I am rewatching The Sopranos, just in time for the 20 year anniversary. It's always been one of my top TV series ever, but a lot of time has passed. I was worried that it wouldn't hold up. But it's so good, right from the very first episode. It holds up. It might even be better, funnier, and smarter than I realized when I watched it for the first time.
Then I got to the episode "A Hit is a Hit". It's just bad. Meandering plot structure, poor editing, and bad dialogue. I didn't even want to finish it.
It recieved an 8.3 on IMDb viewer ratings. I was shocked. 8.3 is not a score for a bad hour of television. 8.3 should be, objectively, pretty good. 8.3 is something you would recommend and is worth your time. "A Hit is a Hit" is neither of those things. And, objectively, the ratings of the other episodes I watched so far weren't all that different, from 8.6 to 8.9:
## # A tibble: 10 x 3
## Episode `Episode Name` Rating
## <dbl> <chr> <dbl>
## 1 101 The Sopranos 8.6
## 2 102 46 Long 8.6
## 3 103 Denial, Anger, Acceptance 8.8
## 4 104 Meadowlands 8.8
## 5 105 College 8.9
## 6 106 Pax Soprana 8.7
## 7 107 Down Neck 8.6
## 8 108 The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti 8.8
## 9 109 Boca 8.7
## 10 110 A Hit Is a Hit 8.3
A difference of .6 shouldn't be the gap between a bad episode and a really good episode. This is where some statistical analysis can be useful. Here is the the distribution of IMDB viewer rating scores of all the episodes:
This distribution is roughly normal enough for my purpose, which is to make sure I never waste my time watching an episode as bad as "A Hit is a Hit" again. That particular episode was 1.25 standard deviations (SD) lower than the mean rating of all episodes, so I decided to use 1 SD lower than the mean as my cutoff for "bad" episodes. In a perfectly normal dstribution, this means I wouldn't watch 17% of all the episodes. I should remind you that The Sopranos is 86 hours of television. I can live with watching 17% less of it.
How do I visualize IMDb ratings? I found some nice plots from u/Pyrolamas and u/shivasprogeny on reddit that seemed like a good models for me to emulate.
Here's the result.
Of course, I wanted to apply my criteria for "bad episodes," then highlight and label them. Here is the final product:
