Description

The visualization above shows TV series that mention opioids painkillers, organized by genre and divided between the ones that treat the topic occasionally and the ones in which it is recurrent. It is possible to observe, first of all, that opioids are mentioned in many different series, most of them belonging to the crime, drama and comic genre. In the crime series opioids are mentioned in a more occasional way – probably as they are used as an ‘excuse’ for building the plot of only one episode-, as much as in the comic ones – probably as opioids are mainly contained in single sketches-. In drama series, instead, those medicines are more often a recurrent topic. This is due to the fact that in this shows the addicted is often an important character –as shown in Protocol 6- and his path through addiction/recovery is followed during multiple episodes. It is possible to say that drama series provide a closer look to addiction while the presence in other genres reflects how those medicines have penetrated pop-culture.

We decided to analyse the presence of the topic in TV series as it could reflect which are the common places about opioid addicted/addiction and which is the imaginary people are exposed to as viewers. It is, in other words, a way to explore how addiction is perceived and commonly presented.

To develop this Protocol we first had to figure out how to select the TV series to analyse. After the failure of the attempt to search the presence of the topic in most popular Netflix shows and on other platforms, we decided to use the website TVFANATIC. Through this platform we have been able to search the words ‘opioid’, ‘painkiller’, main opioids generic and commercial names in TV series episodes titles, plots, reviews and in most famous quotes of characters. From this research, we retained the titles of TV series (season, episode and year of episode) in which those words appear. After we categorize them by genre taking into account the information given on Wikipedia. In the visualization, the selected and categorized TV series are shown and the importance of the topic is decided according to the number of episodes (one or multiple) where opioids are mentioned.

Protocol

Data

Data Source: DensityDesign

Timestamp: November 2018

View Data (500Kb)

The dataset contains a list of categories of tv series genres divided in two columns, one for the number of series with occasional opioid citation and the other for recurrent citations.