Mexico vs. Venezuela: Battle of the Telenovelas
Something that I don’t think we’ve covered in class, and something I think would be interesting to investigate is the critical acclaim of the types of dramas we have covered in class. More specifically I want to investigate the critical acclaim of the telenovelas in two of Latin America’s biggest telenovela markets, Mexico and Venezuela. To do this I will compare the mean IMDb rating of the top 50 telenovelas from each country. Keep in mind the figures below were calculated by hand so there could be some human error.
Mean IMDb rating of the top 50 rated telenovelas in Mexico: 8.280
Mean IMDb rating of the top 50 rated telenovelas in Venezuela: 8.498
There are most likely many reasons why Venezuela has a higher mean IMDb score in this top 50 range than the telenovelas from Mexico. For one, IMDb aggregates its ratings from both critics and fans alike. This could have several impacts on the data. We do not know how many people rated each individual show and it will not be even across the board, with it pretty likely there is some overrepresentation bias in the ratings for both countries telenovelas. I also only measured the top 50 telenovelas from each country, which could mean that one country or the other might have a higher volume of highly rated shows.
All of this aside, the sample size for each is above 30, meaning the samples are approximately normal, so it could be assumed that the sample population of telenovelas from each country can be accurately used to assess critical acclaim and make comparisons. So it is safe to assume that a telenovela produced in Venezuela (before Chavez and Maduro) will be more likely to have a higher level of acclaim than one produced in Mexico based on the metric of IMDb ratings.
There are probably some other reasons culturally or otherwise for this phenomenon. For one, Mexico has a larger catalogue which could mean shorter production times, cheaper production values which could marginally or otherwise impact quality. Venezuela was also later to the game of producing telenovelas than Mexico, and when you don’t have to pioneer an art form you can learn from the mistakes of others and build on what’s already been done. Telenovelas are also virtually dead today in Venezuela, meaning there are less of them being produced these days due to government overreach, defunding, and general mismanagement so Venezuela’s population of shows will remain smaller than Mexico’s giving them less room for critical failure.
I’m sure there are things that I did not cover that could explain these differences but this is just what I’ve postulated. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Mac,
ReplyDeleteComparing the average IMDb scores between Mexico and Venezuela is an interesting idea and I think it is a great jumping off point for further research. For example, you could add more countries into the comparison (Brazil or even the US would be fascinating inclusions). You might also compare ratings and scores from other locations, for example, Rotten Tomatoes. Seeing a table of all the major novela-producing countries along with their ratings from different sources would allow for captivating discussions on why these differences are present. This table would also provide overall basic insight into the statistics of telenovelas. I would love to see you pursue this subject further!
In your comparison of Mexico and Venezuela's IMDb ratings though, I am a bit confused. They have quite similar ratings - rounded up, Mexico has 8.3 and Venezuela leads with 8.5. Honestly, in my eyes this is not a drastic difference, so I am a bit confused why you only compared these two scores. However, your possible explanation for why Venezuela has a higher score seems very logical and correct to me. I agree that the quicker production of Mexican novelas would clearly result in lesser quality, whereas the low amount of Venezuelan novelas statistically allows for less flaws. I wonder if the Venezuelan government has some control over the production/ratings as well, leading to a higher IMDb score? That's simply my speculation on why this difference presents itself, though. I am sure there's complex socioeconomic and political reasoning behind the ratings difference, and I would love to look into it further.
Overall, I really enjoyed the subject of your discussion post. The mathematical and statistical side of telenovelas and TV in general is not one I typically contemplate, so this post was fun to read and speculate on. I hope you continue to compare many types of ratings in the future, maybe even some from Turkish or Korean dramas! Have a great evening!
Thanks so much,
Noah
This is a really creative and really interesting post that I can tell shows a lot of your personality and interests to how you think about telenovelas. I loved the statistical analysis between the imdb scores of both Venezuelan and Mexican novelas, and how you even established normal sample sizes for both populations. I think you could have gone farther and maybe even given medians, ranges, or even standard deviations of both of your data sets. You mentioned that because both sample sizes are normal, that your findings are safe to assume with Venezuelan novelas having more acclaim than Mexican novelas, but wouldn't you have to run a z-test for that? I think that could have been really cool and made the analysis even more interesting (I'm a bit of a math nerd). It was cool how you considered bias and potential errors with the data as imdb has a mixed rating system.
ReplyDeleteAs for your reasoning on why Venezuelan novelas have higher acclaim, I would say that your explanation seems really accurate! I think that seeing what Mexico has done with their shows (what works and what doesn't) as well as a lot of general talent in writers within Venezuela probably greatly contributes to the higher score. Also, I thought about something Dr. A mentioned in a lecture how Venezuelans have to rewatch old telenovelas because modern ones aren't as good, which may play a factor into rating those higher as they are being compared to much worse, modern ones.