Looking into the Black Mirror

When I started writing on this blog, a recurring theme I considered was a constant information overdose. This extends to the impenetrable thickets that is the content of streaming platforms, who carry more than anyone can watch. Hence review aggregation tools like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic can be helpful in avoiding Razzies.

Anthology shows like Black Mirror, which recently received the release of its seventh season on Netflix, are particular suitable to pruning individual episodes from your watchlist. Only recently I discovered the docyx aka IMDb Table project on github, which shows all episodes of a given series in a kind of heatmap coloring based on its IMDb ratings.

Previously, I had read some articles on the rankings of Black Mirror episodes and started occasional viewing by loosely following these recommendations. Triggered by the release of season 7, I reviewed my watching and reconciled it with the ratings heatmap¹.

Turns out I had not watched episode 4, season 2, White Christmas until now, which takes the top spot in the IMDb ranking with a value of 9.1.

I guess my track record for The Simpsons is much better. And for what it’s worth, one of my all-time favorites, The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson scores a solid 9.0 on IMDb.