Forecasting the Success of Television Series using Machine Learning

Television is an ever-evolving multi-billion-dollar industry. The success of a television show in an increasingly technological society is a vast multi-variable formula. The art of success is not just something that happens, but is studied, replicated, and applied. Hollywood can be unpredictable regarding success, as many movies and sitcoms that are hyped up and promise to be a hit end up being box office failures and complete disappointments. In current studies, linguistic exploration is being performed on the relationship between Television series and target community of viewers. Having a decision support system that can display sound and predictable results would be needed to build confidence in the investment of a new TV series. The models presented in this study use data to study and determine what makes a sitcom successful. In this paper, we use descriptive and predictive modeling techniques to assess the continuing success of television comedies: The Office, Big Bang Theory, Arrested Development, Scrubs, and South Park. The factors that are tested for statistical significance on episode ratings are character presence, director, and writer. These statistics show that while characters are indeed crucial to the shows themselves, the creation and direction of the shows pose implication upon the ratings and therefore the success of the shows. We use machine learning based forecasting models such as linear regression, K Nearest Neighbors, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Decision Tree and Forests, Neural Network, and Facebook Prophet, to accurately predict the success of shows. The models represent a baseline to understanding the success of a television show and how producers can increase the success of current television shows or utilize this data in the creation of future shows. Due to the many factors that go into a series, the empirical analysis in this work shows that there is no one-fits-all model to forecast the rating or success of a television show. However, because the variables are statistically significant, they are still able to optimize and affect the rating positively.