@NoHayBanda said:

... its easy to see the correlation between high rating and most votes.

Yes, but how should one deal with this? We're using average rating, so as long as the central tendency of the distribution is constant, it shouldn't matter how many ratings it gets. On the other hand, the # of ratings could be a proxy for the "intangibles" of a show. More people rating ==> Better show. I'm sure the effect is positive and would improve the predictive capability of the model, but it's hard for me to justify this as something that happened during the show (which is what all the other variables measure.)

Oh, the # of raters would be lower the more recent the show...and show ratings also fall over time. So those add more complications.