Analysis and Findings from Investigating Guest Stars in The Office

The Office is an American Mockumentary sitcom television series that depicts the everyday lives of office employees in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.

This sitcom series broadcasted from March 2005 to May 2013, with nine seasons.

Here, we will take a look at a dataset of The Office episodes, and try to

understand how the popularity and quality of the series varied over time.

Before we get started, just want to say that this is part of Data Insight's Data Science Program on Data Camp.

Now let's get right into it.

To do so, we will use the following dataset: datasets/office_episodes.csv, which was downloaded from Kaggle .

This dataset contains information on a variety of characteristics of each episode. In detail, these are: datasets/office_episodes.csv

• episode_number: Canonical episode number.

• season: Season in which the episode appeared.

• episode_title: Title of the episode.

• description: Description of the episode.

• ratings: Average IMDB rating.

• votes: Number of votes.

• viewership_mil: Number of US viewers in millions.

• duration: Duration in number of minutes.

• release_date: Airdate.

• guest_stars: Guest stars in the episode (if any).

• director: Director of the episode.

• writers: Writers of the episode.

• has_guests: True/False column for whether the episode contained guest stars.

• scaled_ratings: The ratings scaled from 0 (worst-reviewed) to 1 (best-reviewed).

To begin we need to import this two libraries pandas and matplotlib

import pandas as pd 
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt 

Then after we read in the CSV as a Data Frame. Pulling out just the first five rows.
office_df = pd.read_csv('datasets/office_episodes.csv', parse_dates=['release_date'])

office_df.head()

Output:

We want to create a color scheme list , Iterate over rows of office_df to input color name to the colors list and then again Inspect the first 10 values in the list.

Here you go,

• A color scheme reflecting the scaled ratings (not the regular ratings) of each episode, such that:

  • Ratings < 0.25 are colored "red"

  • Ratings >= 0.25 and < 0.50 are colored "orange"

  • Ratings >= 0.50 and < 0.75 are colored "lightgreen"

  • Ratings >= 0.75 are colored "darkgreen"

colors = []

for lab, row in office_df.iterrows():if row['scaled_ratings'] < 0.25:colors.append("red")
elif 0.25 <= row['scaled_ratings'] < 0.50:colors.append("orange")
elif 0.50 <= row['scaled_ratings'] < 0.75:colors.append("lightgreen")
else:colors.append("darkgreen")

colors[:10]

Output:

['orange',
 'lightgreen',
 'orange',
 'orange',
 'lightgreen',
 'orange',
 'lightgreen',
 'orange',
 'lightgreen',
 'lightgreen']

Creating a sizing system;

episodes with guest appearances have a marker size of 250

episodes without are sized 25

for ind, row in office_df.iterrows():
if row['has_guests'] == False:
    sizes.append(25)
else:
    sizes.append(250)

Inspecting the first 10 values in the list

sizes[:10]

Output:

[25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 250, 25, 25, 250, 250]

Importing matplotlib.pyplot under its usual alias and to create a figure;

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

For ease of plotting, adding our lists as columns to the Data Frame

office_df['colors'] = cols
office_df['sizes'] = sizes

Here we can split data into guest and non_guest DataFrames and aslo set the figure size and plot the style.

non_guest_df = office_df[office_df['has_guests'] == False]guest_df = office_df[office_df['has_guests'] == True]

plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [11, 7]
plt.style.use('fivethirtyeight')

Creating two scatter plots with the episode number on the x axis, and the viewership on the y axis

plt.scatter(x=non_guest_df.episode_number,y=non_guest_df.viewership_mil, \ 
  c=non_guest_df['colors'], s=25)
               
plt.scatter(x=guest_df.episode_number,y=guest_df.viewership_mil, \   
   c=guest_df['colors'], marker='*', s=250)               

Now we will plot the figure as below with

• A title, "Popularity, Quality, and Guest Appearances on the Office"

• An x-axis label "Episode Number"

• A y-axis label "Viewership (Millions)"

plt.title("Popularity, Quality, and Guest Appearances on the Office", fontsize=28)

plt.xlabel("Episode Number", fontsize=18)

plt.ylabel("Viewership (Millions)", fontsize=18)

Showing the plot;

plt.show()

Ouput:

Finally, as we want to show the most-watched Office episode,

# The highest view
highest_view = max(office_df["viewership_mil"])

# Filter the Dataframe row that has the most watched episode
most_watched_dataframe = office_df.loc[office_df["viewership_mil"] == highest_view]

# Top guest stars that were in that episode
top_stars = most_watched_dataframe[["guest_stars"]]top_stars

Output:

Thank you for reading!!

You can find the source code here