Hello, and welcome to round one of the speculative television tournament!
First, some good news for fans of shows from the play-in round, as I made a couple of mistakes when I was initially sorting through the nominations, as I entered one show twice and only had 63 entries instead of 64, which means three shows moved forward from the play-in: Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Justice League Unlimited, and Fraggle Rock.
Second, with the field set at 64, here are some stats on the entries:
- Unsurprisingly, we’re dominated by American shows, with 56 entries. And that’s being conservative, since at least two of the non-American shows are co-productions with American studios. There are a scattering of British shows, and one each from Japan, Australia, and Canada.
- By decade of debut, the 2010s are in the lead, which I’d bet is a combination of recency bias and streaming services expanding the field of genre television in the last ten years. The full breakdown:
- 1950s – 1
- 1960s – 3
- 1970s – 1
- 1980s – 5
- 1990s – 11
- 2000s – 11
- 2010s – 28
- 2020s – 4
- I also broke down each entry by genre as best I good, with the understanding that some of these are a little hard to classify. Here, science fiction takes the lead, at around 40% of the field. Again, the full breakdown:
- Science Fiction – 26
- Fantasy – 13
- Superhero – 13
- Horror – 10
- Anthology – 2