Rating Graph

I recently discovered the Rating Graph website, which pulls TV and movie ratings from... somewhere (more on that in a minute) and turns them into an easy-to-read graph, including lines of best fit for each season where applicable. This lets you see which episodes of a series are the most and least popular, whether individual seasons gained or lost in popularity as they went on, and so on. It's interesting stuff.

Now, I'm going to put a page break here. While I won't be saying anything directly about the S8 episodes I have still to review, I will be touching on how they were received. If that's too spoilery for you, then you might not want to read any further until you've seen the whole season. For the rest of you, keep reading!

I do have a beef with Rating Graph, and unfortunately it's a large one: the site doesn't say anywhere where it gets the raw ratings from. Its About page (which I can't link to as it's a JavaScript popup) merely states that it "graphs ratings [...] for TV series and Movie sequels by episode". You might guess that the raw stats have been taken from IMDb's user ratings, and you'd be right – but Rating Graph doesn't have the courtesy to acknowledge that.

Since it doesn't, though, I have no compunction in taking a snapshot of the graph as it stood at the time of writing this post and embedding it below. If you use the RG site itself, hovering over a marker will pop up the name of the relevant episode,its initial air date, the number of user ratings its had and its overall rating. That doesn't happen here, so in some cases it may be tricky to see instantly which episodes are the most and least popular.

Click to enlarge

The three most popular episodes of all time are "The Perfect Pear" (average rating 9.6) followed by "A Canterlot Wedding, part 2" and "Twilight's Kingdom, part 2" (both 9.4). The least popular of all time are "Non-Compete Clause" (5.1), "What About Discord?" (5.4) and a tie between "Princess Spike" and "Yakity-Sax" (both 5.9). But that's not what I find the most interesting about this visualisation.

Much more intriguing to me are the best-fit lines. You can see, for example, that S2 has the highest overall rating, that after a fairly strong start S3 fell apart, and that there was a plunge in perceived quality between S5 and S6. S7 did better, and indeed stands as the only season not to have any episodes rated below 7.0, but it's the numbers for S8 that really catch my attention. (I'm aware not everyone has seen it all yet, but I think there are sufficient ratings anyway.)

The current season started with consistently moderate ratings, with every episode up to and including "The End in Friend" scored between 7.2 and 8.3. (The show as a whole scores 7.7.) But then things take off, and the eight episodes from "On the Road to Friendship" onwards average almost 8.6, despite "Father Knows Beast" languishing down at 7.1. Despite that, this is the best run that FiM has had on this metric since the middle of S5.

So, what does all this mean? Granted that this is not in any way a rigorously controlled poll, granted that fans' views of older episodes can change over the years, and granted also that popularity and quality do not always march in lock-step, I think it shows that the received wisdom regarding the show's season-to-season appeal has some truth in it. S6 really did disappoint, and there really was a run of beloved eps from late S1 to early S2. "Mare Do Well" was indeed the least popular pre-Twilicorn ep. "The Perfect Pear" really is overrated.

I do think "The Washouts" is considerably better than its average score of 7.9, though!