I love stuff like this. A statistics professor with a YouTube channel called Stat Race has put together a fascinating video that chronicles the most popular TV shows over the past 20 years, using bar charts. When calculating how popular a given show was, Stat Race included 24-hour audience reports, streaming data and piracy, so it sounds like this is a pretty thorough analysis.
So how has the landscape of TV changed over the past two decades? Take a look:
TV was a different place in 2000, when NBC’s ER and Friends ruled the airwaves. You can see The Sopranos bubbling up underneath the top spot for a while, but HBO’s biggest hit was still a ways ahead of them. And streaming services weren’t even a thing yet; how innocent we were.
Throughout the 2000s, a series of different shows took the top spot, including CSI, Lost, The Mentalist, NCIS, and even Showtime’s Dexter for a hot second. (Man, America loves crime shows.) Still, it might have been the long reign of Lost, a show famous for its deep lore, twisting storyline and excellent production values, that most presaged what happened next.
Game of Thrones comes strong out of the gate in 2011, and then basically dominates the top spot for years, starting in 2012 and going through 2018, when NCIS — which is still on after all these years, by the way — retakes the top spot. Game of Thrones rounds out the decade strong even after it ends.
On the streaming side of things, we see appearances by House of Cards, Stranger Things and Orange Is The New Black. And The Walking Dead has strong showing throughout the 2010s as well. The shows about cops and doctors never go away, but I like that the charts throughout the 2010s look a little more varied than the ones for the 2000s.
I find this fascinating, and I wonder what a chart tracing the next 10 years in TV will look like. Will ABC rule the airwaves with a show about a doctor cop? (Officer Doctor, P.I.) Will Amazon have luck with its wildly expensive fantasy series based on The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings? I’m ready for anything.
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