People say ’90s TV left you with a warm glow and that everything is dark now. We scored the 1,384 most-voted US TV series and the 2,343 most-watched US movies since 1980. Movies have barely changed. TV has changed almost completely.
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Think of the most-watched American TV shows: Friends, That ’70s Show, Game of Thrones, The Last of Us… What share do you think is clearly feel good — the kind that leaves you feeling the world can still be fixed?
Share of shows with a feel good score of 7 or higher out of 10. The yellow line is your guess; the orange bar is what we found; the caps mark the 95% confidence interval.
A happy ending isn’t enough. A show or a movie is feel good if its characters end up at peace, in harmony and loved — by their family, their friends, their community, their country or the universe — and if it leaves us with the sense that there’s hope for humanity.
We read the plot summary of every title, with no name or year, and gave it a score from 0 to 10, with a written explanation:
Scores for some of the most-voted shows (average of the two annotators). Tap one to see why:
We did this for the 1,380 most-voted US TV series on IMDb (the top 30 for every premiere year from 1980 to 2025). And, for comparison, for 2,295 movies.
Each square is a show. Hover or tap to see which one and its score.
We measured the same thing, with the same rulebook and the same annotators, for the most-watched movies of every year. The result is very different.
Top: average by premiere decade, with 95% interval. Bottom: year by year (dots) and 5-year moving average (line).
The 10 most-voted US shows of each decade and their feel good score (tap one for details):
There’s another way to leave you feeling bad: show a society that’s rotten. So we added a second score, from 0 (dystopia: a society that oppresses, decays or destroys itself) to 10 (utopia: fair, caring and getting better), for every title, science fiction or not.
US titles. Average by decade, with 95% interval.
All 1,384 TV series and 2,343 movies, from most to least voted on IMDb, including the most-voted titles of 2026 (a year still in progress, which we left out of the analysis). Filter by decade, year, feel good score, audience, genre, ending or anything else we annotated. Tap a poster to see its feel good score and why, what kind of society it shows, how it ends and the summary the annotators read.
Posters from TMDB. Summaries from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), linked to the version used. Labels assigned by language models: they can be wrong. IMDb ratings and votes as of the download date (September 29, 2026). Information courtesy of IMDb (https://www.imdb.com).
Movies are as feel good as they were in the ’90s. TV isn’t.
What the data supports: the most-voted US shows have gone from an average feel good score of (premiered in the ’90s) to (2020-2025), and the share of clearly feel good shows has fallen from to . The decline shows up in almost every genre and survives every check we ran. Movies, by contrast, barely move until 2020 and dip only slightly after that.
What it suggests: part of it, roughly a third, comes from the fact that we now watch fewer animated shows and comedies and more action and crime; the rest happens within each genre (details in the appendix). Today’s shows also depict worse societies. And IMDb voters rate the most feel good titles slightly lower.
What it can’t tell us: for most shows we only know the premise, not how they end; today’s votes favor the older shows we still remember; and the scores come from language models, with no human review. Nor does it say anything about causes (prestige drama, streaming, audience tastes) or whether people miss those shows: that survey has been designed, but not run.
What holds the story up, plus a few side findings: whether the TV decline is real or an artifact of the method, how much of it comes from watching different genres, which kinds of shows fell the most, how it fits with happy endings, what IMDb voters reward and how we measured it all.
We read every popular show, so there’s no sampling error. But each decade is just one batch of titles, and a similar batch would have come out somewhat differently. On top of that, the scores come from language models, and most TV summaries describe the premise, not the ending. So we checked it in many different ways.
Difference in the average feel good score of US TV series (0 to 10) between 2010-2025 and 1990-1999, with 95% interval.
Part of the change lies in which shows we watch. Among the most popular US shows, animation and comedy, the most feel good genres, go from of all shows in the ’90s to since 2010. Action, thrillers and crime take their place.
US TV series. Average feel good score for each genre in the ’90s and in 2010-2025, sorted from biggest drop to smallest. In bold, genres whose change excludes zero. Only genres with at least 8 shows in each period.
US TV series. Difference between 2010-2025 and 1990-1999 within each group, with 95% interval. Only groups with at least 12 shows in each period. That’s a lot of comparisons at once: some will come out “significant” by chance.
We also classified how each title ends: Happy · Bittersweet · Ambiguous · Tragic. For TV, that’s only possible when the summary describes the ending or the show’s pattern, which happens for a minority of shows. Where it is possible, the two measures go hand in hand, but they aren’t the same thing: some bittersweet endings are deeply feel good, and some happy endings offer no comfort at all.
Number of US shows with a classifiable ending, by ending and feel good score.
US TV series by premiere decade. Happy and tragic endings counted only among shows with a classifiable ending ( of ).
We can’t know whether people miss ’90s TV; that would take a survey. But among movies from the same year and genre, each extra point of feel good is associated with points of IMDb rating. Today’s most-voted shows, like Breaking Bad (9.5 on IMDb and a 1 for feel good), point the same way.
Hover over the dots to see each title; tap to open its details. Dot size is proportional to IMDb votes. Feel good scores come in half-point steps, so the dots are nudged vertically to keep them from overlapping. The IMDb rating reflects the opinion of IMDb voters, not of the whole audience, and says nothing about nostalgia.
Nobody can watch 1,384 TV series in an afternoon, but you can read their summaries. Here’s how it worked:
The two annotators agreed a lot: for TV, their feel good scores were within 2 points of each other in of cases (Krippendorff’s α ); for movies, α . But that doesn’t mean they’re always right: two machines can be wrong in the same way.
Wikipedia rarely says how a show ends: only for of shows does the summary reach the finale. The score mostly measures the experience a show promises (its characters, its world, its tone), not how it wraps up. Even so, the decline holds when we drop the shows for which we only know the premise.
“Most voted” is measured with today’s IMDb votes. From the ’90s, people still vote for the shows they remember, mostly sitcoms; from today, whatever is trending. That can exaggerate the gap.
All the scores come from language models. The materials to validate them with human annotators are ready but haven’t been used yet. The models also recognized almost every title.
Feel good depends on the music, the faces, the pacing… Here it’s judged from a text. And our definition (peace, love and hope) is just one of several possible.
With so many subgroups, some difference will turn out significant by chance. The results by type of show are exploratory.