Ranking 23 Episodes of Black Mirror
This is a companion post to the first episode of my new podcast, Required Viewing with Shams. In this two-part episode we reveal our own rankings of every episode of Black Mirror plus how they compare to the consensus of both critics and fans.
The chart above visualises the likelihood of each episode to be ranked in a given spot from 1 to 23 (1 being the best episode, 23 being the worst) by professional TV critics and journalists. The data was gathered from highly trafficked online media outlets who have published a ranked list of episodes in this fashion. If a website did not have all 23 episodes named, it was excluded from this dataset.
The chart above is the same visualisation using data from a survey sent to fans via the Black Mirror sub-reddit and Facebook discussion group. Survey participants were asked to order all 23 episodes from favourite to least favourite. If a participant indicated they had not seen all 23 episodes their response was excluded. The sample size of this survey is about 200.
The table above shows the exact Average rank in both datasets, as well as the Standard Deviation. Again, 1 is the best rank and 23 is the worst. A higher Std. Dev. means that there is more disagreement on the rank of the episode while a lower Std. Dev. means there is less variation in what rank the episode is given.