, Carl, Dr. Hibbert, etc), I do think the quality and the focus of the show is much better than it has been in almost 2-decades.
Dude, that’s over 700 episodes, most of which suck ass. Why would you do that to yourself?
Nice graph!
By the way, any reason to share this here rather than [email protected], as you did for the Boeing one? Genuinely curious
I mean, they themselves called it.
For anyone wondering the top rated episodes here, all at 9.2 are:
S5E2 Cape Feare
S6E6 Treehouse of Horror V
S6E25 Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part One
S8E2 You Only Move TwiceAnd just as I was finishing that, I noticed that one episode has a 9.3, d’oh!
S8E23 Homer’s Enemy
Why was 9/11 such a poorly rated episode in an otherwise solid season. Hmmm 🤔
Laughter can’t melt steel beams!
Episode 3 of season 6 is such an outlier. Too much romance for the Simpsons audience apparently.
It’s a clip show. Both low rating episodes from the first seasons are clip shows. That’s why. Clip shows are typically unpopular, even tho for The Simpsons, each clip is original and not a reair of a previous one. They’re “filler” episodes.
I’m just nitpicking but why are 7.7 and 6.6 arbitrary the thresholds for the colour change? Also, why is one 6.6 red while another two are yellow?
It appears that the colours are not on a fixed scale. The season averages and individual episodes are coloured using different ranges.
It ranges from lowest to highest regardless of the value. Like conditional formatting in Excel does if you don’t specify the scale.
The seasons average ratings range from 6.1-8.4, so it goes red to green in the span of 2.3 points.
The episodes range from 3.9 to 9.3, so it goes red to green in the span of 5.4 points.
The full IMDb ratings range from 1-10. This should have been used as a basis for the colouring instead. The overall average on IMDb is somewhere around 7, so it would be fine to skew the colours so the middle/yellow was at 7, but it should be able to represent any possible ratings.
Should probably also be acknowledged that the sample size is not going to be the same.
You’re going to get a bunch of people piling in to highly rate the early episodes that they remember watching when they were kids, but a significantly lower number are going to be voting on the episodes that came later.
Really the whole premise of trying to compare and contrast the seasons for such a long running show that existed before IMDb even started is flawed on many levels.
If the music labels are botting up Spotify playcounts, are media producers botting up IMDb ratings?
Yes, it has been observed that IMDb sometimes get a lot of new “single post users” putting in 10/10 ratings on Disney movies that otherwise scored badly.
A very nice wave seeing the series decline… The only problem with it is it seems a little skewed to have 5.5 in strong red…
How people rate things is skewed. 5 really means there isn’t anything redeemable about it.
For someone to mark below the midway point it tends to be because they are offended or upset about it. At that point a quality rating isn’t appropriate, it should be 0.
Why are you assuming that there’s some uniform rating standard that every person is committing to?
That’s just how humans are. The average rating is 7. If it was perfectly even it would be 5. But it isn’t. We are objective or rational when we’re asked to put a number to our personal opinion.
