What Television Shows Have the Most Podcasts?

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I listen to a lot of podcasts.

In a given week, I spend more hours listening to podcasts than watching television, movies or listening to music. Most of the podcasts I listen to are TV-related. In fact, almost every TV show I do watch, I listen to at least one and sometimes more podcasts related to that show. It’s a little crazy.

There’s tons of podcasts out there. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but estimates say that there are close to 200,000 different podcasts in iTunes. The TV / Film category is a very popular section for podcasts, many covering the same shows.

With so many podcasts out there, it made me think about the age old question: What television show has the most podcasts?

If you care about the answer to this ancient question, then you’re going to love today’s infographic.

Note: Akiva Wienerkur from The Seinfeld Recap Podcast actually suggested this idea :-).

Collecting the Data

It turns out it’s not super easy to programmatically search podcasts. The iTunes search is pretty garbage and Apple’s online directory doesn’t directly support search.

What I ended up doing was using Apple’s online directory to narrow down which shows are likely to have a lot of podcasts. I started by collecting a list of popular TV shows and shows that I know have mass appeal.

I discovered that I can search Apple’s online directory by tweaking the querystring parameters. Apple allows you to navigate the directory alphabetically by passing in the starting letter in the querystring of the page’s URL. Turns out that you can actually use larger search strings than just one letter and Apple’s page will only return the matching results.

For example: https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/podcasts-tv-film/id1309?mt=2&letter=Better%20Call%20Saul, will only return podcasts with Better Call Saul in the title.

Now this will not find all podcasts for a given show, but I was able to use this as a way to filter out shows that had little coverage and point out shows that likely had lots of podcasts. Once I obtained a smaller list of results, I hand checked the actual numbers by manually searching iTunes. I excluded general entertainment shows that may cover a particular show once in a while and instead focused on podcasts mostly dedicated to the show.

Why these shows?

The big surprise for me in the list of top 5 of most podcasted shows is Orphan Black. I haven’t seen the show myself, but it by far has the smallest viewership, smallest social media presence and is the newest show out of the top 5. It actually makes me feel like I need to go check out what all the fuss is about. 
 
One other thing that strikes me about the four out of the top 5 is that they are all shows with companion material. The Walking Dead and Orphan Black started as comic books, Game of Thrones is a popular book series, and Once Upon a Time brings together tons of different fairy tales that most people are familiar with. 
 
The outlier is reality TV show Survivor. However, Survivor is an extremely rich show for analysis and discussion. Also, the stars of Survivor are basically regular people, so they are much more likely to come onto a podcast to talk about their experiences than say Peter Dinklage and Kit Harrington.

 

The contestants make up a great community of micro-celebrities. Many are on Twitter with decent followings and they have an incentive to promote PR and media covering the show because it is essentially a way to promote themselves. They are known but not so famous as to be above actively participating in the community.

 
I also think there’s likely a correlation between how many super fans a show has and how many podcasts there are for that show. It’s generally the fans of these shows that are creating these podcasts. Few podcasters do it as a full time job, it’s a labor of love. 
 
Further, the casual viewer is not likely going to spend extra hours beyond the actual TV show thinking, analyzing and listening to podcasts about it. Shows like Big Bang Theory, CSI, and NCIS are cable shows that are very popular, but I don’t believe they foster their own micro-community that’s seeking to do a deep dive into the latest show. 
 
The fanatics listening to 6 hours of Survivor podcasts each week for a 42 minute TV show, as viewers, are probably more akin to Trekkies than folks channel surfing on a Wednesday night. 

My final say

I hope you enjoyed that. It’s possible I missed a popular show as my approach was not 100% exhaustive of every TV program. If you have questions or want me to take a look at a particular show, let me know. 
 
If you have your own independent thoughts about why these shows make for popular podcasting, let me know in the comments.

About the author

Sean Falconer

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By Sean Falconer

Sean Falconer

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I write about programming, developer relations, technology, startup life, occasionally Survivor, and really anything that interests me.