College basketball’s March Madness doesn’t kick off for another two weeks, but in the spirit of the tournament, the Hulu team put together a bracket of its own: Best in Show, a five-week-long face-off where our fans get to decide which shows make it in the “big dance.” To start things off, we’ve selected four shows in each of eight categories, everything from Workplace Comedies to Detective Dramas, and now it’s your time to choose the shows that advance to the next round.
To help you make your selections, we asked for a little help from Entertainment Weekly‘s TV critic, Ken Tucker. He’s shared his take on each of our picks and, like you, he’ll be voting for his favorite shows. (Your votes will account for 75% of the final tally; Ken gets 25%, which he can split between two entries if he chooses.)
Each Monday, we’ll announce which shows move on to the next bracket, with the ultimate Best in Show winner announced April 5. You can vote as many times as you like.
So who will it be? 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation? Lost or FlashForward? Vote now to make sure your favorites have a chance to move on!
Rebecca Harper ()
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So when a show gets choosen as the “Critics choice” does it start with 5% or does it get the 5% after voting ends? Thanks SO much guys! & anyone wanna help How I Met Your Mother win?
This was very disappointing, it could have been a great and accurate way to judge the fanbase and how much the population actually likes certain shows, now i have to doubt every week’s votes because of this type of uneven voting.
come on hulu, get your head out of your bum
WTF HULU! REDO the polls from week 1, no one vote should count for 25% of the vote, I realized this after checking the polls today, Community was winning 60% vs. 40% then one guy votes and it loses? Ken, you should have said something when hulu suggested your vote should count any more than ours.
I would love to see Hulu release the raw public vote results as well as the final percentages after figuring in Ken’s vote, like JC suggested. I understand why Hulu felt they needed a heavily weighted critical vote, just because it’s so easy to ballot-bomb online polls. How many internet naming-of-stuff contests has Colbert won? However, when it’s been obvious in so many of the Best in Show match-ups that the votes aren’t skewed and are based on actual viewer opinion and fans’ love of the shows, giving an imbalanced vote to a critic who already has a widely-read forum for sharing his opinions seems unfair and disingenuous, from a fan’s point of view.
As a huge Community fan, I’m just happy that public love for that show beat out Ken’s opinion for three weeks, whether or not it made it to the finals. Hopefully somebody upstairs at NBC is paying attention.
But, as a huge Community fan…I’m still pissed it didn’t make it to the finals grrrr.
Rebecca, try telling that to the fans of “Community.” Just because he hasn’t had a significant impact, doesn’t mean he can’t. And the fact that you qualified that with “in most cases” means that he HAS had a significant impact in some cases. Why does Ken get a 25% vote in a contest that’s supposed to be for the fans? Why not have two results, one for him, and one for us?
If you insist on giving Ken a weighted vote, why not something more balanced, like 12%? Especially when he can give his entire 25% to a single show (as he must have done for “The Simpsons” in order for it to win despite trailing 60%/40%), that is too much influence. 60% may seem like “slightly more than half” and therefore a close contest, but if you do the math, you can see that, in reality, that’s 150% the number of votes of its competitor. 67%, as explained by Jason T., is 200%. The fact that a show which does not have Ken’s favor (as “Community” obviously does not) needs more than double the number of votes from fans compared to its competitor in order to win…that’s a total joke. This contest is a farce.
This clearly just became Ken’s personal favourites as he’s voted against community in every round and was finally able to eliminate it because Community was only beating The Simpsons 60% to 40%. Its ridiculous that one person is allowed to overturn a 20% lead. This competition just lost all crediblilty.
I’m sorry, that is completely inane.
The beauty of Hulu and the reason for its success is that people finally get to choose the shows they want to watch a la carte. They support what they like to watch, and choose to completely ignore that which does not interest them, without a gatekeeper orfilter to keep them from making a decision.
The idea of best in show was brilliant. Its execution was flawed – it should have required a person to have an count to login andvote, and should have been limited to one vote for account to keep there from being vote inflation. But the decision to allow a single critic a vote that counted as 25% of the total tally is a disservice to the concept of the web site itself and what it provides to its customers.
And for the record: Lost is an incredibly nuanced, multi-layered show. Burn Notice has Bruce Campbell. That a 50-50 tie.
And Community makes me laugh in a way that the Simpsons stopped doing 12 years ago.
Jon, in most cases, Ken’s votes haven’t had a significant impact on the final tally for the shows; in fact, many of his picks were eliminated.
Sean, the final results you see from the last two weeks include Ken’s 25% vote.
I really thought this was a great idea, fans fighting over the best show out of hulu. But now that I read that this “Ken” gets 25% of the popular vote. Seems a little skewed towards his personal favorites not the “BEST IN SHOW”
So are the results we seeing now taken Ken’s vote into account does he vote at the end of the week?
No, you don’t need to be logged in to vote.
Basically, what this means is that if a show gets more than 2/3 (~67%) of the fan vote, it will go forward. If it gets less than 1/3 (~33%) of the fan vote, it will not go forward. Anything in-between will be decided by Ken Tucker.
Do you have to sign in for the vote to count?
Why are Ken’s votes worth 25% of the vote? Surely it’s not a fan pick if the vote isn’t 100% fan vote.
Chuck vs. Dollhouse in round 1?! NOOOO!!! They’re my two favorites!