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Popularity in TV Shows

There are thousands of television shows on the air, but only a few can ever become monumentally successful and be constantly renewed at the end of one season. Many shows in fact disappear into obscurity and are cancelled, despite popular support, because numbers are all that matter. Winners of the top 50 shows include Football, super producers Chuck Lorre and Dick Wolf, and ABC’s Wednesday comedy lineup. The top ten shows of 2014-2015 are as follows: The Big Bang Theory, NFL Sunday Night Football, NCIS, The Walking Dead, NCIS: New Orleans, Empire, NFL Thursday Night Football, Scorpion, Blue Bloods, The Blacklist, and How to Get Away with Murder. However, also shows that were cancelled and did not garnish enough viewers were also listed. Shows such as The Following, Resurrection, The Millers, Stalker, and Masters of Illusion.

The trends of the popularity of shows, and the number of shows that have reached certain viewer numbers follows power rule. Popularity is unique and does not follow a standard deviation. What it follows is the function a/(k^c), with a and c acting on constants which depend on the item, while k is number of individuals who access such an item. As the graph demonstrates, there are very few specific items, in this case TV shows, with millions of viewers, however there are an exponentially greater number of TV shows with only several hundred viewers. These shows however don’t really survive, that is when they don’t become the select few with millions of viewers. As a result of power law, many of the older shows, once obtaining a strong following steadily increase their number of viewers. However it is possible for new shows to obtain viewership despite the popularity of old shows. Why is this? This is because popularity is hard to define and is unpredictable, initial luck is critical to the success of a show. Anything can happen in real life, but only few survive, and majority will fail.

 

http://www.tvinsider.com/article/1989/top-50-tv-shows-2014-2015-highest-rated-winners-and-losers/

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