Rank This

"What to choose, what to choose." You mutter it under your breath whether you're looking at a menu, scanning an Amazon listing or staring at the board at an ice cream stand. The options can be dizzying, and guidance can be scarce. Sure, you can ask waiters their favorites, read reviews online or see what is dripping down the cones of those around you. But it's all anecdotal and subjective at best. The waiter may simply not like crab cakes, the maker of the bread knife may be paying for the reviews, and the five-year old may simply like the way the sprinkles look on her vanilla cone.

It comes down to the fact there is no accounting for taste. And so if you want to know what's "the best" you would do better to look at more concrete evidence. If a preponderance of people rank something higher either by watching, buying or visiting it more often than any other, there's at least a reasonable chance you won't be disappointed. Likewise, if a wide swath of humanity marks it at the lower end of the spectrum, you might do well to look elsewhere. After all, you might be a fan of Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu and are willing to give "Ballistic" a chance. But when you see that Rotten Tomatoes gives it a ranking of 0% and a critical consensus of "a startlingly inept film, it offers overblown, wall-to-wall action without a hint of wit, coherence, style, or originality" it's probably best if you delete it from your Netflix queue.

It used to be the only place to get unbiased viewpoints was Consumer Reports, with its monthly articles like "Dishwasher Buying Guide" and "Best Memorial Day Grills." More recently you almost need to rank the rankers, as the universe has expanded exponentially with both legit and questionable players. Taking on the roll of elder statesman are supposedly neutral third parties, such as Wirecutter for tech or US News and World Reports for colleges and universities. Like CR, these are organizations that have professional reviewers who create metrics that assign weightings to different factors, then tally them up and output the results. Other places crowdsource the input, like Yelp and Expedia, and rank the "Best Mexican" or "Top Beach Destination" based on input from the subset that uses the site. And still others create rankings out of cocktail conversation. Ranker.com has the top quarterback of all time as Tom Brady, and Queens's Freddie Mercury as the best singer. Arguable, perhaps, but they also have Hillary Duff listed as the number one celebrity you could actually meet on Tinder, and the Bible ranked as the number one book you will never finish reading. 

Those last two illustrate the point that, just as media has fractured and caters to very niche audiences, so do rankings. You don't need a big sample or a universal topic to create a list. With data being so available on the cheap its easier than ever to create a tabulation that is specific. Take the latest ad from the History Channel. A well-respected purveyor of historical documentaries and other fare, it took out a full page announcement in the paper touting it being at the top of its specific universe. As the banner headline reads, "the HIGHEST RANKED factual entertainment TV brand." I'm not arguing with that, and nice achievement. But what was the sample size and the competition? That's like Guy Fieri boasting he hosts the "HIGHEST RANKED Show about Diners, Drive Ins and Dives." 

Still, it helps to know the track record when you go looking on where to spend your capital, whether it be tabulated in dollars or minutes. And with the History Channel claiming the top spot, you can work on the basis that their default is going to be quality real world stuff. And so if you watch their show "Enola Gay: Rain of Ruin," a doc on the famous plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, you know from the marks bestowed on the carrier that you're probably going to be informed and entertained. On the other hand, if you turn to Hulu for director David Farrier's 2016 about the strange world of competitive endurance tickling entitled, what else, "Tickled," you can't purport be surprised if you're not.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford writes the NUMBER ONE column that appears in this space. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.