Comparing the Centralities of Core Characters in Three Sitcoms Ana L.C

Revista de Sistemas de Informação da FSMA n. 27 (2021) pp. 54-66 http://www.fsma.edu.br/si/sistemas.html Comparing the Centralities of Core Characters in Three Sitcoms Ana L.C. Bazzan, Instituto de Informática – UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil Abstract—The area of network science provides tools to While a previous work [10] has proposed a similar analyze the structure of the social network of characters comparison, that work covers only a subset of episodes. underlying the plot of narratives such as sitcoms. It can The contributions of the present paper are to extend also help to detect roles and characters that are prominent. In this paper, three sitcoms – Seinfeld, Friends, and The Big that comparison to cover the majority of the seasons (if Bang Theory– are analyzed, whose plots are centered on a not all) of the three aforementioned sitcoms. Another couple of friends who face typical daily situations. For such contribution is to collect data about the ratings of the analysis, characteristic measures of their social networks shows and analyze whether they correlate with a measure are used, as well as measures that compute the importance of the distribution of degrees. of single characters, when interacting with others in the network. The contributions of the present paper are mani- This paper is organized as follows: the next section fold. For one side, it analyzes social networks that resemble discusses other works that deal with tools of network social relations among young people. A second contribution science for quantifying some aspects of storytelling. Sec- is towards extending previous studies that compare those tions III to V give brief descriptions of the three shows. sitcoms. Lastly, this paper also investigates whether there is Section VI discusses the structure of the social networks a correlation between the respective ratings and a measure of the distribution of degrees. of the shows, from a global network perspective. A perspective centered on the centrality of the respective Index Terms—Social networks, Centrality measures, Sit- characters is the focus of Section VII. Section VIII com. presents some concluding remarks. I. INTRODUCTION II. STORYTELLING AND SOCIAL NETWORKS What makes some sitcoms more popular than others? Apart from obvious candidate answers such as plot, In this section, the benefits of using tools of social cast, and cinematography, the area of network science networks to analyze the structure of well-known sitcoms also tries to contribute to answering that question by and other shows is briefly discussed. The reader is providing tools to analyze the structure of the network of referred to [19] for more details, as well as pointers to characters underlying the plot (the social network of the related works. show’s plot), as well as to detect roles that are prominent. Beveridge and Shan [11] used network theory to in- Thus, analyzing individual shows or comparing simi- vestigate who is/are the most central characters in Game lar ones seem to make sense, as it was done in [19] (a of Thrones. This popular show was also the target of: survey paper on this subject), as well as in [9], [10], [20], [29] and [18]. The latter computed the importance [11], [16], [17], [18]. of characters and used them as features or input to a In this paper, three sitcoms – Seinfeld, Friends, and machine learning algorithm in order to predict how likely The Big Bang Theory – are analyzed, whose plots are to die some characters are. centered on a couple of friends who face typical daily The three sitcoms featured in the present work have situations for those who live in a big city, even if one also received attention in past works: [30] (featuring show is known to be about nothing. For such analysis, Seinfeld), [13] (The Big Bang Theory), while Friends typical measures of their social networks are used, as was the focus of several works, as follows. Nan et well as measures that compute the importance of single al. [22] used a deep learning model for face recog- characters, when interacting with others in the network. nition in Friends’s videos in order to distinguish the Examples of such social networks appear in figures 1 to six main characters and establish the social network 7. between them. Albright [3] calculated the frequency of 54 characters’ shared plotlines, throughout the entire show, drawing conclusions on who are the most independent characters. Analyzing the importance of the characters is also the goal of [28]. Seth [27] used the transcripts of Friends available in the Internet, aiming at shedding light on the question about who stood out among the character of the show. The following parameters for each character were accounted for: number of lines and words spoken, number of screen appearances, appearances in some locations, and mentions in the episode title. A similar goal underlies the work in [8], [9], [10], where the importance of each character is investigated using various centrality measures. In particular, in [10] four sitcoms are quantitatively compared, showing that despite an intuition that they are very similar, such intuition cannot be backed by the centrality measure values. Fig. 1: Seinfeld: Network of Characters (pilot). Still focusing on Friends, [17], [16] compared differ- ent extraction methods using both manually extracted and automated datasets, providing evidence that automated methods of data extraction as, e.g., machine learning, are reliable for most (though not all) analyses. Regarding The Big Bang Theory, a recent paper [13] has focused on the dialogues of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, using a concentration measure to analyze dominance in the dialogues. The authors show a declining trend in the concentration of dialogues over the seasons. Their main finding is that there is a high correlation between the decline in that concentration and a decline in popularity of the show. This has inspired the investigation that is discussed ahead (Section VI), which concludes that, when one measures the concentration by means of entropy of degree distribution, one no longer observes such correlation. Fig. 2: Seinfeld: Network of Characters (episode Other works, dealing with extraction of interactions with big clique). (from video, transcripts, etc.) are for instance [21], [12]. These works all investigate specific aspects of individual shows; however only a few aim at comparing them. Among them, we can highlight the following: (i) [31], where the authors have analyzed the character networks of Stargate and Star Trek and found that their structures are similar; (ii) [10], as aforementioned. Hence, there is a gap in the literature regarding comparison of shows that, intuition says, look similar. III. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIAL NETWORK OF Seinfeld Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld for NBC, Seinfeld features Jerry Seinfeld (himself), his school friend George Costanza (Jason Alexander), his former girlfriend Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Fig. 3: Seinfeld: Network of Characters of episode and his neighbor across the hall Cosmo Kramer "The Serenity Now". 55 (Michael Richards). The show is set predominantly in an apartment building in Manhattan. The “show about nothing”—as often described—began without much fuss in 1989, with a pilot and only 4 other episodes in Season 1, while Season 2 had 12 episodes. After, Season 3 had 23 episodes1 and, after that, it became one of the biggest comedy hits in the U.S. The stories are about the minutiae of daily life, as experienced by four thirty-something single New Yorkers who had no family or other strong responsibilities and hence, allow room for obsessions about small things such as getting a table in a Chinese restaurant, queuing, renting an apartment, finding the car in a parking garage, buying a new suit, getting together with friends, etc. Since its beginning, Seinfeld broke several sitcom Fig. 4: Friends: Network of Characters (Season Four). structures and formulas such a central romantic relationship: Larry David is credited with refusing to focus on a romantic relationship formula between Jerry and Elaine. Rather, episodes would follow a proper structure: the story thread is presented at the beginning, normally involving the characters starting in their own situations; this is then followed by rapid scene-shifts between plot lines bringing the stories together. Thus the characters’ stories intertwine in each episode, and, despite the sep- arate plot lines, the narratives maintain the ties among the four characters. This means a change over the usual A and B plotlines. Also, Seinfeld departed from family and group sitcom formulas of its time, in that the four main characters were not related by family or work connections, but remain close friends throughout the episodes. Fig. 5: Friends: Network of Characters (Thanksgiving Another characteristic of Seinfeld is that a higher episodes). than usual number of secondary characters recur and, moreover, play an important role, at least at single episode level. In fact, as discussed ahead, the number of not take part). The latter depicts the social network of an characters throughout the episodes in Seinfeld is much episode with the maximum clique (Episode 14 in Season higher than the other sitcoms. These characteristics have 7, where a bunch of characters living in the same condo obvious consequences for the social network structure of as Jerry’s parents take place in a meeting of the condo’s the show; characters in Seinfeld have the lowest average board of the directors). The network in Fig. 3 is closer degree (number of interactions they are involved in), a to a typical one. clear consequences of the aforementioned separated but Seinfeld tied plotlines. It might be also that the scenes in IV. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIAL NETWORK OF are longer and thus there are less connections.

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