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Billie's Best of 2017

Happy new year!

And lucky me. I always get to go last, after reading everyone else's "Best of." Unsurprisingly, I concur with a lot of what the other Agents of Doux have already listed, particularly when it comes to what was good on television this year.

I have particularly enjoyed the ambiguity and strangeness that is Star Trek: Discovery, the cleverness of The Good Place, the incredible humor in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the surprisingly wonderful diversity of Sense8, the performances and writing in The Handmaid's Tale and The Crown, Jon Bernthal in The Punisher, and every single kid in Stranger Things.

And strangely, I still adore Supernatural. I did a rewatch of all of those many, many seasons this past spring, summer and fall, and discovered that Supernatural binge-watches really well, although I quickly realized that four episodes at a time is my limit. (I also realized this time that when I'm looking at the series as a whole, my least favorite plotline is the Mark of Cain.)

So. I decided to do something different with my "Best of" post this year: the best of Doux Reviews. This site has been around since 2004 and includes material I wrote going back to 1997. We're soon going to be posting review number 8,000. That's a lot of reviews.

Because we've lived at three different domain names, it's nearly impossible to get an accurate count of anything; it only really goes back to the current one. But I did try to figure out our most popular shows and highest-hitting reviews. I also thought it might be fun to see what's gotten the most comments.

Our most popular show is... this might not surprise you... Supernatural. Hey, thirteen seasons is a lot of seasons. I've been reviewing it nearly that long, too.


The other shows in the top five are Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, La Femme Nikita and Lost.

I bet La Femme Nikita is the real surprise there. Part of it is probably longevity – it's one of the oldest set of reviews on the site, like Buffy and Lost – and part of it is probably passion combined with a lack of competition by other sites. There aren't a lot of La Femme Nikita reviews still out there on the internet, which makes Google searches point to Doux Reviews a bit more.

Because we've covered so many shows – check out our All Shows list – I wanted to mention not just the top five, but the top fifteen. These are the top currently/recently running shows:

Game of Thrones
Person of Interest
The Vampire Diaries
Arrow
The Walking Dead

And rounding out our fifteen are the old classic shows:

The X-Files
Six Feet Under
Breaking Bad
Angel
Smallville

Shocker, isn't it? I can't believe that Smallville is on that list. I'm somewhat proud of my Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad reviews, but I was so reluctant to review Smallville, especially in its final four seasons, that I mostly just posted a few thoughts and called it a day.


But I'm particularly proud of The X-Files being in the top fifteen. Our X-Files team has been plugging away on and off since 2009 (!) and we're about to post our final review: the season nine series finale! Technically, I suppose The X-Files is both current and classic, since it's coming back for an eleventh season in January. (Yes, of course we're covering it.)

While the show pages get the most hits, there are reviews and articles that have gotten a bunch, too, and I bet some of them will be a surprise to you. They were a surprise to me. In the summer of 2011, I decided to review some of my favorite movies, and I included a lot of spoilers. For some reason, a few of those movie reviews have gotten a lot of hits:

Interview With the Vampire
The Princess Bride
The Matrix
Pleasantville

Other reviews and articles that have gotten a surprisingly large number of hits include:

Doctor Who/Torchwood/The Sarah Jane Adventures Crossover Guide
The Tudors: What You Need to Know
Buffy Quotes for Every Occasion: Part 4, Librarianship
Kid Winchesters: The Younger Versions of Dean and Sam

and an episode of Persons Unknown:

Persons Unknown: Identity

Josie Kafka always insisted that that last one got a bizarrely high number of hits for the kitten photo (below), because nobody watched Persons Unknown. But she might have been modest. Maybe Persons Unknown was a huge hit in an alternate universe and the hits somehow transferred over here.



One of our highest hitting posts is Comment Poetry. This post happened in the first place because we found a Recent Comments widget to put on the right side of the site (it's still there, take a look →). In an attempt to save our readers from getting spoiled, we reduced each comment to a few words, and the result looked like free form verse, some of which was pretty darned funny. So we posted the Comment Poetry article with our favorites, and kept adding to it. Every time I read through those comments, I laugh out loud. This might be my favorite:
And now
the cactus is
a cactus
is
a cactus?
I think
maybe
(My second favorite piece on Doux Reviews after Comment Poetry is probably Sam T. Cat's review of the Under the Dome episode, "Manhunt.")

The Comment Poetry article has something else of note: it has more comments than any other piece on Doux Reviews (currently, 176). Which brings me to my list of pieces with the most comments, which is completely unrelated to the number of hits:

Comment Poetry
Lost: The End (the Lost series finale)
Game of Thrones Book v. Show Discussion (season four)
Billie's Ten Rules of Television
Game of Thrones Book v. Show (earlier seasons)

I had to leave a lot out of this post. There were tons of reviews with lots of hits that I didn't mention, and in a few years, I'm betting the top shows will change to include Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Twin Peaks. But what do I know? I'm always surprised by Doux Reviews.

So – Happy new year! Thank you to every writer, past and present and possibly future, who have made this site what it is. And thank you to every single reader who has stopped by, because there would be no point in writing all these reviews if no one was reading them.

Billie
---
Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

9 comments:

  1. Here's to many, many years of reviews and fantastic genre TV.

    8000 reviews that's a lot of TV. I mostly pick stuff to watch going by what You guys review. The 100 and Vampire Diaries being the biggest examples. When I watch a show that's not reviewed here I consider it incomplete.

    I'm suprised the Smallville revies are on the list. I never got into it because for me it was mostly an attempt to create a Roswell clone with a recognizable IP. Of course Roswell declined in quality so fast and got cancelled while Smallville endured for 10 seasons despite the sometiems dubious quality so I guess it was a sound move to create it for the newtwork.

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  2. Happy new year, Patryk! I always enjoy your comments. :)

    Smallville is on a short list of shows that I am sorry I ever started to review. I hadn't even watched the first four seasons, but when James Marsters was added to the cast in season five, I decided to review season five. So I binge-watched the first four seasons, and when it started getting good, I started writing brief reviews. When the show started to decline, which was when they wrote out the Luthors, I didn't stop reviewing, and I should have.

    (Other occupants of that list include The Dead Zone, Heroes and Sleepy Hollow.)

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  3. I'm glad I can contribute in some way. :) I just wish I could be more up-to-date with my commnets. I ususally write something long after the discussion has already died off and people can't reply to my theories because they already saw the answers.

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  4. Patryk, I think that's actually one of our strengths -- that we're a "time machine" site. You can go to any show, experience it as it was when it aired, and be certain you won't get spoiled. I don't think there are a lot of TV sites out there that do this.

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  5. What a great final 2017 post, Billie. It was like going through the history of the blog. Glad to see that Buffy is still slaying the hits. Happy to see La Femme Nikita up there too, it has such an epic, intense love story that it certainly deserves a place on the internet where fans get to pour out their love for the show.

    Interesting that the Librarianship quotes of Buffy get so many hits.

    This is a special site to be a part of. Like many of the writers, I was a reader for several years before joining the team, so, you know, to any reader out there who would like to have a show you love covered by us, you could be the one covering it. ;)

    Happy New Year, everyone!

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  6. Happy New Year and all the best for 2018 to everybody in this site. As Patrick has said, my experience watching a show feels incomplete if I don`t read a review in this site. I have been following you since when you reviewed La Femme Nikita, and even though I don`t watch much tv these days, I still came to this site to read most of the reviews even when I haven`t watch a show.
    Also, I always look forward for the different Best off post, the creativity you guys have (and the amount of tv you watch) is amazing. I particularly like this post, its definitely a nice way to resume your history here.
    Thanks for all the wonderful experience!
    Cecile

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  7. This was such a fun list!

    I'm not surprised that La Femme Nikita is at the top. It seems like whenever I glance at the Recent Comments widget, someone is commenting about a episode. (This feels like a sign that I should watch it.) I am surprised that Kid Winchesters has so many hits, though, if only because it's fairly recent! Also surprised that the Arrowverse crossover guide isn't up there as well.

    Nearly 8,000 reviews. Damn. Here's to 8,000 more!

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  8. Happy New Year! Ad happy 13th season of SPN! May live the show!

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  9. Very interesting...it's a hard thing, these days, to keep up with so many shows. When I was just a commentor, I would say...Hey guys, review this and that. Right. I know exactly why it's not that easy to review shows, now. With so much content, it's hard to decide what to focus on (or to finish the retro reviews that I came on the site to do) and as soon as I think that I'm almost caught up - something else starts. (Imagine me pulling my hair out, right about now.) Okay, don't. I'm getting older, I need every strand.

    In my best of, I forgot to mention "Mindhunter," which I couldn't stay away from, as soon as I watched the first 15 minutes. Such an amazing look into the early days of the FBI behavioral unit and serial killers. Also, "Travelers" is quickly becoming one of my favorite shows. Season 2 is amazeballs.

    I love this site and even if I never have a spare minute, anymore, I'm so glad to be here. Happy trails.

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