How to count occurrences of each unique value within a column of lists Pandas

Question

I have a column in a DataFrame looks like this:

I want to count the occurrence of each value in those lists.

The output I want is a DataFrame looks like:

Genre	Occurrence
Drama	12224
Crime	5699
Comedy	1314
...	...

I've tried value_counts() and the result is the frequency of lists but the elements within them.

[Comedy, Drama]                                28
[Comedy, Drama, Romance]                       27
[Comedy]                                       25
[Action, Crime, Thriller]                      22
[Crime, Drama, Thriller]                       21
                                               ..
[Crime, Drama, Horror, Music, Thriller]         1
[Adventure, Drama, Romance]                     1
[Drama, Romance, War]                           1
[Action, Adventure, Fantasy]                    1
[Action, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Thriller]     1

I also tried to combine the column to a list of lists then count but nested for loops is not a good way. I'd love better solutions.

Answer 1

you can explode and then count the values

df["genre"].explode().value_counts()

explode will spread out the contents of those lists into each row on their own, so that value_counts will count them as separate entities.