Recently I ran an online survey in which I asked people to pick their 3 favorite episodes of Mysterious World from 2021. Over 200 people responded, and here are the results!
Like last year, every episode was in somebody’s top 3, so everything was among somebody’s favorites. In fact, no episode got less than 3 votes as a favorite.
(Fractional numbers are because some people divided their votes, and I wanted to be nice and tabulate them anyway.)
Border Patrol Ghost was clearly the overall favorite, and I decided to look a bit deeper at the results to see if there were any particular patterns or lessons that could be discerned.
First, here are the results with the episodes that were paranormal or religious highlighted. Non-highlighted ones are naturalistic mysteries.
Interestingly, only one of the top five mysteries was paranormal or religious. The other four were natural. Shows you can have non-paranormal, non-religious mysteries that are still compelling!
It is clear, though, that the religious mysteries rank higher than the paranormal ones, which isn’t surprising given the largely religious makeup of the audience.
One issue we’ve discussed is the use of 2-part episodes versus 1-part episodes. Currently, I’m using a mix of them, trying of one 2-part mystery a month and two 1-part mysteries.
Here are the results with the 2-part mysteries highlighted.
As you can see, the 2-part mysteries cluster among the more popular ones.
This suggests that doing a mystery in 2 parts can be worth it if the space is needed to properly explore it.
Finally, while I try to include some storytelling in every mystery, some mysteries are more purely story-driven than others. Here are the results with the story-focused mysteries highlighted.
As you can see, the story-focused mysteries also cluster toward the top rather than the bottom of the list.
That’s not at all surprising. Humans are wired for stories, and I’d expect them to be the most popular.
What I found heartening is how many of the “story-lite” episodes are still in the top half of the list! It’s a sign that we’re able to deliver engaging episodes even when we’re not relying on a narrative in story form to completely drive the episode.
Finally, I wondered if how recent a mystery has been covered might significantly affect its popularity, with people’s memories of more recent episodes being more vivid.
So, I gave each episode a number based on the order we did them in and then highlighted them based on how recent they were.
Do me, it doesn’t look like the recency effect was particularly strong, though there is a slight tendency to have the oldest episodes toward lower part of the spectrum.
Interesting results!
Thanks, everybody, for listening and sharing your feedback!
