Looking at The Office’s IMDb Ratings and Writers

The data this week comes from the schrute R package for The Office transcripts and data.world for IMDb ratings of each episode. The featured article is The Pudding’s ‘The Office’ Dialogue in Five Charts, which is ‘a breakdown of how every character contributed to the show’.

Ratings

There are 188 The Office episodes.

The first visualization I made was of the episode ratings of the entire series, grouped by season. The width of the violin plot indicates the density of the episodes with that particular rating.

Labeled above are the highest rated episodes per season, except in the cases of season 1 and 8, which have their lowest rated episodes labeled. Unsurprisingly, those two seasons were the lowest rated overall of the whole series. “Goodbye, Michael” and “Finale” are tied with the highest IMDb ratings of 9.7, with another fan favorite “Stress Relief” coming in second with a rating of 9.6.

Writers

I also wanted to look into who wrote the episodes and see if there were any particular writers who did the most episodes.

Mindy Kaling wrote 20 episodes (including “Goodbye, Michael” 💗), while BJ Novak wrote the second most at 15. Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg are next with 14. There were 10 episodes without writer data.

Other questions I wanted answered but didn’t/couldn’t make visualizations about:

• Highest rated episodes - who wrote them? Who was in them?
  • Mindy Kaling, Greg Daniels, and BJ Novak each wrote three of episodes with the highest IMDb ratings (>= 9). If the episode “Niagara” about Pam & Jim’s wedding is to be considered as two episodes, Mindy and Greg (who wrote both) would each have writted four.
• What is the average rating of each writer’s episodes?
  • Can be found in the table below:

writer	avg_rating	episode_count
Mindy Kaling	8.405000	20
B.J. Novak	8.486667	15
Gene Stupnitsky	8.385714	14
Lee Eisenberg	8.385714	14
Greg Daniels	8.575000	12
Paul Lieberstein	8.250000	12
Brent Forrester	8.410000	10
Justin Spitzer	8.360000	10
Jennifer Celotta	8.388889	9
Michael Schur	8.488889	9
Charlie Grandy	8.037500	8
Aaron Shure	8.033333	6
Daniel Chun	8.333333	6
Halsted Sullivan	8.033333	6
Warren Lieberstein	8.033333	6
Carrie Kemper	7.675000	4
Owen Ellickson	7.450000	4
Robert Padnick	8.125000	4
Allison Silverman	7.433333	3
Steve Hely	7.866667	3
Amelie Gillette	8.500000	2
Anthony Q. Farrell	8.700000	2
Dan Greaney	7.800000	2
Dan Sterling	7.900000	2
Graham Wagner	8.000000	2
Jon Vitti	7.850000	2
Jonathan Green	7.750000	2
Lester Lewis	8.300000	2
Nicki Schwartz-Wright	8.300000	2
Ricky Gervais	7.900000	2
Ryan Koh	8.200000	2
Steve Carell	9.000000	2
Gabe Miller	7.750000	2
Stephen Merchant	7.900000	2
Caroline Williams	8.800000	1
Jason Kessler	6.800000	1
Jonathan Huges	7.800000	1
Larry Willmore	8.200000	1
Peter Ocko	7.500000	1
Tim McAuliffe	8.000000	1