After we told you the 10 longest running TV shows currently on the air it would be only fair also to tell you which ones are the best, so we prepared a list of 11 Best TV Shows of All Time. To get an overall picture of greatness, we used a few sources. The first source was a list of the Best Series of All Time made by TV Guide, American’s most influential TV magazine. For the second source we used a list of Best Written TV Series compiled by Writers Guild of America. To round it all up we added Hollywood’s favorite TV Shows list made by Hollywood Reporter. We combined the sources, giving each TV Show points from 1 to 20 based on their spot, and brought you an ultimate a list of 11 best TV shows of all time.
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Let us take a moment and explain why combining multiple sources into a single “consensus” estimate produces better results. When you are using an indirect approach to produce an estimate for anything, your estimate is always biased in one or multiple ways in various magnitudes. When you combine two or more approaches it is more likely that some of these biases cancel out and the resulting estimate is more accurate. For example if you are trying to predict an election’s outcome by using a single poll, your estimates will contain a large margin of error. However, if you combine estimates from multiple polls conducted by different pollsters, the estimates will have smaller margins of error and will usually have higher accuracy.
We have been using this same approach at Insider Monkey to identify the best stocks to invest in the stock market by calculating the consensus picks of 700+ hedge fund managers. Any hedge fund manager may be biased in one direction or the other at any point in time. However, our research had shown that their consensus stock picks actually beat the market by double digits annually in a back testing covering 13 years. At the end of August 2012 we launched an investment newsletter being encouraged by these promising results. Guess how this strategy performed in the 3 years since August 2012? One word: amazing. The strategy returned 102% in its first 3 years versus a gain of 48.8% for the S&P 500 ETF (SPY). You can read the details of this investment strategy here. Our strategy doesn’t beat the market every month but on average it produced much better returns on average. This is generally the case when we use multiple sources to calculate a consensus estimate.
Why don’t you go ahead and check whether this is a good way of identifying the best TV shows of all time:
