The.One.with.the.Data!

The idea is to analyze and understand the contribution of all the Lead Characters of F.R.I.E.N.D.S TV series (1994-2004) in-terms of number of dialogues spoken by them.

Lead Characters/The FRIENDS in this TV series are Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross.

Some notes on data scraping

Data is scraped from episode transcipts - html files. These transcripts can be downloaded from my GitHub repo.

R code to extract data and create plots is here.

Once you extract and tidy the data, it looks like this...

> dialogues
# A tibble: 227 × 8
   Episode_Number CHANDLER  JOEY MONICA PHOEBE RACHEL  ROSS season
            <int>    <int> <int>  <int>  <int>  <int> <int>  <chr>
1               1       76    80    141     38     94    94     01
2               2       32    17     56     28     75   126     01
3               3       72    56    103     76     52    66     01
4               4       64    47     94     62     86    78     01
5               5       70    72     66     46     74    80     01
6               6      115    60     68     20     30    43     01
7               7       49    54     46     49     86   106     01
8               8       74    22     68     32     36    96     01
9               9       52    64     96     40     70    71     01
10             10       61    38     46     97     36    58     01
# ... with 217 more rows

Observations

Rachels talks a lot! :P

From the plot below, you can see the Number of dialogues(#dialogues) spoken in all Ten Seasons by each Lead-Character.

Overall, the writers maintained #dialogues by all characters to be close to each other's, with Rachel delivering the highest (15,707) and Phoebe the least*(12,443). Chandler(14,091), Joey(13,865)* & Monica*(14,032)* are in the same league and Rachel & Ross*(15174)* are in the other. I guess you can expect that #dialogues for Phoebe are the least. Phoebs is not the least favourite character though! :)

Number of Dialogues versus Season

Season 6 has the highest #dialogues*(10,897)* out of all Ten seasons. And season 5 (10,738), season 6 & season 7*(10,798)* have almost same #dialogues. Maybe the writers created relatively more content towards middle of the series.

And also it is obvious that something went wrong while extracting data for Season 2, as #dialogues for this season*(1,416)* are pretty less compared with the rest. The script has to be modified to extract accurate data for this season. And it's also worth to check the same for Season 10 as well, because #dialogues for this season (4,392) doesn't compare well with the others.

Percentage of Dialogues versus Season

From the plot below, you can see the Percentage of dialogues spoken by each characer in each Season.

Even from this plot it's clear that Phoebe has the least #dialogues in the series.

Number of Dialogues by each Character in each season

The above plots show clear contribution of all the Lead-Characters individually towards each season. And even from these plots, it's clear that more work might be needed to extract data from Seasons 2 & 10.