Breaking Badly: The Declining Quality of TV Shows
Let me ask you this. Have you had that moment recently where you finish work, grab a snack, flop onto the couch, and then spend the next 45 minutes scrolling endlessly through Netflix, Stan, or whatever else, only to give up and re-watch the same show (mine is Seinfeld or Star Trek TNE) for the eighth time? Yeah, me too. It feels like we're drowning in options, but finding a genuinely good new show to get hooked on is getting harder and harder.
I started wondering if I was just becoming a grumpy TV snob, or if something had actually changed. Is the quality of television actually going downhill?
Being the data nerd I am, I decided to stop wondering and start investigating. I needed some proof to validate my frustration. I found a great starting point: Metacritic's official list of the "Best TV Shows of All Time". This felt like a good sample because it’s already supposed to be a curated list. I grabbed the Metascores (the averaged score from professional critics) and the User Scores (what we, the viewers, think) for shows released each year and plotted them on a graph - the plot only shows data 2010 onwards because I wanted recency in the data. The result was... well, see for yourself.
Let's break down what this chart is telling us, because it’s pretty revealing:
Critics vs. The People: A Tale of Two Timelines. The first thing that jumps out is the gap between the blue line (critics) and the red line (us). Professional critics consistently seem to rate shows higher than the general audience. Are they seeing some artistic genius that we're missing, or are they just a little detached from what makes a show purely enjoyable? It seems we're just a tougher crowd to please!
The Great Nosedive of 2020. Look closely at the red line around 2020. It doesn't just dip; it takes a proper cliff dive. This suggests that, according to viewers, the overall quality of even the "best" shows took a significant hit right around then. Was it the pandemic affecting production? The streaming wars prioritising quantity over quality? Whatever the cause, the data reflects a feeling many of us have had.
2025's Grim Report Card (So Far). If you thought things were improving, think again. Based on the data so far, this year is on track to have the lowest average user score since 2010. This isn't just a blip; it's starting to look like a trend. My frustration now feels completely justified.
And remember, this analysis is based on a curated list. I can only imagine what the data would look like if we included all the forgotten, bottom-of-the-barrel shows that get released and disappear without a trace.
It really feels like we've hit a point of "content fatigue." We're paying for more services than ever, but the return on investment—in the form of genuinely brilliant, memorable TV—seems to be dropping. Give me one incredible show over a hundred mediocre ones any day.