The Incomparable Network

All-time stats

All shows on the network, first and last episode timeline.

incomparable_episodes |>
  group_by(show) |>
  mutate(
    d_min = min(date),
    d_max = max(date)
  ) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = reorder(show, d_min))) +
  geom_errorbar(aes(ymin = d_min, ymax = d_max),
    width = .5, linewidth = 1, alpha = .85, color = inc_navy
  ) +
  coord_flip() +
  scale_y_continuous(
    transform = c("date", "reverse"),
    breaks = scales::breaks_width("2 years"),
    minor_breaks = scales::breaks_width("1 year"),
    labels = scales::label_date("%Y")
  ) +
  theme_incomparable() +
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(hjust = 1)) +
  labs(
    x = NULL, y = "First to last episode date",
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "Show timelines: first and last known episode dates.",
    caption = caption
  )

All episodes since 2011.

incomparable_episodes |>
  count(show) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = reorder(show, n), y = n)) +
  geom_col(fill = inc_navy) +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_incomparable() +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "All episodes since 2011, by show.",
    x = NULL, y = "Episodes",
    caption = caption
  )

incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = duration, fill = show)) +
  geom_point(shape = 21, color = "white", alpha = .6, size = 1.8, stroke = 0.2) +
  scale_y_time(breaks = hms::hms(minutes = seq(0, 300, 30))) +
  scale_fill_viridis_d(option = "rocket", guide = "none", end = 0.85) +
  theme_incomparable() +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "Episode duration over time; one fill per show.",
    x = NULL, y = "Duration (HH:MM)",
    caption = caption
  )

incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  count(year, month) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = month, y = n)) +
  geom_point(color = inc_navy, alpha = .8, size = 1.2) +
  facet_wrap(~year, nrow = 1, scales = "free_x") +
  theme_incomparable() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, size = rel(0.5))) +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "Episodes per month since 2011.",
    x = NULL, y = "Episodes",
    caption = caption
  )

Episode duration by the 15 people most frequently appearing on the network:

top_15 <- incomparable |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  count(person) |>
  top_n(15) |>
  pull(person)

Selecting by n

incomparable |>
  filter(person %in% top_15) |>
  group_by(person) |>
  mutate(mean_duration = mean(duration)) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = reorder(person, mean_duration), y = duration)) +
  geom_point(alpha = .4, position = position_jitter(height = 0, width = .25),
             color = inc_navy, size = 1) +
  geom_boxplot(alpha = .35, outlier.alpha = 0,
               color = inc_dark, fill = palette_incomparable[["cream"]]) +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_incomparable() +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "Episode duration for the 15 most frequently appearing people.",
    x = NULL, y = "Duration (HH:MM)",
    caption = caption
  )

2026 hosts and guests

incomparable |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  count(person, role) |>
  spread(role, n) |>
  replace_na(list(guest = 0, host = 0)) |>
  mutate(total = guest + host) |>
  arrange(desc(total)) |>
  datatable(style = "bootstrap", colnames = c("Person", "Guest", "Host", "Total Appearances"))

I opted to leave out the plot for that data because oh boy so many people, so I hope everyone will be happy with the table. It was artisanally crafted as a gift to The Incomparable panelists and fans <3

A searchable table of all the nice people*

* All the nice people and Philip Mozolak

Here’s a searchable and sortable list of all the episodes released in 2026 (UTC, no freedom timestamps, sorry). There are multiple rows per episode, because each person gets their own row, which should make it a little easier to find out which person participated in which episode. Because manually searching through https://www.theincomparable.com/person/ would be almost like work.

incomparable |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  select(
    show, number, date,
    duration, title, person, role
  ) |>
  mutate(
    date = lubridate::as_date(date),
    show = factor(show)
  ) |>
  arrange(desc(date)) |>
  datatable(
    style = "bootstrap", filter = "top",
    colnames = c(
      "Show", "#", "Date (UTC)",
      "Duration (mins)", "Title", "Person",
      "Role"
    )
  ) |>
  formatDate(3, method = "toDateString")

2026 shows

TL;DR TeeVee is basically cheating.

incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  count(show) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = reorder(show, n), y = n)) +
  geom_col(fill = inc_navy) +
  coord_flip() +
  theme_incomparable() +
  labs(
    title = glue::glue("The Incomparable Network — {current_year}"),
    subtitle = "Shows by episode count.",
    x = NULL, y = "Episodes",
    caption = caption
  )

2026 episodes

incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  mutate(date = lubridate::round_date(date, unit = "week")) |>
  count(date) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = n)) +
    geom_col(fill = inc_navy) +
    scale_x_date(date_breaks = "1 month", date_labels = "%B") +
    theme_incomparable() +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust = 1)) +
    labs(
      title = glue::glue("The Incomparable Network — {current_year}"),
      subtitle = "Episodes per week.",
      x = NULL, y = "Episodes per week",
      caption = caption
    )

Yearly episode output

All in all, The Incomparable published 3.9445^{5} minutes of content, or 39 weeks, which are numbers that exist as a concept in your head but not in reality.

incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  count(year) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = factor(year), y = n)) +
    geom_col(fill = inc_navy) +
    theme_incomparable() +
    labs(
      title = "The Incomparable Network",
      subtitle = "Episodes per year.",
      x = NULL, y = "Episodes",
      caption = caption
    )