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.
Cultural Impact
So far, we've only examined broad trends within our keyword themes. We wanted to dive deeper into the content in our analysis to see the cultural prominence of a single piece of content.
The following chart is a closer look at our sample with each film and TV show sized by popularity and also including variables like release year, genre, and more.
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 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 chart gives us a much deeper look at the relationship between stories and culture. Many AIDS/HIV related films preceded Philadelphia (1993). But none ever broke the Top 20 films of the year. Its success at the box office and film awards cemented it as a cultural milestone. In fact, no other film has surpassed Philadelphia until 2015, when Straight Outta Compton (ranked #19) brought rapper Eazy-E's struggle with AIDS to the big screen.
Midnight Cowboy was the #2 top-grossing film in 1969. No film up to that point was quite as aggressive in featuring illicit drugs and LGBT themes. Similarly, The Wire (2002-2008) was the first show to upend traditional small screen narratives about drugs, providing a realistic and nuanced portrayal of the drug trade and drug addiction. Inspired by its portrayal of complex issues like socioeconomics, race, and the drug trade, Harvard and other universities developed curriculums on The Wire.
What We Learned
So, what did we learn from our experiment? There’s still much more to understand — each of the themes we looked into can be their own deep study.
Does culture affect the stories fans love? Yes. In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey used space exploration to reflect the growing cultural fears of Communism and technology outpacing humans. In the 1990s, during a time when zero-tolerance policies were becoming widespread in schools across America, shows like My So-Called Life and Buffy The Vampire Slayer mirrored what was happening in society, covering the topical issue of guns in schools.
Do the stories fans love affect culture? In many cases, yes. During the time of Nixon’s “War On Drugs” in the 70s, Up In Smoke took a countercultural position on its portrayal of marijuana usage, showing the humor and relatively harmless effects of being high. It’s considered the first great stoner comedy, inspiring a series of stoner comedies at the end of the Reagan era (’89) like Dazed and Confused and Half Baked. As marijuana-themed shows and films have increased, the perception of marijuana has also become more acceptable.
Another key learning from our experiment: Just because a show or film didn’t make the top of the box office charts or TV ratings doesn’t mean it had little cultural impact. In the past, metrics like those were the only things that mattered, but, with the magnitude of choice today, the climate has changed and those factors can not be considered alone. Watching a film or show is not a passive experience; powerful stories can create major cultural shifts even if they reach smaller audiences. It’s not always about how many people are watching, but who.
The Future
Stories have always been the building blocks of our culture and society. In the past, stories were a way of passing down shared traditions, values, and societal norms. But with the explosion of content today, we’re seeing more stories that challenge our norms and, challenge our expectations, and offer commentary on society that differs from our own.
What is media’s role in reflecting and shaping the world around us? It creates new possibilities through its connection with fans. We often look back to reflect on the relationship between content and culture, but it’s important to think about what today’s stories are saying - and more importantly, what are the stories that are truly worth sharing?
For further analysis and to learn more about Fan Theory go to V by Viacom
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.