Black Mirror episode ranking analysis

July 31, 2023

Several websites have ranked all of the episodes in Seasons 1-6 of Black Mirror. Similar to my analysis of “I Think You Should Leave” skits, I wanted to analyze these rankings and compare them to my own opinions. The plots and tables below show some insights into the Black Mirror episode rankings, generated from the data I aggregated in this spreadsheet, which you can contribute your own rankings to. Plots were generated using this Colab Notebook.

Top-ranked episodes

Figure 1. Ranking of all Black Mirror episodes from seasons 1-6, sorted by average ranking.

   

Figure 2. Correlation matrix of different rankings, sorted by their correlation with Mashable’s Dread ranking.

   

Table 1. Top 10 episodes, according to average rankings

   

Table 2. Top 10 episodes, according to my rankings

   

Most underrated, overrated, & polarizing episodes

Table 3. Top 10 most over-rated episodes, according to my rankings.

   

Table 4. Top 10 most under-rated episodes, according to my rankings.

   

Table 5. Top 10 most polarizing episodes, as measured by the standard deviation of all rankings.

   

Correlations

Figure 3. Correlation between Mashable’s ranking of episodes by dread, and my metric of over-ratedness, measured as the difference between my ranking and the average ranking. Episodes that are less dreadful tend to be more overrated (Spearman rho = -0.40, un-corrected p-value = 0.04).

   

Figure 4. Weak correlation between the ranking of an episode and when it was released: episodes released longer ago tend to have a better ranking (Spearman rho = 0.37, un-corrected p-value = 0.06).

   

Table 6. Average episode ranks by season.

Data sources

You can easily load the data yourself in python by running: pandas.read_csv('https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13jl1yrwu4W-zL0i_avoNzVBDtbBRzUmKKTjLIHfJopE/export?format=csv&gid=0'). It includes my own rankings and those from 9 websites: