Do TV Shows Really Decline?

Everyone knows television declines: shows arrive full of promise, spend their best ideas early, and coast downhill to a finish nobody asked for.

It's mostly false. Tested against 192,720 episode ratings from 3,234 shows, only about one in six clearly declines. The largest group barely moves at all, more shows rise than fall, and the moment the belief expects a collapse — the finale — is usually a show's peak.

• Your Favourite Show Probably Didn't Decline

  The full argument in plain language, with all nine figures, and one show that everyone remembers wrongly. Start here.

• The technical report

  The same findings in formal form: data, methods, results with confidence intervals, robustness checks, limitations and the full regression table. Also as a 16-page PDF.

• The decision log

  Every methodological choice, why it was made, and the traps caught along the way. The mistakes are in here too — including one found while building this page.

• The code

  The build, the analysis scripts, the figure source, and a test suite that recomputes every published number from the committed data.