‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ Unseats ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ As TV’s Wordiest Show
Though The Sound and the Fury, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses may have long stumped scholars with their linguistic complexity, these classic texts may have finally met their match: the subtitles for Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Famed for its wit and meta attempts at addressing police brutality, the 2010s sitcom has gained yet another claim to fame nearly four years after its finale, boasting the most words per minute of any popular show available on streaming, per a new analysis from Kapwing. In calculating this statistic, content strategist Liam Curtis and his team “counted the number of subtitled words in up to 50 of the latest episodes of the most popular TV shows,” dividing those sums by the episode’s run time to determine a program’s average words per minute.
After crunching the numbers, the FOX/NBC sitcom landed at the top of the list, blowing away its competition at 206 words per minute. Besting series like Bob’s Burgers and Central Park — which respectively came in second and third place with 197 and 195 words per minute — Brooklyn Nine-Nine managed to dethrone the previous holder of this fast-talking superlative: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In a similar 2023 study from WordFinderX, the FX(X) staple topped the list at 176.2 words per minute. Despite reaching 189 words per minute this time around — a jump that may be at least somewhat attributable to slight differences in methodology — the Gang failed yet again at winning an award, coming in fourth place overall.
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So what, exactly, do these numbers mean?
Beyond vindicating ‘90s kids as the first — and possibly only — recorded application for those highly-advertised speed-reading courses, these stats have some serious implications for accessibility, impacting how individuals with various disabilities — or folks who simply prefer subtitles — interact with such shows.
“That may be comfortably within the average speed (260 words per minute) for reading a book, but it’s a lot to handle when there are also images to digest,” Curtis wrote of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s fast pace.
Noting that Ofcom — the U.K.’s TV regulator — has advised a maximum subtitling rate of 160 to 180 words per minute for pre-taped TV programs, Curtis added that these wordy programs may make it harder for audiences to actually watch the action instead of just reading all the lines.
After all, who among us watches TV to read? Certainly not Charlie Kelly.