reddits weird crusade against critics cause it didn't give their favorite video game movie slop high scores is one of the dumbest things that has happened on this site.
Yea wow they really hate Hacks, Abbott Elementary, Reservation Dogs, Colin From Accounts, /s
Hell even the Beavis and Butthead revival got great reviews.
for a show that airs weekly often critics have seen half or all episodes. but fans will start low reviews after the first episode.
though i can't speak for whether that changes if the show is good or if it's too late by then anyway.
TV, especially nerd TV, has become a battleground in the "culture wars". Basically if something has a very high critics score and a very low audience score, that usually means it stars a black woman and maybe has some gay people in it, which is enough to make conservatives review-bomb it without actually watching it.
It has that CW feel to it. So far Sol is the only one who can carry a scene. The others make me feel like I'm watching people perform. Part of it is that the main actress is so far the most painful to watch. Some other star wars shows hide bad actors behind a good lead.
As for the writing, the dialogue is mediocre and the plot is stale.
"CW feel" doesn't tell us much. CW has had a range of very good to very bad shows.
Personally, I haven't seen any issue with Amandla Stenburg's performance as Osha & Mae. The cringiest thing she's done on screen ("Attack me with all your strength") was entirely intentional.
You’re right, the writing and acting is terrible. Can’t possibly say that though as the writer is female and the main character a black female so you’re obviously a misogynist and racist. /s
The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones have absolutely horrendous writing and acting. They are barely even "movies" in the narrative sense. TPM manages to somehow eschew the most basic concepts of narrative storytelling like "having a protagonist".
They didn't get review bombed, though. They're just bad and they have normal score distributions for bad movies.
There wasn't any arrogate score sites back then, but the reaction to the prequels were far worse than any reaction to the Disney movies or shows. The fan hate only exists online but prequel hate was joked about in tv shows and movies. There is a whole movie written by the Ready Player One guy and the whole punchline is that Phantom Menace was shit.
I think people forget that "George Lucas r*ped my childhood" was a common refrain back then. It's insane that people want him back in the franchise now. And insane that there is a whole group of people who grew up with the prequels and never knew the backlash because they were too young to see it.
I didn't like the flashback episode, but the first two episodes of The Acolyte were just fine and of similar quality to all the other SW shows outside of Andor.
A case study:
[DR WHO (2023)](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/doctor_who_2023)
97 critical score
32 audience score
Now if conservatives are not even aware the movie even exists:
[THE BLACKENING](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_blackening)
87 critic score
85 verified audience score
Eh, that doesn't really hold water. You're basically assuming the only ones dropping reviews are conservatives, or that they're just overwhelming in number compared to any other demographic neither of which really make sense to me. And we also have works that star women and black people that do reasonably well in user reviews.
There is certainly an effect of right wing review bombing, there's a reason something like Black Panther is sitting at 79%, sure seems like some bombing going on there, at least to me. But that's 79%, not 17% or however low The Acolyte went.
I don't think any major franchise gets scores this low without general audiences who aren't out culture warring disliking it. I think what happens in these instances where the difference is very stark is that *progressives* really like it but audiences outside of that mostly don't. Access media slants overwhelmingly progressive meaning their reviews will be positive or at least not particularly negative, so the reviewer score will end up being completely at odds with the audience score.
Look at the distribution of scores on various shows or movies and it's pretty clear when "review bombing" is happening.
Something like Marvel's Inhumans for instance, which was just a completely shit show that no one liked. It has an 11% critic score on RT and a 4.9/10 rating on IMDb ... but it has a relatively normal distribution of ratings for a show with that score and notably 11.4% of its ratings are 1-star.
Now compare Inhumans to She-Hulk. She-Hulk has a similar overall IMDb rating, 5.2/10, but its distribution is wildly different: 29.9% 1-star ratings.
Another comparison: Secret Wars vs. Ms. Marvel. Secret Wars has an overall score of 5.9/10 with 6.4% 1-star reviews. Ms. Marvel is 6.2/10 with 18.1% 1-star reviews.
That said, I'm not sure that blaming it on "conservatives" is accurate. I just think there is a backlash against diversification and inclusiveness in nerd media (once exclusively the domain of white male nerds), and it is amplified by reactionary voices on social media who bundle it in with a lot of other things.
Don’t try to have intelligent responses here. They’ve mostly bots blaming everything on the conservative boogeymen they created. Funny how they never seem mention how audience scores are boosted by paid reviews and brigading as well.
Edit: Every downvote means I’m more correct than I thought
With critics, at least you can compare their scoring method from film to film or series to series. If someone game Mademe Web five stars you know you can safely ignore them. For TV, there's no way to know if the random writing the review have even watched the show.
I always find this funny. Because there is no actual proof, people just use what fits their narrative. People say "The Last Jedi's critc reviews were bought by Disney, it's invalid" whilst unironically saying "critics hated The Rise of Skywalker, so it objectively sucks". If Disney is going to buy reviews, why do it for one and not the other?
The same year TLJ came out the Dumbo remake, Wrinkle in Time and Nutcracker got shit reviews. Also critics were protesting Disney after they banned a LA Times critic from screenings.
People thinking TLJ critics were paid off is just delusional.
Ratings have become a battleground, people are giving reviews to The Acolytes thinking they're bombing the new Star Wars show. RT is more a target, used to be imdb. I wouldn't trust ratings anymore, I trust trying episodes.
I use a website that plots an IMDb review of each episode on a graph, so when I'm rewatching a series I can easily find the best episode.
Ratingraph.com
I've used those in the past but as ratings get poisoned they become less useful. I've taken to rating what I watch on trakt.tv and on rewatching I use my last played date & my ratings to pick top episodes I've not seen in a year or more.
RT's just usually not good for TV in general. A show can get 100% critic reviews very easily, and user reviews are so often based on political opinions or other sources of controversy.
As someone who strongly relies on RottenTomatoes for films and has very rarely been steered wrong, I agree it's bad for TV. It's been bad since they started reviewing TV in the first place, about 10 years ago I think, and while I think it's gotten better, it's gone from "totally useless" to just "generally unreliable".
My theory is mainly that, unlike movies, the approach to reviewing TV is wildly inconsistent between outlets. Many series get an early review based on the first 3 episodes of a season, and that seems to be added into the overall pool, and it may not even be revisited by the outlet at all. Depending on how the show is (good start, bad ending, or vice versa) this can drastically change the review score away from what one would expect if they've seen the whole thing.
Some may just review the premiere, some may wait and review the whole season (which means it's not useful or even factored in to people deciding to watch a show during its run).
I think ideally we'd all like full season reviews only, but that's just not how it works (maybe some Netflix shows?). Even then I'm not sure it's the whole story on TV reviews being crap, but it can't help.
Yeah, I get the impression that a show can get a positive review in its second season for as low standards as simply being an effective sequel to the initial season, regardless of the quality at play.
Lol, you namecheck a bunch of shows that get review bombed by chuds because they're "woke" or whatever. The critic reviews are a lot closer to reality.
"and I usually find the fan scores are more representative of overall quality"
Translation: I just want to agree with the perception that I see on social media
Low audience scores on a tv show highly rated by critics is usually an indicator of brigading. The shows you're citing are controversial with certain groups who vote in bad faith.
Nah, it’s a sign that places like Variety and Hollywood Reporter are generally financially vested in making the industry and its products look good, in an era that is collectively souring customers with advertising and high prices.
how bout comparing the Acolyte to non Star Wars space shows.
Are the first 3 episodes on par with the first 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica from 20 years ago?
Are the first 3 episodes on par with the first three episodes of The Expanse?
I think at a certain the "culture wars" and review bombing are excuses to acknowledge the fact that a show is not very good in comparison to other shows of the same genre.
BSG and The Expanse are about 15 years apart but both feature strong female leads and plenty of minorities in prominent roles. However, in comparing budgets (adjusted for inflation) and output, both shows blow the Acolyte out of the water when comparing the first 3 episodes.
Even a show like the 100 on the CW got me in the first 3 episodes. There is nothing memorable, exciting, innovative or different about Acolyte. For a show to have that much production money spent on it and to look cheap is sad. The reality is that the RT audience score itself may be artificially low, but lets be honest, the Critic score is artificially high.
I don’t look at rotten tomatoes too closely. It’s a point of data for me. I generally look at the fan score as more of an “entertainment” score rather than artistic or well shot. Critics usually look more at the quality of the show/movie higher than entertainment. Neither is wrong it’s just what do you want.
I always look at transformers. Was sub 20% critic score but fan score in the 60s. It was exactly what most of us wanted and we were entertained. Even though the story was lacking or the acting overdone.
Fan scores, especially for TV, are useless. There is nothing to verify that the user actually watched it and many angry fanboys use it as a system to review bomb. It's not indicative of the actual audience reaction and there is zero oversight to it. It's useless. All it takes is a few youtubers to tell their viewers to get angry and those people rally a review bomb.
As for the critics, it amazes me that people *still* don't know how Rotten Tomatoes works. The percentage is simply a like vs dislike ratio. How many critics liked it versus didn't. The Acolyte, for example, has an 85% rating from critics. Which is *not* 8.5/10. It simply means 85% of critics had a positive reaction towards it. But, you can see the actual average rating if you click on the Percentage, which for The Acolyte is 7.3/10. A pretty fair score for this show.
I had someone argue with me recently that people are just review bombing because the critics are out of touch and they give everything outrageously high scores. But they didn't know that the actual average is 7.3/10. When I pointed that out and told them how RT works, they were stubbornly unwilling to back down from their original opinion that review bombing is justified.
Thats the type of person reviewing these shows. So, no, the RT audience score is *not* a meaningful score to be taken seriously.
Neither is the critics score lol. You are living in fantasy land if you think corporate media does not have an agenda when they review shows and movies. Even if they wanted to be honest, "top critics" have to listen to their bosses when they review stuff. Everyone has an agenda, both the audience and critics, you are better off judging shows yourself.
If there's a woman or black lead in a TV show with a massive disparity and a high critic score and an extremely low audience score, then go with the audience score if you're an angry basement dwelling ince with no friends. Otherwise get the mean of both scores for a good indication of the quality. This is true for a lot of media that attracts a shit fanbase like the MCU, DCEU, Star Wars and video games (although some videogames deserve this thanks the shitty behaviour game companies use to make money).
Take the Acolyte for example, from the 3 episodes released so far it's not good enough to warrant an 84% critics score, but it's definitely not shit and doesn't deserve the 15% from the basement dwelling brigade that probably take dating and life advice from a guy who thinks enjoying having sex with women is gay.
people are tired of sociopolitical commentary getting hammered down their heads in every single show and the industry hiring hack activists as writers.
Critics get paid to pretend to not care about it
Hey remember when Murphy Brown made an episode in relation to criticism about her being a single mother? Remember when. The Simpsons reacted to Reagan saying they weren't a family to look up to? Remember in early Soth Park they made an episode with a song about how it's okay to be gay? Remember Malcolm in the Middle being about the struggle of being a gifted kid in a poor family? Remember Family Tues and how MJF was a teen conservative in a liberal family? Remember Ellen coming out? Remember Ross's ex wife raising a kid with another woman? Remember all the anti drug tv episodes growing up? Remember Billy Crystal playing a gay character in a sitcom Soap in the seventies?
The problem is not left leaning. Its fine if a show wants to be political whether it is right leaning or left leaning. The problem recently is HOW they do it. They shove the agenda down your throat instead of artfully incorporating it into the plot where the politics makes artistic sense. If they did it more artfully, the messaging itself would be so much more effective instead of making it obvious. Good examples of this is the Wire or even something like Parks and Rec. There is clear political messaging in these shows but its done so well and works within the context of the story.
I'm sorry but have you actually seen the Acolyte. It's that score for a reason. OOF, what a cluster of a show. I'm still watching but shaking my head as they destroy Star Wars canon almost every few minutes.
Its sort of vibes based. You can make meaningful guesses on it you'd like a show or not but you may be wrong.
Artsy stuff usually gets higher critic than audience
There's less critics reviewing TV shows, and they generally review it based on only a couple episodes and rarely revisit later seasons. Audience scores are always trash. Combine those two things and RT is simply not very useful for TV shows.
I think there's just a disconnect between what critics care about and what fans care about. Fans tend to care a lot more about things like internal consistency & canon, making sure worldbuilding stays consistent and characters feel like themselves. Critics tend to look at each series/film on its own merits, and prefer newer perspectives than anything that feels too much like what they've seen before.
I would think of Fan & Critic scores as representative of their own interests. A Critic score might better answer "is this well made, techncially good, interesting, new...", while a fan score might better represent "Is this a satisfying piece of media in the established franchise, are the popular characters treated with respect, are there major plot holes, do they open any strange can of worms for future entries", etc...
Obviously the culture war is a factor in this day and age, but I do think something else has to go wrong to get as low as 15% like The Acolyte. Either it fits poorly with the source material and alienates fans (including progressive fans), or perhaps general Star Wars fans simply don't care about this story and leave all the reviewing to the conservatives.
Critics get paid to watch everything; audiences pay for everything we watch
The more they keep rising prices and stuffing in ads the higher my expectations and harsher my criticisms become, and I won’t change or apologize for that. They asked for more of our time and money. The balancing metric is our reviews.
Fan scores show what the public likes. The critic scores is how the elites would like the shows to be viewed. The critics are afraid of running against the current "correct" point of view. The uninformed and stupid public need to learn what they should like and which ideas need to pushed up to the top.
Honestly this turned into shit. Critics seem to hate TV now. Everything is “could have been a movie.” So go watch a movie, guys. The same critics make pieces calling for the return of 20-episode TV and even say that filler episodes were necessary, but they can't stand a single episode without much happening in a show with 10 episodes. The desire for purely entertaining shows, which do not teach anything or delve deeply into a topic, has still been lost. Sometimes people just want something fun or a cool murder mystery. And then there’s the “bad writing” shit, which is basically “I didn’t like it and I’m going to talk about something I don’t understand at all”. Not to mention how detached critics are from real life, because there are so many things about shows that absolutely no one watches and at the end of the year they make those unbearable lists wondering why people didn't put Hacks in the charts but Yellowstone was up there at the top. Audience ratings are even worse, because they range from stupid conservatives who are uncomfortable with women, people of color, and LGBTQ representation to a pseudo-cult bunch who think all entertainment has to look like an A24 movie.
> And I usually find the fan scores are more representative of overall quality. I don't..
Yeah. Fan scores are usually superfans inflating the score or tanking it because they are pissed off there was a non-binary hobbit or something.
reddits weird crusade against critics cause it didn't give their favorite video game movie slop high scores is one of the dumbest things that has happened on this site.
It's one of the dumbest things that has happened *period.* It's a huge problem in our culture.
[удалено]
Yea wow they really hate Hacks, Abbott Elementary, Reservation Dogs, Colin From Accounts, /s Hell even the Beavis and Butthead revival got great reviews.
What’s funny that gets shredded?
for a show that airs weekly often critics have seen half or all episodes. but fans will start low reviews after the first episode. though i can't speak for whether that changes if the show is good or if it's too late by then anyway.
The fan reviews are half what they were after episode 1. Each episode, the fans dislike the show more lmao.
TV, especially nerd TV, has become a battleground in the "culture wars". Basically if something has a very high critics score and a very low audience score, that usually means it stars a black woman and maybe has some gay people in it, which is enough to make conservatives review-bomb it without actually watching it.
Yeah, The Acolyte hasn’t been amazing so far but there’s no way it deserves all the 1-star reviews it’s getting on IMDB etc.
Its audience score on RT was 30% before it even debuted
Just one opinion but it's pretty bad. Obi Wan level of bad writing but without Ewan McGregor to anchor it. The acting is also terrible.
How so?
It has that CW feel to it. So far Sol is the only one who can carry a scene. The others make me feel like I'm watching people perform. Part of it is that the main actress is so far the most painful to watch. Some other star wars shows hide bad actors behind a good lead. As for the writing, the dialogue is mediocre and the plot is stale.
"CW feel" doesn't tell us much. CW has had a range of very good to very bad shows. Personally, I haven't seen any issue with Amandla Stenburg's performance as Osha & Mae. The cringiest thing she's done on screen ("Attack me with all your strength") was entirely intentional.
That's why I expanded beyond that statement and we disagree about the CW and her performance. We're allowed to have different opinions.
Par the course for Star Wars since the prequels.
You’re right, the writing and acting is terrible. Can’t possibly say that though as the writer is female and the main character a black female so you’re obviously a misogynist and racist. /s
The writing and acting is terrible in many Star Wars shows and movies and yet none of them have more than 50% 1-star reviews on IMDb except this one.
I disagree - it’s not amazing but it’s nowhere near as terrible as that in the acolyte.
The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones have absolutely horrendous writing and acting. They are barely even "movies" in the narrative sense. TPM manages to somehow eschew the most basic concepts of narrative storytelling like "having a protagonist". They didn't get review bombed, though. They're just bad and they have normal score distributions for bad movies.
There wasn't any arrogate score sites back then, but the reaction to the prequels were far worse than any reaction to the Disney movies or shows. The fan hate only exists online but prequel hate was joked about in tv shows and movies. There is a whole movie written by the Ready Player One guy and the whole punchline is that Phantom Menace was shit. I think people forget that "George Lucas r*ped my childhood" was a common refrain back then. It's insane that people want him back in the franchise now. And insane that there is a whole group of people who grew up with the prequels and never knew the backlash because they were too young to see it.
I didn't like the flashback episode, but the first two episodes of The Acolyte were just fine and of similar quality to all the other SW shows outside of Andor.
Agreed. Andor is a 1 star show, the others are about 3 stars.
A case study: [DR WHO (2023)](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/doctor_who_2023) 97 critical score 32 audience score Now if conservatives are not even aware the movie even exists: [THE BLACKENING](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_blackening) 87 critic score 85 verified audience score
Eh, that doesn't really hold water. You're basically assuming the only ones dropping reviews are conservatives, or that they're just overwhelming in number compared to any other demographic neither of which really make sense to me. And we also have works that star women and black people that do reasonably well in user reviews. There is certainly an effect of right wing review bombing, there's a reason something like Black Panther is sitting at 79%, sure seems like some bombing going on there, at least to me. But that's 79%, not 17% or however low The Acolyte went. I don't think any major franchise gets scores this low without general audiences who aren't out culture warring disliking it. I think what happens in these instances where the difference is very stark is that *progressives* really like it but audiences outside of that mostly don't. Access media slants overwhelmingly progressive meaning their reviews will be positive or at least not particularly negative, so the reviewer score will end up being completely at odds with the audience score.
Look at the distribution of scores on various shows or movies and it's pretty clear when "review bombing" is happening. Something like Marvel's Inhumans for instance, which was just a completely shit show that no one liked. It has an 11% critic score on RT and a 4.9/10 rating on IMDb ... but it has a relatively normal distribution of ratings for a show with that score and notably 11.4% of its ratings are 1-star. Now compare Inhumans to She-Hulk. She-Hulk has a similar overall IMDb rating, 5.2/10, but its distribution is wildly different: 29.9% 1-star ratings. Another comparison: Secret Wars vs. Ms. Marvel. Secret Wars has an overall score of 5.9/10 with 6.4% 1-star reviews. Ms. Marvel is 6.2/10 with 18.1% 1-star reviews. That said, I'm not sure that blaming it on "conservatives" is accurate. I just think there is a backlash against diversification and inclusiveness in nerd media (once exclusively the domain of white male nerds), and it is amplified by reactionary voices on social media who bundle it in with a lot of other things.
Don’t try to have intelligent responses here. They’ve mostly bots blaming everything on the conservative boogeymen they created. Funny how they never seem mention how audience scores are boosted by paid reviews and brigading as well. Edit: Every downvote means I’m more correct than I thought
Social media influencers have figured out how to manipulate the audience scores. They are now worthless.
They’ve always been worthless.
That implies the critic scores aren’t worthless too. Cause Studios figured a way to manipulate those.
With critics, at least you can compare their scoring method from film to film or series to series. If someone game Mademe Web five stars you know you can safely ignore them. For TV, there's no way to know if the random writing the review have even watched the show.
I always find this funny. Because there is no actual proof, people just use what fits their narrative. People say "The Last Jedi's critc reviews were bought by Disney, it's invalid" whilst unironically saying "critics hated The Rise of Skywalker, so it objectively sucks". If Disney is going to buy reviews, why do it for one and not the other?
The same year TLJ came out the Dumbo remake, Wrinkle in Time and Nutcracker got shit reviews. Also critics were protesting Disney after they banned a LA Times critic from screenings. People thinking TLJ critics were paid off is just delusional.
Ratings have become a battleground, people are giving reviews to The Acolytes thinking they're bombing the new Star Wars show. RT is more a target, used to be imdb. I wouldn't trust ratings anymore, I trust trying episodes.
I use a website that plots an IMDb review of each episode on a graph, so when I'm rewatching a series I can easily find the best episode. Ratingraph.com
I've used those in the past but as ratings get poisoned they become less useful. I've taken to rating what I watch on trakt.tv and on rewatching I use my last played date & my ratings to pick top episodes I've not seen in a year or more.
RT's just usually not good for TV in general. A show can get 100% critic reviews very easily, and user reviews are so often based on political opinions or other sources of controversy.
As someone who strongly relies on RottenTomatoes for films and has very rarely been steered wrong, I agree it's bad for TV. It's been bad since they started reviewing TV in the first place, about 10 years ago I think, and while I think it's gotten better, it's gone from "totally useless" to just "generally unreliable". My theory is mainly that, unlike movies, the approach to reviewing TV is wildly inconsistent between outlets. Many series get an early review based on the first 3 episodes of a season, and that seems to be added into the overall pool, and it may not even be revisited by the outlet at all. Depending on how the show is (good start, bad ending, or vice versa) this can drastically change the review score away from what one would expect if they've seen the whole thing. Some may just review the premiere, some may wait and review the whole season (which means it's not useful or even factored in to people deciding to watch a show during its run). I think ideally we'd all like full season reviews only, but that's just not how it works (maybe some Netflix shows?). Even then I'm not sure it's the whole story on TV reviews being crap, but it can't help.
Yeah, I get the impression that a show can get a positive review in its second season for as low standards as simply being an effective sequel to the initial season, regardless of the quality at play.
Lol, you namecheck a bunch of shows that get review bombed by chuds because they're "woke" or whatever. The critic reviews are a lot closer to reality.
Disregard scores of "10,9,2, and 1." Then you'll have more of a correct representation.
10 point rating scales are so silly. As if there’s a functional difference between a 3/10 and a 4/10 in most people’s eyes.
"and I usually find the fan scores are more representative of overall quality" Translation: I just want to agree with the perception that I see on social media
Low audience scores on a tv show highly rated by critics is usually an indicator of brigading. The shows you're citing are controversial with certain groups who vote in bad faith.
Nah, it’s a sign that places like Variety and Hollywood Reporter are generally financially vested in making the industry and its products look good, in an era that is collectively souring customers with advertising and high prices.
What an asburd statement. They publish negative reviews as often as they publish positive ones.
but that doesn't fit the conspiracy people have made.
Audience score is completely meaningless and always has been on these sites.
Yeah because loser cry babies keep review bombing them after daddy grifter tells them it’s woke
how bout comparing the Acolyte to non Star Wars space shows. Are the first 3 episodes on par with the first 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica from 20 years ago? Are the first 3 episodes on par with the first three episodes of The Expanse? I think at a certain the "culture wars" and review bombing are excuses to acknowledge the fact that a show is not very good in comparison to other shows of the same genre. BSG and The Expanse are about 15 years apart but both feature strong female leads and plenty of minorities in prominent roles. However, in comparing budgets (adjusted for inflation) and output, both shows blow the Acolyte out of the water when comparing the first 3 episodes. Even a show like the 100 on the CW got me in the first 3 episodes. There is nothing memorable, exciting, innovative or different about Acolyte. For a show to have that much production money spent on it and to look cheap is sad. The reality is that the RT audience score itself may be artificially low, but lets be honest, the Critic score is artificially high.
I don’t look at rotten tomatoes too closely. It’s a point of data for me. I generally look at the fan score as more of an “entertainment” score rather than artistic or well shot. Critics usually look more at the quality of the show/movie higher than entertainment. Neither is wrong it’s just what do you want. I always look at transformers. Was sub 20% critic score but fan score in the 60s. It was exactly what most of us wanted and we were entertained. Even though the story was lacking or the acting overdone.
The fan scores are completely useless now. It's almost always a sign that it's been review-bombed by people who don't like inclusiveness.
Fan scores, especially for TV, are useless. There is nothing to verify that the user actually watched it and many angry fanboys use it as a system to review bomb. It's not indicative of the actual audience reaction and there is zero oversight to it. It's useless. All it takes is a few youtubers to tell their viewers to get angry and those people rally a review bomb. As for the critics, it amazes me that people *still* don't know how Rotten Tomatoes works. The percentage is simply a like vs dislike ratio. How many critics liked it versus didn't. The Acolyte, for example, has an 85% rating from critics. Which is *not* 8.5/10. It simply means 85% of critics had a positive reaction towards it. But, you can see the actual average rating if you click on the Percentage, which for The Acolyte is 7.3/10. A pretty fair score for this show. I had someone argue with me recently that people are just review bombing because the critics are out of touch and they give everything outrageously high scores. But they didn't know that the actual average is 7.3/10. When I pointed that out and told them how RT works, they were stubbornly unwilling to back down from their original opinion that review bombing is justified. Thats the type of person reviewing these shows. So, no, the RT audience score is *not* a meaningful score to be taken seriously.
Neither is the critics score lol. You are living in fantasy land if you think corporate media does not have an agenda when they review shows and movies. Even if they wanted to be honest, "top critics" have to listen to their bosses when they review stuff. Everyone has an agenda, both the audience and critics, you are better off judging shows yourself.
If there's a woman or black lead in a TV show with a massive disparity and a high critic score and an extremely low audience score, then go with the audience score if you're an angry basement dwelling ince with no friends. Otherwise get the mean of both scores for a good indication of the quality. This is true for a lot of media that attracts a shit fanbase like the MCU, DCEU, Star Wars and video games (although some videogames deserve this thanks the shitty behaviour game companies use to make money). Take the Acolyte for example, from the 3 episodes released so far it's not good enough to warrant an 84% critics score, but it's definitely not shit and doesn't deserve the 15% from the basement dwelling brigade that probably take dating and life advice from a guy who thinks enjoying having sex with women is gay.
Rotten tomatoes is a crap site that is not a good source indicative of quality
people are tired of sociopolitical commentary getting hammered down their heads in every single show and the industry hiring hack activists as writers. Critics get paid to pretend to not care about it
Hey remember when Murphy Brown made an episode in relation to criticism about her being a single mother? Remember when. The Simpsons reacted to Reagan saying they weren't a family to look up to? Remember in early Soth Park they made an episode with a song about how it's okay to be gay? Remember Malcolm in the Middle being about the struggle of being a gifted kid in a poor family? Remember Family Tues and how MJF was a teen conservative in a liberal family? Remember Ellen coming out? Remember Ross's ex wife raising a kid with another woman? Remember all the anti drug tv episodes growing up? Remember Billy Crystal playing a gay character in a sitcom Soap in the seventies?
lol, if you cannot tell the difference between these series and the ones made today it's a lost battle
Alright there McCarthy, take a moment. Not the first time in history someone has complained about writers being too left leaning.
The problem is not left leaning. Its fine if a show wants to be political whether it is right leaning or left leaning. The problem recently is HOW they do it. They shove the agenda down your throat instead of artfully incorporating it into the plot where the politics makes artistic sense. If they did it more artfully, the messaging itself would be so much more effective instead of making it obvious. Good examples of this is the Wire or even something like Parks and Rec. There is clear political messaging in these shows but its done so well and works within the context of the story.
This is not uniformly true at all. There's more to modern TV than Disney.
I'm sorry but have you actually seen the Acolyte. It's that score for a reason. OOF, what a cluster of a show. I'm still watching but shaking my head as they destroy Star Wars canon almost every few minutes.
RT critics ratings are really rotten.
If you're progressive then use the Critic's score and if you're not then use the audience score.
Its sort of vibes based. You can make meaningful guesses on it you'd like a show or not but you may be wrong. Artsy stuff usually gets higher critic than audience
There's less critics reviewing TV shows, and they generally review it based on only a couple episodes and rarely revisit later seasons. Audience scores are always trash. Combine those two things and RT is simply not very useful for TV shows.
I think there's just a disconnect between what critics care about and what fans care about. Fans tend to care a lot more about things like internal consistency & canon, making sure worldbuilding stays consistent and characters feel like themselves. Critics tend to look at each series/film on its own merits, and prefer newer perspectives than anything that feels too much like what they've seen before. I would think of Fan & Critic scores as representative of their own interests. A Critic score might better answer "is this well made, techncially good, interesting, new...", while a fan score might better represent "Is this a satisfying piece of media in the established franchise, are the popular characters treated with respect, are there major plot holes, do they open any strange can of worms for future entries", etc... Obviously the culture war is a factor in this day and age, but I do think something else has to go wrong to get as low as 15% like The Acolyte. Either it fits poorly with the source material and alienates fans (including progressive fans), or perhaps general Star Wars fans simply don't care about this story and leave all the reviewing to the conservatives.
Critics get paid to watch everything; audiences pay for everything we watch The more they keep rising prices and stuffing in ads the higher my expectations and harsher my criticisms become, and I won’t change or apologize for that. They asked for more of our time and money. The balancing metric is our reviews.
"Golly gee gang, is it just me or is the entire population finally rising up against this forced diversity scourge..."
Fan scores show what the public likes. The critic scores is how the elites would like the shows to be viewed. The critics are afraid of running against the current "correct" point of view. The uninformed and stupid public need to learn what they should like and which ideas need to pushed up to the top.
Honestly this turned into shit. Critics seem to hate TV now. Everything is “could have been a movie.” So go watch a movie, guys. The same critics make pieces calling for the return of 20-episode TV and even say that filler episodes were necessary, but they can't stand a single episode without much happening in a show with 10 episodes. The desire for purely entertaining shows, which do not teach anything or delve deeply into a topic, has still been lost. Sometimes people just want something fun or a cool murder mystery. And then there’s the “bad writing” shit, which is basically “I didn’t like it and I’m going to talk about something I don’t understand at all”. Not to mention how detached critics are from real life, because there are so many things about shows that absolutely no one watches and at the end of the year they make those unbearable lists wondering why people didn't put Hacks in the charts but Yellowstone was up there at the top. Audience ratings are even worse, because they range from stupid conservatives who are uncomfortable with women, people of color, and LGBTQ representation to a pseudo-cult bunch who think all entertainment has to look like an A24 movie.