You Are What You Love
What Your Taste In TV Says About You
Does culture affect the stories fans love? And do the stories fans love affect culture?
In 1994, MTV’s Real World: San Francisco featured Pedro Zamora, the first openly gay, HIV-positive man on television. The show documented Pedro’s journey as an AIDS educator and his commitment ceremony to his partner. This was one of many firsts from the show; audiences had never seen anything quite like this before, and Pedro’s story is still considered a pivotal moment in television and pop culture history.
Real World: San Francisco generated enormous attention and opened the doors for LGBT issues and AIDS in media. It also pioneered a new format and genre of television, reality, which still reverberates through culture today.
TV and film play a tremendous role in how we think about aspects of culture such as race, war, drugs, and sex. But understanding the relationship between these stories and culture has always been difficult. For example, was Pedro’s story on Real World a catalyst for change? Or was it the result of previous years’ events (e.g. Philadelphia in ‘93 and Magic Johnson announcing his HIV diagnosis in ’91)?
What’s behind this exploration?
Our analysis looks to identify the relationship between the stories fans love and culture. For example, we hypothesized that the Apollo lunar landings in 1969-1972 would incite an immediate explosion of "space-themed" films (it didn't). We also wondered whether media representation of Islam has grown with terrorism fears, war, and political unrest in the Middle East (it has).
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Information courtesy of IMDb. Used with permission.
Starting in 1996 of each year’s sample consists of its top 200 films and top 50 TV shows.
We then looked at the IMDb keywords associated with each piece of content, clustering similar keywords into themes that we believed would represent the most interesting shifts in media representation of culture. The line chart represents the trends within these themes over time and the bubble chart is a deeper look into the sample.
Films: We used US-based box office data to rank the top 200 films in each year. When we did not have box office data, we subsequently ranked the films by the total number of IMDb votes (a proxy for popularity).
TV: We used viewership ratings to rank the top 50 TV shows in each year. When we did not have historical viewing data, we ranked TV shows by the total number of IMDb votes (a proxy for popularity). From 2000 to the present, TV enters a burgeoning period, the “Golden Age of Television” - so we split the rank to the top 25 broadcast shows and top 25 cable shows to represent a wider range of stories.
Excluded: We’ve excluded certain types of TV programming – such as News, Sports, Specials, Competition Reality, and Home Improvement & Lifestyle shows – to focus on content that includes at least a broad storyline.
Included: IMDb votes can be skewed by a variety of factors (e.g. a piece of content’s present-day popularity may differ from historic popularity). With these in consideration, we decided to include the total number of votes (rather than average rating) as a proxy for popularity when we did not have historical data.
While we encountered some limitations: (e.g., the dataset uses crowdsourced tagging, TV keywords can sometimes be limited, and overall tagging begins to decline in 2013), we were interested in what general trends the data highlights.
We selected the Top 50 TV Shows from each year, 1966 - 2016
And then used IMDB plot keywords to filter for themes such as .
Does film and TV shift with culture?
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Information courtesy of IMDb. Used with permission.
Each year’s sample consists of its top 200 films and top 50 TV shows.
Films: we used US-based box office data to rank the top 200 films in each year. When we did not have box office data, we subsequently ranked the films by the total number of IMDb votes (a proxy for popularity).
TV: we used viewership ratings to rank the top 50 TV shows in each year. When we did not have historical viewing data, we ranked TV shows by the total number of IMDb votes (a proxy for popularity). From 2000 to the present, TV enters a burgeoning period, the “Golden Age of Television” - so we split the rank to the top 25 broadcast shows and top 25 cable shows to represent a wider range of stories.
Included: IMDb votes can be skewed by a variety of factors including a piece of content’s present-day popularity, which in many cases will differ from historic popularity. With these in consideration, we decided to include the total number of votes (rather than average rating) as a proxy for popularity when we did not have historical data.
Excluded: We’ve excluded certain types of TV programming to focus on content that includes at least a broad story - News, Sports, Specials, Competition Reality, and Home Improvement & Lifestyle.
While we encountered some limitations: (e.g., keywords for TV can be limited at times, overall tagging begins to decline in 2013), we were interested in what we would see based off of the directional trends from the data.
This is a story about how film plots mirror (or shape) historical events.
For example, how early did the film industry portray the AIDS epidemic? Has movie representation of Islam changed with war and politics in the Middle East? Did the lunar landing in 1969 incite a wave of space-related films?
We analyzed a database of several million user-submitted keywords that describe a film’s plot, everything from “full-frontal male nudity” to “exploding car.” For every year since 1966, we grouped plot keywords from the top 200 films (by box office) into cultural themes, such as LGBT, civil rights, religion, and technology.
Let’s examine the results.
This is one part in a series of experiments on Viacom’s Fan Theory, which also examines the neurological effects of South Park and taste in TV.
Explore all experiments on
DO THE TYPES OF STORIES WE LOVE SHIFT WITH CULTURE?
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Information courtesy of IMDb. Used with permission.
Each year’s sample consists of its top 200 films.
We used US-based box office data to rank the top 200 films in each year. When we did not have box office data, we subsequently ranked the films by the total number of IMDb votes (a proxy for popularity).
Included: IMDb votes can be skewed by a variety of factors including a piece of content’s present-day popularity, which in many cases will differ from historic popularity. With these in consideration, we decided to include the total number of votes (rather than average rating) as a proxy for popularity when we did not have historical data.
While we encountered some limitations, we were interested in what we would see based off of the directional trends from the data.
This gives us a much clearer view on how film responded to major cultural events. For example, many AIDS/HIV-related films preceded “Philadelphia,” but none of them broke into the top-grossing 20 films of the year. The role of “Philadelphia” in public discourse is unmatched.
This is just one look at the data, specifically for films. Analysis of 2,500 TV shows and additional visualizations can be found on Fan Theory here.
Fan Theory is a series of thought-provoking experiments from Viacom, designed to explore the relationship between fans and the stories they love.
Leveraging the power of our best-in-class research and data capabilities, Fan Theory looks at fans and audiences through a cultural, psychographic, and neurological lens. As a global entertainment company, we’re committed to understanding audiences in new ways to build deeper connections with fans that have breadth and depth. Each experiment is in support of this, validating the hypotheses we have around the relationships and dynamics fans have with content.