Visualizing Breaking Bad Fan IMDB Ratings

Readers of this site know how much I enjoy Breaking Bad. I certainly have my favorite episodes, including the show’s pilot and, for my money, Vince Gilligan’s magnum opus “Ozymandias.”

Now, thanks to GraphTV, you can see how fans rating all 62 episodes on IMDB with, to boot, clickable links to the IMDB page of each. (Note that the scales on the y-axis provide a skewed picture. In reality, the differences in fan ratings aren’t as pronounced as GraphTV would suggest. See Tufte’s classic book VDQI.)

Click on image to embiggen it.

And you can do the same thing for other shows’ IMDB ratings, including Mad Men and Dexter, a show that in my view jumped the shark well before its last season. Speaking of endings, I’m not the only one who found the ending of The Sopranos a bit wanting.

I would love to see intra-show real-time ratings. Perhaps someone is working on that right now. In other words, based on tweets, is it possible to gauge real-time viewer sentiment based upon 140 characters?

Simon Says

As I write in The Visual Organization, we are living in an era of Big Data, open APIs, increasingly robust open-source tools, and unbridled creativity. Never before has it been so easy to represent data in interesting and interactive ways. GraphTV is certainly one of the coolest I’ve seen. While it’s not a business tool for most of us, it only underscores what’s possible these days.

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