Data Underload  /  , ,

Television Genres Over Time

By Nathan Yau

IMDb catalogs television episodes with up to three genres. Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945, when there were only a few shows available, up to present day, when there are more shows any human could ever need.

Prints are available for a limited time in the FlowingData Shop.

Comedy and drama (and combinations including them) still set the foundation, but reality TV, news, and talk shows make up a larger share than they used to.

Below are the individual genres split up, which makes it easier to see rising and falling patterns. Again, television episodes can have more than one genre, so the sum of the values below won’t sum to 100 percent.

 

To be honest, I haven’t watched actual TV shows in years. I’m mostly a basketball and cooking videos type of a guy, but this seems about right? There sure are a lot news and talk shows. Maybe let westerns have another chance.

Chart Types Used

Area ChartStacked Area Chart

Become a member. Support an independent site. Get extra visualization goodness.

See What You Get

Favorites

Reviving the Statistical Atlas of the United States with New Data

Due to budget cuts, there is no plan for an updated atlas. So I recreated the original 1870 Atlas using today’s publicly available data.

Jobs Charted by State and Salary

Jobs and pay can vary a lot depending on where you live, based on 2013 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here’s an interactive to look.

A Day in the Life of Americans

I wanted to see how daily patterns emerge at the individual level and how a person’s entire day plays out. So I simulated 1,000 of them.

Air Quality Mapped Over Time

With wildfires burning in the western United States, smoke fills the air. This is an animation of the air quality during the past couple of months.