Visualising the decline of Game of Thrones
At one point in time, Game of Thrones was considered to be one of the greatest and most popular TV series of all time. After an ending that was disappointing to a lot of viewers (to put it politely), it seems to have vanished from pop-culture completely. With the aid of data visualisations, I will try and highlight the show’s rise in popularity and it’s swift decline in reputation. The data for the visualisations in this piece was obtained from www.imdb.com and www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episodes. All data was processed in python (matplotlib, pandas and seaborn) then edited for visual effect in Inkscape.
Rise in popularity
With each season of Game of Thrones being released, it seemed as if it was only getting more and more popular. This rise in popularity is of course due to an increase in people watching. There is information available for the number of viewers of each episode in the US. Below are two visualisations (of the same data) that reflect this information.
Fall from grace
Based on the popular novels by George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones was a well-loved series from its inception. With the unique position of being based on a series of books that are yet to be finished, potentially it was tempting fate from the very start. It should be noted that the first two seasons follow closely
from the first two books and season 3 and 4 each represent half of the 3rd book. After this, the books are followed less closely and new non-book content was added. Seasons 7 and 8 are based on the final two books which are yet to be published. Below are two visualisations (again, on the same data) that attempt to highlight the change in viewer appreciation over the course of the show.
Remarks
Although no one can say for certain why the show declined in quality so drastically, it is very clear that this is the public perception. Each of the first 4 seasons follows a similar pattern, they start with a rating near 9 and increase gradually over the course of the season to a near 10 rating for the finale. Seasons 5–7 still generally receive high scores, but with a greater variance in the scores. They do also follow the pattern of having a line of best fit that increases over the course of the season. Season 8 only has 6 episodes and they are the 6 lowest-rated episodes in the whole of the show. It also has a very severely negative gradient in its trendline, with the finale receiving a 4.0 rating.
The average number of viewers from the first season to the last nearly increased 7-fold with an increase in viewership in nearly every season.
There appears to have been some stagnation in seasons 4–6 but the final two seasons had large increases in viewership.
Despite there being no obvious correlation between the two illustrated attributes, the trends that they took over the course of the show are clear
to see.
Infographic
This article was created to accompany an infographic I produced on the subject. It contains all the same content and can be seen below (or on my Behance).
