A criticism that is sometimes leveled at various TV shows is that they’re predictable… “I k new from the moment that lady showed up that she was going to turn out to be a bad guy”, etc. I’m curious if anyone has ever tried to quasi-objectively test how predictable TV shows are. I think it might be interesting to watch a show, then during each ad break pause the show (assuming you have a DVR or are streaming) and write a few sentences of predictions about what you think is going to happen in the rest of the episode. Obviously if a show is truly predictable you should be to predict fairly early what will happen later in the episode. More subtly, if a show is predictable you’ll at least be able to predict what will be important later in the episode, even if you can’t guess the details. For instance, in a cop show if someone is murdered and we spend a lot of time talking to both the victim’s sister and the victim’s brother, in a predictable show you might very definitely know that the killer was either the sister or the brother, even if you can’t pick which, but an unpredictable show might have the storyline go off into a totally different direction later in the episode, where the real resolution is something like “well, it turned out not to matter who killed that guy at all because zombies attacked” or something along those lines.
Anyone ever tried an experiment like this? I’m tempted to give it a try for some of the shows I currently watch… most likely Marvel Agents of SHIELD, or maybe Arrow when it starts up again next week.