This week, I found data on Friends, and that seemed like a great topic for some fun charts! This week’s charts are fairly simple but still interesting.
First, I looked at the IMDB rating for each episode of Friends, and I took the average rating for each season.
The top chart isn’t terribly interesting because ratings did not significantly change over time. Seasons 5 and 10 have the highest ratings, and seasons 9 and 1 have the lowest ratings. However, the error bars show that these differences probably aren’t significant. When looking at individual episodes, the range is 6.9 to 9.7, which is still not a wide range. The bottom chart is a violin chart, which is more interesting because it shows the distribution of ratings for each season. For instance, season 1 had a majority of episodes with a rating around 8, while season 10 had a more even distribution with a few episodes rating very high. In summary, Friends had great ratings from the beginning to the end!
Here, I made a similar chart from data showing the number of US viewers on the original air date.
This chart shows a bit more variety than the first one. It seems like season two was a highly watched season, although the error bars are quite large here, indicating that there was a lot of variation in viewership between the episodes. We see that on the violin chart, which shows that there were a few outlier episodes with many more viewers than the rest of the episodes. A similar pattern is seen in season 10. The six episodes with the lowest number of viewers were all in season 7, and the two episodes with the highest number of viewers were from season 2 (although its worth mentioning that these two episodes aired directly after the Superbowl). The episode with the third highest amount of viewers was, of course, the last episode.
Next, I thought it would be fun to make a word cloud of the titles for each episode.
Okay, each episode of friends starts with either “the one where” or “the one with”. I filtered out those words so that we could see words besides those on the word cloud. Rachel, Ross, then Joey are the three most common words in the titles. Monica is the friend that gets mentioned the least in the titles, tying with “wedding” with a count of 9 mentions. You can click a word to see how many times it was mentioned.
Well, that’s all I have to say about these Friends charts!