Characterizing Episode Titles
When I am geeking out about possible ideas for graphs (which is quite frequently), I often circle back to data on television episode titles. I see episode titles as a wealth of potential information: What cutesy naming conventions did the creators sneak into the titles for a given show (e.g. “The One With…” naming structure of Friends episode titles, the scientifically-themed The Big Bang Theory episodes, etc.)? What words or themes show up most often in the titles for a given show? Which characters most frequently find their way into episode titles? This last question intrigued me the most and led me down the rabbit hole of looking at this data for a few beloved television shows.
I wanted to focus my attention on a few television shows that had ensemble casts, specifically looking at character names in episode titles across these shows. The appearance of a character name in an episode title often (though not always) signifies an important role that the character is playing in one of the episode’s main storylines, so it can be a possible signal of which character(s) are crucial to the series overall. Admittedly, there are many ways to analyze which character(s) are most central to a show. While episode titles are just one piece of the puzzle, they are interesting data points nonetheless.
As such, I put together a few graphs looking at which characters appear most often in episode titles for their respective shows. My three graphs cover The Simpsons, Friends, & Saved by the Bell - three very different shows, but each one a classic in its own way.
The one with potentially the most robust data was The Simpsons. With 700+ episodes, there was definitely a sufficient sample size with which to analyze. In looking at the data for The Simpsons, the general story was not really all that shocking: Homer held the lead with 59 episodes, with Bart next at 47. Anecdotally, it does seem that these two characters are the ones most well-known to folks who have never seen a minute of The Simpsons and are likely the ones with the most merchandise and general pop culture visibility. Lisa and Marge are next on the list with the third-most and fourth-most episode titles, respectively. I would have liked to see Marge a bit higher (she clocks in at only 24 episode titles, compared to her husband’s 59!). Admittedly, balanced gender representation may not be The Simpsons’ strong suit, as highlighted by the fact that, according to this analysis done by Todd Schneider, female characters make up less than 25% of the total dialogue on the show; that number drops down to just 10% when looking at supporting characters alone.
While there were not a huge number of surprises in the The Simpsons data around its main cast of characters, the supporting characters offered some interesting results. Not shockingly, Mr. Burns appeared in the most episode titles among supporting characters, followed by Ned and Moe. However, I was very surprised to see Principal Skinner miss the cut-off for the graph, despite being one of the side characters who has appeared in the most episodes. In terms of episode titles, he has only been in two: “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song” and “Skinner’s Sense of Snow.” On the flip side, Apu was in more episode titles than I would have expected, given the fact that his total episode count is lower than several other side characters (including many that didn’t even make it onto this graph!). It seems like when Apu does appear, he is much more likely to be a focus of the episode and actually find his way into the episode’s title.
While it is totally unrelated to character names, as I was doing this analysis, I also took a just-for-fun look at what other words appeared in Simpsons episode titles the most often, and I was intrigued to see that “d’oh” has actually appeared in twelve episode titles! Maybe this is common knowledge to die-hard Simpsons fans, but I hadn’t realized how often the writers chose to squeeze “d’oh”-related puns into the episode names (a few of my favorite such punny episode titles include “Waverly Hills, 9-0-2-1-D’oh” and “D’oh Canada”).
Moving on to the next show that I analyzed, here is how the data panned out for the ten seasons of the sitcom Friends:
Rachel was the main character with the most episode title appearances with 27, followed closely behind by Ross with 24. Monica was the lowest of the group, with only eight episodes featuring her name.
As I looked over the results of the Friends graph, I was curious what drove such high results for both Ross and Rachel. My initial hypothesis was that it was perhaps driven by all those early season will-they-won’t-they plotlines featuring these two characters. We did in fact have episode titles like “TOW Ross’ New Girlfriend,” “TOW Ross Finds Out,” and “TOW Ross and Rachel Take a Break,” which all centered around the Ross/Rachel relationship dynamic. However, Rachel’s surge was also driven by a ton of Rachel-centric episodes in seasons eight and nine (“TOW Rachel Tells,” “TOW Rachel Has a Baby” (Parts 1 & 2), and “TOW Rachel’s Other Sister,” just to name a few).
As a huge Monica fan, I feel like she sometimes doesn’t get enough love, and that also seemed to come through in these episode titles. Monica’s name appears in only eight episode titles - just a third of Rachel’s episode title appearances! Furthermore, of the eight episodes featuring Monica’s name in the title, it is only in four of these that she doesn’t share the episode title with another character’s name (e.g. “TOW Ross and Monica’s Cousin”). There was quite a bit of Monica-centricity in the first season of Friends (she even was the first Friend to have her name featured in an episode title, with “TOW the Fake Monica”), but that focus died down a bit as other characters on the ensemble cast came into their own.
Finally, I took a look at Saved by the Bell episode data across both the original episodes and Saved by the Bell: The College Years. The sample set was a bit smaller than either The Simpsons or Friends, as there were only 105 episodes to analyze, but here are the results:
Zack Morris may be trash (according to the popular YouTube video series), but he was also the clear winner when looking at which ‘Saved by the Bell’ character’s name appeared in the most episode titles.
My first reaction in gathering the data for this graph was… where’s the love for the ladies? In all fairness, Zack Morris was the main character of the show, so seeing him lead the way on this graph made complete sense. As for the rest of the gang - I feel like it was pretty clearly an ensemble, although Screech did seem to receive a lot of memorable and quirky storylines, so seeing him with the second-most mentions was not a huge shocker.
What was most interesting to me was that Kelly, an iconic character in her own right, never got a single mention in an episode title until The College Years. Furthermore, Jessie’s only episode title mention was “Jessie’s Song” (yup… that’s the infamous caffeine pills episode), and Lisa’s only episode title mention was in the second episode of the show (“The Lisa Card”).
And for all the Saved by the Bell buffs out there who may be wondering - I debated about whether to include Good Morning, Miss Bliss episodes in here. For those unaware, Good Morning, Miss Bliss was the Disney Channel show that was retooled to become Saved by the Bell and sometimes ran in syndication as part of the overall Saved by the Bell franchise. However, it turns out that none of the Good Morning, Miss Bliss episodes actually included character names, so it was essentially a moot point.
Compared to Friends and The Simpsons, Saved by the Bell’s lower number of total episodes (and thus lower number of episodes with character names in the title) made this particular analysis a bit tougher. As such, as a follow-up, I’d be interested to do a deeper dive into Saved by the Bell episodes, not just by character names in the episode titles, but also by which characters had the most prominent storylines. My hypothesis is that Zack and Screech would still dominate, but I would hope (and maybe guess?) that we’d see a bit more representation from Kelly, Jessie, and Lisa.
I would love to hear suggestions of other television shows with lots of character-centric episode titles that might be interesting to do a similar analysis for. Feel free to share any requests with me in the comments below or via email!