The low ratings for Community episodes on tv.com baffles and angers me

Cafe Society
1

This is something stupid to get worked up over, but occasionally I like to see what other people thought the best episodes of my favorite shows were. So I’ll check the episode ratings over at IMDB and tv.com.

Community is excellent. You should be watching it. It’s easily the funniest thing on tv right now.

Anyway, it’s not a wildly popular show, but other shows that weren’t popular but that were good got the high ratings you’d expect - arrested development has plenty of episodes in the 8.5+ range for example on both sites.

And the IMDB ratings for community episodes is relatively fair. Too low, in my estimation, but not absurd. They can recognize excellence, at least, with Community’s best episodes scoring in the 9s.

But the tv.com episode ratings are in the dumps. They are mostly in the 6 range, with barely any breaking 7. And it’s not that tv.com reviewers are just harsher - for Arrested Development, the ratings are actually higher than IMDB. The ratings for the generic crappy sitcoms of the day like two and a half men or hell, even “shit my dad says”, which I heard was a trainwreck, averages about 8.1.

Even “modern warfare”, arguably the show’s breakout hit and best episode, scores a 6.9! That episode is in the running for best single episode of a comedy show ever and it’s rated over a full point below the average 2 and a half men episode!? (At least IMDB recognizes its greatness here with a 9.6)

I don’t know why but this has been bugging me.

I’ve come up with a theory.

Community makes fun of Glee a few times in its run. The middle aged women with no lives who would like glee* are exactly the sort of people to have a stick up their ass and organize some sort of downrating campaign to bash community. IMDB has better math to detect and throw out people intentionally shitting on a movie and so their efforts are not as effective there. TV.com, having no such protection, gets shit on.

But I don’t know. Modern Family, which is not as good as Community but I feel it’s a solid tier up from other generic sitcoms, rates about a 6 on average. I mean, over 2 full points below shit my dad says. So maybe the people who participate in tv.com reviews are just fucking idiots. But then how did Arrested Development get so highly praised there? Maybe the current idiot wave is recent…

I don’t know. This topic is probably too stupid to merit its own discussion but I felt like ranting and asking people if they knew wtf was up with that.

  • present company excluded. I’m sure all the Glee fans on the SDMB are the type of middle aged women who don’t necesarily have a stick in their ass. Perhaps a pen, or a waffle.
2

I know nothing of tv.com, or their ratings. I am familiar with IMDB, but I couldn’t care less about how their rating system works.

That said, I had to add my two cents here. Community is excellent, and more people should be watching it. I had been taking a pass on it during Season 1, until I accidentally tuned in about five minutes into the “Modern Warfare” episode.

I was hooked. This is one of the funniest, best-written shows around. I’ve seen every episode since, and I’m catching up on Season 1 through Netflix (why aren’t you streaming this show, Netflix! shaking fist).

Just wanted to say, I got your back, SenorBeef. Even if I don’t really care too much about why tv.com ratings are down on this show. Cause it’s great regardless!!

3

I’m a middle aged woman who doesn’t have a stick up her ass, doesn’t watch Community, doesn’t watch Glee, don’t watch or care about either of them, their ratings, tv.com, or netflix. I can assure you my old biddy friends feel the exact same way and we are not spending what precious time is left to us on earth jiggering the results on some website. The vast majority of people who care about these things are bored teenagers, we middle aged slugs are indifferent. That said, I’ll probably give Community a try sometime because I’m always the last to discover something good and be amazed I never heard of it before !

4

Middle aged woman here checking in. I love both Community and Glee for the same reason…their absurdity factor. There is nothing saying I have to pick one over the other. And to be honest, I kind of resent the implication that I do.

5

I found Community after seeing people talk about it on another message board, and it soon rocketed to the top of my admittedly short list of TV shows that I watch diligently.

I’ve started showing it to my friends, and as a result I’ve seen the early episodes three times recently. An Introduction to Film is much, much harder to watch the second time :frowning:

My girlfriend prefers Season 1 because of the greater number of off the wall pastiches in Season 2. I prefer Season 2 for the same reason. A Fist Full of Paintballs is the greatest artistic creation in the field of everything in the history of forever*.

*May depend on your love of cowboys and/or love of hyperbolic statements about TV shows.

6

I didn’t say you had to choose, just that you were a terrible person.

I’m not saying all Glee fans are necesarily horrible, just that my pet theory is that a subset of Glee fans with a stick up their ass is downrating it. But I don’t know. Other shows seem to show a trend that tv.com is retarded, so maybe it’s not community specifically. It’s kind of sad that there aren’t enough good shows on tv to establish a baseline for what a good show would be rated there.

7

Huh? There are dozens of good shows out there right now and hundreds more that have gone to that live studio audience in the sky. You could easily undertake such a project, but getting a decent enough sample size for every show is what would make it hard.

8

I feel confident that nothing like this is happening. First of all, middle aged women are exactly the sort of people who don’t organize online campaigns to tamper with the ratings of TV shows. My mother is a middle aged woman who likes Glee but doesn’t like Community, and I’d bet she doesn’t even know there are websites where you can rate episodes of TV shows. If she did, she wouldn’t care, and she would probably say something like “Why would someone spend their time doing that?” Middle aged women with no lives and sticks up their asses might write letters to the editor complaining about TV shows they find offensive (although Glee seems more likely to offend such people than Community), but I doubt there are many who’d ever think to give low online ratings to a show they don’t even watch because they heard it made a crack about Glee.

I’d consider it at least somewhat plausible that teen and 20-something Glee fangirls/boys would rush to defend their favorite show’s honor, but the few, subtle jokes about Glee on Community seem unlikely to provoke such a reaction. There’s also no reason to look for a conspiracy theory when Glee attracts millions more viewers than Community.

If the figures on Wikipedia are correct, the most US viewers *Community *ever attracted was 7.89 million…with its pilot episode. Since then it’s generally been between 4 and 5 million viewers per episode. Meanwhile, the least-watched episode of Glee (back in season one) had 6.10 million US viewers. Since late in season one the show regularly has 10+ million viewers. Not counting the post-Superbowl episode (26.8 million viewers), the most-watched episode of Glee had 13.66 million viewers. It’s my understanding that Glee is also popular internationally. I’ve never heard the same about Community.

Speaking as someone who watches and likes both I think Community is the better show, but it’s clear that Glee is much more popular. If it’s more popular then it should come as no surprise that it’s getting higher ratings on a site like TV.com.

9

I really like Community, but I’m kinda amazed it got renewed. Its not exactly the kind of thing with mass appeal (a half hour spoof of Dinner with Andre?) and all the metametahumor doesn’t really seem like the kind of thing that appeals to the plebs. And as the previous poster notes, its ratings are pretty meh, and getting more meh as time goes on. It was barely beating the now canceled Outsourced at the end of last season.

10

If it wasn’t clear, the ratings are the user ratings (1-10) for quality, I’m not talking about the tv ratings (how many people watched). Otherwise I’m not sure what how those points are relevant - there are unpopular shows that are wildly successful in critical reviews, which is why I used the example of Arrested Development in the OP. TV.com user ratings managed to acknowledge it as a great show despite its unpopularity.

11

Yes, that was perfectly clear. I’m not sure why you have difficulty understanding that a show watched by 2-3 times as many people as Community is likely to get better user ratings on TV.com. More people like Glee than like Community. That’s just the way it is. The fact that Glee is more popular with the general public than Community is a reasonable explanation for why more people are giving favorable reviews to Glee on TV.com. Your mean old lady conspiracy theory is not.

Community doesn’t even have a small but stable viewership, its numbers have been pretty steadily declining since the show first came on the air. Community lost about 2 million viewers by its second episode, and it’s gotten worse from there. The season two finale of Community was watched by less than half as many people as the pilot. There are clearly a lot of people who have given Community a chance but decided they didn’t like it. Some of them are presumably giving the show negative reviews on TV.com.

If you’re asking why Arrested Development has better TV.com ratings than Community then I don’t know, but looking at TV.com right now I see that AD’s ratings are based on far more votes than Community’s. AD actually has more votes than Glee, despite attracting only about half as many viewers when it was on the air. So based on looking at the TV.com pages for just these three shows, I’d say that if there’s anything weird going on with voting patterns it’s that AD fans are hugely overrepresented.

If TV.com ratings are that important to you then maybe you could attempt to mobilize Community fans to get out the vote. However, if you care about the show you should be more worried about the low viewer numbers. I’ve never heard of a show being canceled because it had mediocre TV.com ratings.

12

I don’t know how any of that related to anything I’ve said.

I never once brought up the Glee ratings on tv.com. Never even looked them up. They might be 5.0, they might be 9.5. No idea. I never made a point that. It was only my semi-serious theory about why community was rated lower than other network sitcoms.

I see no reason why tv ratings automatically correlate to user ratings and that’s born out quite a bit. The random suburbanites who like garbage sitcoms aren’t passionate about them, they just sort of glaze over in their general direction between feedings. They typically don’t go on internet sites to rank the shows, I’m guessing.

Firefly averages about a 9.2 despite getting no tv ratings. Arrested Development is regularly in the 9s despite barely being able to stay on air. To pick a random example, the George Lopez averages somewhere in the low 7s, despite it being popular enough to get 12 times as many episodes as firefly and more than twice as many of arrested development.

My point was that great but underwatched shows tend to get good ratings on these sorts of sites at least because the fans are passionate about them and the critics recognize their merit, even if the general tv audience doesn’t. Arrested development and firefly are prime examples of this. In my estimation, community isn’t as good as either, but it’s the closest network TV has come to a special, unique comedy that even begins to compare to arrested development, so I’m curious as to why it doesn’t get the same level of critical recognition.

And on IMDB, it’s underappreciated, but at least the great episodes do get recognition. On TV.com, its best episodes, which are amongst the best episodes of any comedy ever put on tv, routinely score lower than the average episode of generic, crappy sitcoms. This perplexes me.

13

This thread inspired me to check, and netflix.ca at least has season 1 streaming. Looks like they just got it. You may want to re-check.

14

If more people like a show, why would that give it better ratings? If we have 20 people who give Community a score of 9.0, and 5000 people who give Glee a 9.0, they will both still have a 9.0. The number of people watching is irrelevant.

No, I think it is very reasonable to think that Glee fans are intentionally giving Community bad reviews for dissing their show. People very much do think that way. For example, if I go to ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, and watch a review where someone blasts a show, but does it well, they still get a ton of negative reviews and comments. You dissed something I like, so I will diss you.

Heck, they had to make a songabout the concept on YouTube. (Warning: horrible, horrible earworm.)

15

Perhaps Community has more viewers who tend to be more critical of the show’s craftsmanship and Glee has more viewers who vote up an episode that showcases their favorite singer. I’m not really sure why it has to be viewers of this show are concocting a plot to vote down this other show for little to no reason.

16

I really doubt there’s a Glee conspiracy here. Mainly because Community has only made fun of Glee, what, two times?

17

It appears as if you are not the only person to notice this phenomenon.

From the tv.com messageboard:
Community:Who downrates all these episodes?
One theory I can believe put out in that thread is that people want their show to be in the top 10 listings, so they go to all of the competing shows and give it bad ratings. If fans of more popular shows do this to a show like Community it’s TV.com ratings will plummet. Presumably, this is a new phenomenon, therefore Arrested Development did not have to deal with this sort of anti ballot box stuffing.

18

I didn’t say they automatically correlated, but if a show isn’t popular with the general American public then there’s nothing mysterious about it being unpopular with TV.com users. You’ve come up with two counterexamples of shows with small but devoted cult followings. That’s not “quite a bit”. Most shows that fail to attract many viewers don’t have small but devoted cult followings.

The low overall number of votes for Community on TV.com indicate that Community does not inspire the same kind of passion as Arrested Development or Firefly. I don’t know why this is, but it seems unlikely it has anything to do with the voting behavior of Glee fans.

If people only voted for shows they loved on TV.com then every show would have a high rating. The declining audience for Community indicates that a lot of people who’ve seen the show don’t like it. I’ve encouraged people I know personally to watch Community, only to have them tell me later that they didn’t care for it. Some of the people out there who have watched but disliked Community are presumably expressing this opinion online.

As Inner Stickler pointed out, Glee fans may also be less critical of their favorite show than Community fans are of theirs. Glee attracts a lot of younger viewers. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of its t[w]een fans are not especially discerning and would give even mediocre episodes good ratings.

In the absence of any actual evidence of a Glee fan conspiracy (e.g. posts on Glee fan sites), I’d say it’s very unreasonable to assume that one exists. IMHO the two or three references Community has made to Glee don’t even qualify as disses, and the majority of Glee fans obviously never watch Community at all – if they did, the show would have a lot more viewers than it does. I doubt that Glee fans even consider Community a rival show, since Glee is hugely more popular and the shows don’t air on the same night (well, they are this summer, but it’s all reruns anyway). Fans of The Big Bang Theory would have better reason to want Community to fail, since TBBT moved from Mondays to Thursdays at 8 pm this past season. Or if you want to go looking for a conspiracy, I’d bet there are more Americans offended by the presence of a Muslim character on Community than give a damn that there have been a couple of jokes about glee clubs.

Middle aged women don’t. Not that middle aged women can’t be at least as spiteful as anyone else, but I don’t believe that tampering with TV.com ratings is the sort of thing that would ever occur to most middle aged women. As I said before, I’d consider it a lot more plausible that young Glee fans would do such a thing, but I see no reason to jump to this conclusion when there’s a far more obvious explanation for Community’s low TV.com ratings. A lot of people just don’t like the show. I’m as sad about this as anyone, but it’s true.

19

I realize there’s some subjectivity in here, but shows that are really good but unpopular tend to at least get high user ratings. Firefly and Arrested Development are the prime examples. Pushing Daisies is another - almost no one watched it but every single episode scored about a 9 on tv.com. Now am I wrong to group Community in with those shows? Maybe, but based on the people I know who like community, and based on the people I know who don’t, I would put it in a similar place as those other shows. Not as good as arrested development or firefly, but definitely in the “no one watches it but it’s really good” camp.

Well, part of it is that I think it hasn’t had a chance to get the post-broadcast viewers that those shows picked up after they became hits amongst a certain group.

But I do think there’s a deliberate downranking. I mean - if it’s just that the voters generally didn’t like the show, you’d still expect the good episodes to stand out from the bad, right? Even if you think the show should average a 6, you’d see Modern Warfare or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or For a Few Paintballs More and give it a 7 or 8 even if you generally don’t like the show. But the good episodes don’t rise above the bad episodes at all, which suggests to me a large group is just dragging the whole thing down with a lot of 0 and 1 votes.

Compare it to IMDB - the show is underrated there in my view, but it’s much more reasonable. The relative voting - between the worst and best episodes of the series - makes a lot more sense. The best episodes, like the 3 I mentioned above, break a 9 and are rated significantly higher than average. So those ratings at least make sense.

Would these people be watching every episode and giving an honest rating of each one if they disliked the show and gave up on it?

As far as the Glee stuff - it was just a pet theory of mine, I realize it’s just a guess. I don’t know what it is. It does seem like a deliberate effort to downrank, so then why would anyone do that? The only thing I can think of is that someone’s axe was getting gored and they decided to retaliate against the show. So who does community make fun of? Well, a lot of people, but Glee is a repeat customer. And Glee in my total wild guess opinion seems to be like the sort of show that would have an audience that did stupid petty shit like this. So it adds up.

But then again there may be a greater tv.com stupidity going on. Modern family, which isn’t great, and not as good as community, I think we can agree is one of the smarter, better sitcoms on today. The ratings on IMDB average about an 8. Community’s IMDB ratings average about 8.6. Pretty reasonable.

Now I think we can agree that the George Lopez show and Shit My Dad Says are among the dumber sitcoms on tv. George Lopez on IMDB averages about a 6. Shit my dad says averages around a 6.8.

Now tv.com. Community averages around 6.8. Modern family averages around a 6. George Lopez averages around a 7. Shit my dad says averages about an 8.

Now maybe that just means tv.com viewers are all morons. That does seem to be a trend so. But that doesn’t explain why some shows are rated correctly (arrested development, firefly, pushing daisies, etc.) or why viewers can’t even differentiate the good episodes from the bad episodes of community. Other shows tend to have the ratings vary a decent bit - some episodes a 5.5, some episodes an 8.5, but Community is almost all in the 6.6-7.2 corridor which is an odd result.

Anyway, something odd is going on here and I can’t quite figure it out.

20

Have you considered that both Arrested Development and Firefly were canceled before TV.com began? The only people rating those episodes are people who really care about the show. Community is a current show and doesn’t have that luxury.

I can’t explain Pushing Daisies.