The Incomparable Network

Author

Lukas Burk

Updated

May 4, 6:22 (UTC)

All Time Stats

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

Code 
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 = .75, color = "#2C2E6A"
  ) +
  coord_flip() +
  scale_x_discrete(position = "top") +
  labs(
    x = "", 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.

Code 
incomparable_episodes |>
  count(show) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = reorder(show, n), y = n)) +
  geom_col() +
  coord_flip() +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "All Episodes Since 2011 by Show",
    x = "", y = "# of Episodes",
    caption = caption
  )

Code 
incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = duration, fill = show)) +
  geom_point(shape = 21, color = "black", alpha = .5) +
  scale_y_time(
    breaks = hms(minutes = seq(0, 300, 30))
  ) +
  scale_fill_viridis_d(option = "A", guide = "none") +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "All Episodes Since 2011 by Duration, Colored by Show",
    x = "", y = "Duration (mins)",
    caption = caption
  )

Code 
incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  count(year, month) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = month, y = n)) +
  geom_point(color = "black", alpha = .75) +
  facet_wrap(~year, nrow = 1, scales = "free_x") +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "Episodes per Month Since 2011",
    x = "", y = "# of Episodes",
    caption = caption
  ) +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, size = rel(0.5)))

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

Code 
top_15 <- incomparable |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  count(person) |>
  top_n(15) |>
  pull(person)
Selecting by n
Code 
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 = .5, position = position_jitter(height = 0, width = .25)) +
  geom_boxplot(alpha = .5, outlier.alpha = 0) +
  coord_flip() +
  labs(
    title = "The Incomparable Network",
    subtitle = "15 Most Frequently Appearing People's Episode Duration",
    x = "", y = "Duration (mins)",
    caption = caption
  )

2025` Hosts and Guests

Code 
incomparable |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  group_by(person, role) |>
  tally() |>
  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 2025 (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 aprticipated in which episode. Because manually searching through https://www.theincomparable.com/person/ would be almost like work.

Code 
incomparable |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  select(
    show, number, date,
    duration, title, person, role
  ) |>
  mutate(
    #duration = round(duration, 2),
    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")

2025 Shows

TL;DR TeeVee is basially cheating.

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

2025 Episodes

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

Yearly Episode Output

All in all, The Incomparable published 3.71441^{5} minutes of content, or 37 weeks, which are numbers that exists as a concept in your head but not in reality.

Code 
incomparable_episodes |>
  filter(year >= 2011) |>
  count(year) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = factor(year), y = n)) +
    geom_col() +
    labs(
      title = "The Incomparable Network",
      subtitle = "Shows per year",
      x = "",
      y = "# of Episodes per Year",
      caption = caption
    )