Not convinced whether it’s worth sticking with The Wire, Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead? Kevin Wu’s Graph TV tool lets you see whether you’ve picked a winner. The site compiles a chart of users’ ratings of TV show episodes on IMDb, plotting the rise and fall of ratings over each season.
GraphTV itself is pretty simple; type in the name or IMDb ID of any television series, and the site puts together a simple graph for each season of that show that charts the rating of each episode, giving you an optional trend line for the quality of a season or of an entire show’s run. Here’s how The Walking Dead has performed over its four seasons so far:
As you can see, the show suffered with fans through its first season, picked up in the second, then dive-bombed in the slow third before performing its strongest in the just-finished fourth season. Compare that to The Wire:
And Seinfeld:
And Game of Thrones:
It’s easy to waste a few minutes seeing how your fellow TV watchers rate your favourite TV series; for older series, there’s something fascinating about seeing the slow but definite demise as viewers lose interest. Just look at Happy Days for a good example of that.