Afraid you missed out on one of the best movies, TV shows, books or albums of the year? Don’t worry, the critics at [insert any given publication here] probably have your back. In an age when websites need clicks and yearly roundups are a low-cost way to drive traffic, these lists seem more ubiquitous than ever.
Last year, I noticed that these lists had a lot of overlap, and I was curious about whether they were as uniform as they seemed — if they all tell us to watch the same movies and TV shows, do we really need so many of them? So I analyzed the differences (or, more often, the similarities) of the lists at 30 national publications. In 2014, I discovered that people really loved “Boyhood,” “Transparent” and “Lila” by Marilynne Robinson. (Speaking of which, I still need to get around to watching “Boyhood” at some point.)
I did the same aggregation this year, surveying 30 top national and Web publications for their critics’ picks. 2015’s most-listed movie: “Carol,” which topped the best movies lists with mentions on 18 of 22 (82 percent) lists.
In the TV world, “Master of None” and “Fargo” tied for most mentions — both were on 20 of 24 (83 percent) lists for best TV shows.
For books, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” won by a mile, with mentions on 16 of 20 (80 percent) lists.
The only unanimous critical pick came from the “best albums of 2015” lists, where Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly” was mentioned on each of the 19 lists.
This data set also tells us something about the publications themselves. Which had the most original lists? (Bloomberg and The New Yorker, among others.) Which list stuck to the items that more or less everyone can agree on? (TV Guide, get a bit braver!)
Of the publications that had lists in at least three of the four categories , The Daily Beast had the most similarities to everyone else — 74 percent of items mentioned on its lists were also mentioned at least four times elsewhere; The Guardian U.S. was the least like other publications, with 35 percent of its listed items on at least four other lists.
Overall, about 55 percent of the shows, movies, albums and books were on at least five lists, meaning there isn’t as much overlap as it may seem. You can basically flip a coin to determine whether any given item on any of these “best of 2015” lists is one that critics agree on, or if it just suits that particular critic’s taste.
18 of the 30 did.