#sol explains things

Secondly, the co-EP position is a step on the ladder to EP. JDS’ last position was co-EP, ostensibly to assist and learn from a more experienced EP. He moves up into EP, and LM moves from head of storyboard to co-EP. Yet… she’s not moving into an EP position. She’s going back to directing. Same for JDS.

Third, somewhere between last November and maybe March, Hedrick either asked to be transferred off the project, or made known he was considering quitting. Whomever he told must’ve been pretty high on the food chain, since most companies will let a manager block if the person’s expertise is required. Yet JDS wasn’t able to, and you have to know by now JDS would’ve blocked out of pure spite.

In other words, there were probably two competing versions. JDS/LM, and Hedrick. That exec-ally weighed the options and determined Hedrick was the one worth keeping – and promoting up to EP, at that. I’d call it a signal to the other execs, but it’s more like a neon billboard thirty feet high. JDS and LM may’ve won the battle over VLD, but Hedrick undeniably won the war. 

I would expect somewhere around there, the EPs were informed there would be no sequel. The actual message may’ve been simpler: there may or may not be a continuation, but JDS and LM would definitely not be working on it. As professionals, they’d be expected to work out their contracts to the end, close up shop properly, and move to their next projects. Somewhere else. 

April is the traditional month for project-shopping and staffing-shopping, so at that time, DW probably saw no reason to be anything but professional, as well. Give the EPs enough time to put their names out on the market for that April crunch, knowing that most projects might not begin until winter or possibly the following year (especially for movies, which are planned much farther in advance than TV shows). 

That’s probably what they did, and until S7, their departure would’ve been more related to being bad managers, I’d expect. If you track their interviews around March and onwards, they just get worse. They weren’t taking the quiet professional departure expectation very well. After S7’s fiasco, DW forced them to quit all publicity, and even go radio-silent on twitter for nearly two months. That’s extreme, and it could be that their obedience was the only thing keeping them from being walked out the door right then.

There are different types of firing, after all. There’s firing due to malfeasance or sheer incompetence, when HR gets involved and someone’s escorted off the property. There’s firing someone because they turned out to just not be a good cultural fit, and then there’s firing someone because you think someone else could do the job better. The last two use “we don’t need this position anymore” or “the project is ending” as a polite fiction, but those avoid the tremendous paperwork required to fire a person. 

(For those of you not aware, most states you cannot just fire without any warning at all. Even in fire-at-will states, you must have their full paycheck plus any vacation payouts, to be handed over in one lump sum right then. You’ve got to close out your accounts, basically. That means documentation: showing there’s a fireable offense, written warnings, possibly a PIP, and then you can fire them. Skip a step, and the company’s open for an employment lawsuit. Much better on all involved to pressure someone to willingly head for the door.)

viewer feedback via IMDB

Here’s all eight seasons, with their respective episodes averaged into each season’s value. It’s... well. Look for yourself.

For comparison, I also did a breakout, where the full seasons got split into 6 and 7, so we're comparing apples to apples with S3-S6 split seasons. The  pattern is pretty consistent, between first-half and second-half, in that the season-half (or half-season) with the ‘finale’ is usually the one with the higher score. People like big finale set pieces, and those tend to get highest ratings. 

Unless, of course, you’re season 8. Then people hate you. 

S1, S2, S5/S6 (as a two-part season), even S7, all have higher ratings for the finale-containing half. And then there’s S8. I usually try to avoid a word as strong as hate, but... there’s really no other word that fits when the difference is that stark. People really, truly hated S8, in case the Rotten Tomatoes score wasn’t enough to tell you that. 

Given the scores for S8, I had to create a new, even lower level to see how the seasons broke out in terms of ratings per episode. Now we have great (green), good (blue), okay (yellow), poor (red), and... terrible (maroon). 

Yeah. So. There you go. Remember when I said last season that The Voltron Show had lost its title as worst episode ever, unseated by the Feud? 

Well, the Feud has been unseated... by ten episodes in S8. Take your pick, there’s plenty to choose from. As of the time of this posting, the current three worst episodes are The Zenith (5.2), Uncharted Regions (5.3) and Clear Day (5.5). I’d list the ten worst but then I’d just be listing all but three episodes from S8, anyway. 

However, it’s interesting to see the pattern form when you put the split-seasons back together. You can see how in some ways, there’s a certain level of audience approval gradually building, I guess as people got used to the story’s vagaries, err, style.

The number of ‘great’ episodes (8.6 or higher) slowly climbs; the number of ‘okay’ episodes gradually declines. S7 breaks that pattern, with only one ‘good’ episode, a few ‘okay’ and the rest at poor. S8, well. Yeah. 

Okay, moving along, to the IMDB traffic. This is another viewership-style stat, since a site’s page tends to get hit the most when people want to know about the show they’re watching. 

The color-dot indicates the ranking for the week of release. S6′s biggest interest was the week it released, which tells me people were going direct to IMDB on the day of release or the next day. When that happens, it seems to correlate with viewers coming to rate every episode, often with a strongly positive slant. They want to get right in there and make their happiness known. 

S7, the leap upwards came a week later, and the utter wildness of the rating (plus the delay) seems to be related more to rubbernecking and controversy, rather than viewers reporting in. S8 not only debuted lower than the previous two seasons, it also had a delayed reaction (indicating more controversy)... and it dropped right back down, in one of the biggest post-peak drops I’ve seen yet.

viewer feedback via twitter

About six hours after S8 appeared on Netflix, I caught this sentiment analysis of the twitter stream for ‘voltron’ as a keyword. This is from midnight California time (point of release) to about 6am California time.

This is the tracker where I can’t review sentiment, and judging from the other tracker I use, the negative is higher... but more negative than positive is never good, no matter the totals. 

Twelve hours after release, I checked the other tracker. Traffic overall was pretty low compared to previous seasons (and nowhere near what S7 had prompted, not even in the same county). Sentiment was running about 3:1 negative --- that is, for every for-VLD tweet, there were three against. 

(If it makes anyone feel better, #Allura was the center of the maelstrom, with Shiro a not-quite-close second. No, despite the impression on tumblr, people weren’t sitting back and accepting Allura’s fate.) 

But seriously, the response was otherwise pretty subdued. This is a general traffic pattern + predictive, for #voltron as of two days after release:

Which is pretty much... nothing at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d think no season had been released at all. It shouldn’t look that flat when a season drops, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be predicted to fall within the week. 

And back to the sentiment analysis, showing the trends over the first week and a half after release. It’s continued to fall in a semi-regular pattern, so this is a fair-enough idea of what it looks like. (It hasn’t changed much; it just keeps gradually dropping.) 

24 hours after release, negative-to-positive was nearly 1:1; since then, it’s stayed pretty consistent with two positive tweets for every one negative. Which, okay, you might say, two-thirds of people expressing an opinion seem to be somewhat okay with things, right? 

Except I think there might only be like a few hundred of them. I mean, the peak up there, of total mentions? Maybe 1200, total. Sure, it’s great that 510 people had something nice to say while 498 were unhappy, but... that’s practically three people in an empty auditorium, if you go by twitter’s usual traffic levels. 

And no one’s sticking around, either. Once again there was a post-release bump thanks to the simmering controversy... and then everyone hung up the phone, left the building, went on vacation, but they sure checked out. 

That leap upwards? That’s not the week of release. That’s the week after. The week of release (second bar from the right) is flat for just a bit, before spiking upwards. And just like the wiki-extrapolated viewership stats, it falls promptly afterwards. Like a rock. 

(I so want to crack a joke about rocks fall, everyone dies, but... #TooSoon?) 

There’s one last chart to explore, but this one’s a bit of a doozy to explain. Once you see what it’s saying, though, hopefully you’ll find it as interesting (and illuminating) as I do. I’ll leave it here for everyone to ponder, and get into it in the final S8 installment. 

viewership stats comparison

Here’s the first two weeks of all eight seasons. S8 is the dashed line. 

It started even with S7, and dropped quickly to run above S4 and S5... and by the second week, it’d dropped to run at the bottom rung with those two seasons. It took a hard hit on the holiday (much harder than the previous two years), then bounced up again above the tail threshold. 

Here’s the same numbers, but adjusted to put each season’s peak together. This gives a better sense of the season’s tail, compared to the rest. 

It’s cutting across the seasons. It’s not as severe as S1/S2 (which began at tremendous heights and thus had farther to fall), but it’s not as flat as S6 or S7. It seems to be falling in line with S4 and S5, for the most part. In case you’re unaware, those are not good seasons to duplicate, numbers-wise. 

A third way to compare the tails is to look at their heights and their lengths. For this one, I adjust to line up the ends of each season’s tail (that is, when its viewership stats drop below the 3K threshold for more than two days running). Right now I’ve got S8 a little out in front of S4 and S5, duration-wise, but unless some bombshell drops in the next few days, I expect the tail to be done by the end of this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday. 

Since the above charts go day-by-day, it makes it a little hard to get a sense of just how each week stacks up, comparatively. Here’s a chart that gives you that, comparing each week across all the seasons. 

(Note: we’re only one day into week 3, so S8′s value is artificially low, there.)

In the first week, it’s not too bad. S8 is lower than S7, showing some damage from the lack of hype, but overall it’s middle-of-the-pack, being 5th highest viewership for its first week. (Seriously, you can see the impact when DW’s marketing puts the hype machine in high gear, and this isn’t it.)

The second week is where the bottom drops out, and it falls to only a few thousand above S4 and S5. The real sign will be if it drops below both of those in the 3rd week; that’s when we could safely say S8 really is the worst season.

Now I’m going to flip the script and look at the rate of change between the weeks. It’s a bit premature for this since we need to be into the fourth week to really have enough data for rate of change, but what the hell. Why not. 

In a rate-of-change graph, a positive number (bar going upwards) means an increase, and a negative number (which all of these are) indicates a decrease. The longer the bar, the bigger the rate of change. 

I’ll use S1 as the example in plain english. These values are from day-of-release to the following thursday (one week of broadcast). Think of it as: if 100 people watched in the first week, 60 watched the 2nd week. That’s a -40% difference. There was a further drop moving into the 3rd, of 30%. Again with our simpler numbers: if 60 people watched the 2nd week, 40 watched in the 3rd week. 

The 3rd-to-4th week is the smallest by far, and it’s a sign something must’ve happened. Marketing launched a post-release campaign, or there was a con that got people excited. Whatever it was (idk, ask @ptw30, who tracks these things), it halted the drop-off, keeping the loss down to 11%. 

Now you can see why this chart shows the real meaning behind the one above: of all the seasons, only S3 had a bigger drop between its 1st and 2nd weeks. S8′s rate of change is -64%. That’s pretty bad for what should be the final season. Buzz should continue a little longer, as viewers process where and how the story concluded. 

(The second bar looks horrendous for S8, because it’s comparing the full 2nd week to only one day’s value for the 3rd week, so ignore that for now.)

engagement stats comparison

I’m going to hop over to look at how much people are talking about VLD. I track searches on three terms -- “Voltron Legendary Defender” (series title), “voltron” (term), and “Voltron” (series title). I average the values, chart ‘em, and we get this lovely picture, with the release week marked in the season’s color.

There’s one oddity I don’t think I’ve pointed out before: the level of engagement dropped slightly, between two weeks before S7 and the week of S7′s release. That’s... not how these things are supposed to work.   

There’s a particular detail I look at in this chart, and that’s the drop-off. Here’s a closeup of S3 through S8. The blocks in lighter green indicate where the 3rd week level of engagement remained above the week of release. The blocks in red indicate a drop in engagement. 

Every season has some chatter in its release week, followed by a jump in the second week. In S3, S5, and S6, the chatter remained above the release week level. In S4, S7, and S8, chatter drops off precipitously. 

In other words, inside of two weeks, the engagement levels have dropped to below that of the week of release. You could characterize this as the audience taking a week to react... and then dropping the topic. Something in S3 and S5 had audiences lingering a bit more. S6 is the ideal -- it didn’t just get people engaged, it kept them engaged, staying above the release-week levels all the way up to SDCC. 

demand analysis comparisons

Now let’s take a quick look at Parrot’s “demand analysis,” which is not actually viewership statistics. It’s how much people are talking, overall, on a variety of platforms. While Parrot isn’t about to release its algorithms, reading between the lines tells me it’s taking traffic on twitter, facebook, instagram, news sites, forums like reddit, and other platforms, to arrive at a single value. It does this for however many series, and then ranks the results. 

Here’s the historical track of VLD, with S8′s values added. 

Note: white circles are placeholders, because I couldn’t find data for every single week. Given the way demand cycles tend to work, it’s likely that VLD stayed on the chart in the gaps, so I put in placeholders for those weeks.

Yes, Tim, VLD has leapt up to sit at #7, but it debuted at #9, which it hasn’t done since S3. (S4 never charted at all.) Worse, S8′s second week -- and judging from previous behavior, its highest peak -- only just brought it up to the level of the opening weeks for S5, S6, and S7. 

What makes the demand analysis somewhat questionable as a point of pride is that this doesn’t track viewership but chatter. When you consider S7′s 2nd week was marred by significant controversy, and S8 prompted a rash of the same (if at a lower volume), I really can’t say that #7 ranking is necessarily a sign everyone is cuing up the show on Netflix. 

It just means there’s a lot of talk. It doesn’t necessarily qualify this talk as good. 

What drives home the dubiousness of this value (in terms of judging demand analysis as some sign of popularity) is the Business Insider article Tim linked to, which has this line:

Which I guess is somewhat more diplomatic than showing this: