How Many Episodes of a TV Show Should You Watch Before Quitting?

Daniel Parris is a lover of data and pop culture. He combined his interests on his Substack, Stats Significant, where he uses cold hard numbers to answer the toughest questions, like which old movies have withstood the test of time.

He also investigates things like what age people stop discovering new music. And in his most recent pop culture statistical analysis, he did a fascinating dive into how many episodes you should watch before you officially quit on a TV show.

Some of the best TV shows of all time get off to a slow start. One of the most egregious examples I can think of is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The first three seasons—26 episodes each—can be balled up and thrown away, with a handful of exceptions.

The next four seasons are one banger episode after another with only a handful of turds scattered throughout. Not everyone has the time to sit through three shitty seasons before getting to the good fourth one.

To scientifically find out the precise moment you should give up on a show that hasn’t captured you yet, Parris used IMDb ratings to find out that most shows need 6 to 7 episodes to hit the level of quality it will sustain throughout the rest of its run. Starting a new show can be daunting, especially if it’s an old-school network show like the previously mentioned TNG or a traditional network sitcom like Friends that ran for 236 episodes.

When Should You Stop Watching a TV Show?

According to Parris’ calculations, the first six episodes of Friends fall below the show’s overall IMDb rating average. But once you hit episode seven, the quality starts to rise, and the IMDb rating starts to level off. By the way, the average score for episodes of Friends is 8.34, which is pretty damn high, to begin with, so even the worst of the early episodes will entertain.

Things start to get a little more complicated when you get into the modern streaming era, a time when seasons for all shows are shorter, thus not providing the creators enough breathing room to figure themselves out. I’ll use TNG as an example yet again: it got more episodes during its “slow to start” years than most modern shows get in their entire runs, from pilot to series finale, if they’re even so lucky to make it that far. In that time, TNG learned how to be one of the greatest TV shows ever made.

Parris then tries to tackle a thornier question: how long do you stick with the show that’s clearly struggling? His research suggests that once a show hits six consecutive underwhelming episodes, the likelihood of recovery decreases significantly. Shows like Game of Thrones and House of Cards never regained their initial quality after dipping below their standard, or when they “jumped the shark,” as he explains it.  

I’m not a fan of the term “jumped the shark.” To me, it symbolizes a singular moment so absurd, so stupid, so outside the parameters of what the show has been that it simply cannot recover. The writers have lost sight of what made the show good and are now dipping into self-parody.

Most shows that are good and then get bad don’t have a singular moment of absurdity that tipped the scales. They just lose steam and peter out, like an aging professional athlete who was once a star. Sadly, we have yet to come up with a catchy “jumped the shark”-style term for that.

As Parris points out, some viewers stick with shows even after the decline. Viewers of How I Met Your Mother stuck with the show even after IMDb ratings seem to agree that it lost some steam in the back half of its nine seasons.

But that damn central mystery, baked into the title of the show, kept people coming back for some semblance of resolution. What an evil trick that was.