Every dot is a person, a show, a studio or a writer. A line between two of them means a real credit: this actor was in that show, this writer wrote for it, this company made it. The whole of American situation comedy, joined up.
The question the map exists to ask is who sits at the middle of it — and there is no single answer, because it depends on what you decide to count. Count every job the same and one name comes first. Count episodes instead and somebody else does. Ask how completely one show belonged to a performer and the order changes again. Switch the buttons and watch the map change its mind. That is not the map being unreliable. That is the finding.
New here? Ignore every control below. Drag the map about, and click any dot to see who it is and what they did. Everything else on this page explains itself when you want it to.
Genealogy — which connections are drawn
Find a name
Three and a half thousand names are on this map and almost none of them announce themselves. Type any part of one.
Who is on the map
Names on the map
Size — what makes a dot big
Switched off while you are inside one genealogy, on purpose. These four ways of counting are worked out over the whole map at once, and they do not survive being cut down to a part of it. Size here is just how many connections something has.
Colour — what makes a dot its colour
Read the same corpus as text → the Royalty Ledger
Drag to move · scroll to zoom · click anything to see who it is · then click any credit in its record to travel thereTap anything to see who it is · tap any credit in its record to travel there · drag sideways to move · pinch to zoom · the page still scrolls
Legend
Not yet joined to the rest
How to read it
A big dot is not a famous person. Size means the map cannot get around them: take that person out and parts of American comedy stop connecting to each other. A beloved star who spent thirty years on one show is a small dot, correctly — everybody could reach them, but nobody had to go through them. Most of the map is small dots. That is the measure being honest.
Two buttons, and they do different jobs. The row marked G₀ to G₃ does not change who is on the map. It changes what a credit is worth: treat every job the same, or weigh it by episodes, or ask how completely one show belonged to somebody. The row above it does change who is on the map. Pick one genealogy and you get a different picture altogether: only the actors, or only the writers and studios, or only the shows that share a fictional world.
Things near each other are usually a credit or two apart. But the map is worked out fresh in your browser every time, so where a dot sits is not a stored fact. A dot floating on its own is only telling you nobody has entered its connections yet.
The full apparatus, and what it refuses to claim
Size is betweenness, not importance. A node is drawn large when paths run through it, and betweenness is a savage measure: most of the corpus scores zero under every model, so most of this map is small dots, correctly. A large node is not a beloved performer. It is one the graph cannot route around.
Nearness is a claim, and a limited one. Nothing about a node's position is stored — the layout is solved in your browser each time, by springs that pull joined nodes together and a pressure that pushes everything else apart. So distance on the stage approximates distance through the corpus: two names that land near each other are usually few credits apart.
Three things the geometry does not know, and which it would be a mistake to read into it. It ignores how heavy an edge is — a 181-episode lead and a single guest appearance pull exactly alike, so the geometry answers the G₀ question no matter which model is selected above. It ignores size: a node is never drawn toward anything for scoring highly. And a fragment, having no edges to the body, has no springs either, so where it sits is arbitrary and only its separateness is a fact. What is reliable is the lit corridors of a selected node. The rest is a two-dimensional shadow of something that does not fit in two dimensions.
Three dials, and the first two are easy to confuse. G₀, G₁, G₂ and G₃ do not change who is on the map. They change how much a credit is worth. G₀ treats every job the same. G₁ says a hundred episodes should not count the same as one. G₂ asks something else entirely — not how much somebody worked, but how completely one show belonged to them, so a performer in all four episodes of a flop scores what a performer in all two hundred of a hit scores. G₃ uses our own labels, lead and regular and recurring and guest, and is marked as a judgement because that is what it is. The two beneath them, G₀c and G₀p, are not models at all: each deletes a whole kind of connection and runs the sums again, to find out whether a result was only ever true because of that kind.
The three genealogies work the other way round. L1, L2 and L3 do not re-weigh this map; they redraw it. L1 keeps only who acted in what. L2 keeps only who wrote, created and produced. L3 keeps only which shows share a fictional world — a spin-off, a crossover, a character who walked out of one series into another. Different lines mean a different cast of characters in each, so a position in one has nothing to do with a position in another, and only positions are ever quoted. Somebody missing from a map gets a dash, not a low placing: it means the question does not apply to them.
The genealogy control sits above the model control because it decides what the model is even talking about. Pick L3 and the whole corpus shrinks to fifty-two shows in seventeen separate fictional worlds, which is not a gap but the thing that genealogy was drawn to find. Inside a single genealogy the four models switch off, and that is a rule rather than a missing feature — they are arithmetics over the merged graph and do not survive the trip.
So: the models argue about how much things count; the genealogies argue about what counts at all. Every record shows both, one under the other, which is how you find the strange cases — a name that rules one map and is simply absent from the next. One honest caveat: the four models run over everything at once, performers and studios and authorship together, which is exactly the mixing the three genealogies exist to refuse. That is what G₀p is for.
The facets are a third dial and recompute nothing — which is why the four models stay available in every combination of them. Two consequences. Almost every connection here runs through a show: nobody has an edge from a writer to a performer, they both joined a series. So hiding the shows does not empty the map, it projects, and a grey line then means only that these two shared one. And a writer is on no graph at all — a writing credit is declared not to be an edge, or the busiest hand would win by volume — so a writer scores zero under every measure here. That zero is not missing data. It is the true score of somebody who lies on no path.
Every record is a set of doors. The credits listed beside a name are not a description of that person — they are the other people and shows, named. Click one and the map goes there and opens its record instead. That is how you walk the thing: not by hunting a thousand dots for a name, but by following the credit that joins them.
The sky is not complete, and the gaps are named. Anything the main body cannot reach is listed beside the map and flies to on a click. None of it is a mystery — they are shows and people whose connections nobody has entered yet, and a connection is one credit's worth of work.