This list, put together by editors at IMDB, is weird, because it doesn’t really reflect the “best” shows of the year, or even the most “popular” shows of the year. According to the editors, the top 10 list is “not based upon critical assessments (here’s the 40 best series of all time based on IMDB user ratings) or box-office performance but the actual pageviews by more than 160 million unique monthly users of IMDb.com.” In other words, this top ten list is based upon how many times someone had to look up the television show’s IMDB page because they wanted to know the name of one of the characters, which is to say, there were a lot of people in 2013 who wanted to know 1) what was the name of the actress in that nude scene on Game of Thrones and 2) who plays Huell?
1. Game of Thrones
2. Breaking Bad
3. The Walking Dead
4. Big Bang Theory
5. Arrow
6. How I Met Your Mother
7. Dexter
8. American Horror Story
9. Vampire Diaries
10. Supernatural
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That is a weird combination of shows. I get why people might look up How I Met Your Mother frequently (who plays the mother?), and The Walking Dead (what was the name of the guy who just got killed off?) and even Dexter (to leave mean user reviews), but why would anyone look up the Big Bang Theory page? For the quotes page? Because there are only 3 quotes on it, from
six seasons, and one of them is “Bazinga” and another is a terrible knock-knock joke. Maybe people were searching for answers as to why the series is “funny”? (Here’s the answer)
Where is Mad Men, anyway? Why didn’t more people spend their time looking up who plays the three different Bobby Drapers this year? And Boardwalk Empire, which has lots of actors whos names are hard to remember. Also, why does Dexter have a higher user rating (9.0) than Mad Men (8.7). In fact, among the “top” shows, Dexter has the third higher user rating, behind Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. Why is this completely arbitrary “top” ten list suddenly very frustrating?
