Just the opposite, that someone gave a 5 star review for only “woke” reasons. Which I find very doubtful.
There were many bigoted reviews, but Amazon has cleaned most of them out.
Those bigoted reviews may not be at the top, but they skew the overall rating down.
My previous statement wasn’t clear, apologies.
A five star review that was inflated has no need to be based on delight for “woke” casting or other similar critieria. You seemed to be suggesting that that would be the only reason for such inflation. Feel free to clarify if that isn’t what you think.
My point is that the popular media was praising ROP for many reasons that had nothing to do with casting and progressiveness, loudly and more visibly to the typical viewer than the poisonous racist trolls. It is perfectly reasonable to expect that, if review inflation took place, it could just as easily be based on those criteria and not the “woke” issues.
Which is why, when I referred to metacritic scores, I disregarded all of the negative reviews and only considered the ratio of mixed to positive and make my comparison to other shows on that same basis. I think that is one way, albeit imperfect, of approaching an unbiased assessment of its reception.
If you think the review system is fatally flawed then fine, we shouldn’t use it as any sort of evidence one way or another to judge critical reception for any show and all we are left with is our personal judgement and anecdotal evidence. That’s fine by me as well.
I mean, if your argument is that “breaking bad” was more compelling TV, i don’t think anyone is going to disagree. There’s some range between “awesome show, one if the best” and “this was decent, will watch the next one”. I think RoP is the second of those.
I would.
I strongly dislike - no, I hate - any media that has real-world criminal equivalents like drug dealers, mafioso, gangsters etc as main protagonists. There’s nothing “compelling” about it, however sympathetic or understandable you try and make them, my contempt for what they are overrides all that.
In fact, that’s the closest I come to considering a group “always evil”. Never mind orcs, meth manufacturers are it.
Maybe because of where I grew up, I don’t know.
Not that I disagree with your larger point, mind you. There are shows that are way better, and RoP is merely “decent” (although on the “quite good” side of that). I just disagree as to what that compelling TV is.
No my argument is not about a subjective evaluation of quality. Everyone likes what they like.
It was more that, regardless of what any of us think as individuals, the show likely hasn’t had a critical or viewer reception strong enough for Amazon’s exceptations. We are two weeks after the finale and yet we still haven’t had anything much from Amazon on how it went. I suspect if it was a rip-roaring success that was undeniable they’d have been quick to tell us. I imagine the figures, when (if?) they are released will tell a much more muted story.
I think “mixed at best” was a reasonable assessment and I’m expecting that some changes are likely to be triggered because of that.
On a personal level, I hope that the changes are drastic and far reaching as I’m hoping for a better Tolkien series overall.
Please proceed, governor.
Which of those sets of figures is from Amazon? (I can only open one of those links, the others require an account. The one I can open doesn’t reference Amazon figures)
Heh. I actually quite watching “breaking bad” after a couple of episodes for very similar reasons. I found watching the main character’s descent into evil profoundly unpleasant. Nonetheless, it was an enormous hit, and i think an awful lot of people found it compelling.
I quite enjoy watching horrible people get their just desserts. There are small victories and periods where the anti-hero evokes some sympathy and we feel for them becaue they aren’t one-dimensional but there is certainly no general glorification of any of the main characters. Moral ambiguity is what they were aiming for and they certainly succeeded in my opinion. I’m comfortable with that, I mean, I watched the whole of “Downfall” and hardly ever cheered for the Nazis.
Hard to parse out those figures.
First table would initially lead one to conclude that House of the Dragon blew ROP out of the park, that it did not much better than the much less extravagant She-Hulk … but that is a multiple of average viewers for a show on their platform? Those are likely not each apples and may not even each be fruits. Has to do with both subscriber base size and size of catalogue and …
“Mostly positive” … not signing up for Rasmussen, but I’d love to know how many of those were 6/10 vs 9/10. And I’d love to see those ratings (and actual viewer numbers) compared head to head with HoD’s.
The last article is just dumb. Concluding great word of mouth because more watched this fairly long show’s conclusion on Saturday than the Friday it dropped? That’s stupid.
I remain sure that Amazon has better numbers. I do not believe they will share them and do not read anything into that as I do not think they generally do.
According to that metric you can say that it was closer to “Welcome to Wrexham” than it was to HOTD.
But without the detail of how that table was constructed it isn’t possible to say what conclusions can be drawn.
Apparently the Parrot Analytics data involved…
takes into account consumer research, streaming, downloads and social media, among other engagement
To come to some sort of aggregate “most in-demand” index. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that actually signifies.
I feel like if your first table had shown RoP near the bottom, some folks would be like, “see, it’s terrible!” But with it near the top, the reaction is “wait, what are these strange numbers!?”
The explanation at the bottom of the table says it’s relative to the average show in market, not relative to shows on that platform, FWIW.
As for Amazon, yes they could be more transparent. They’ve said that the show is closing in on 100 million viewers, and that production on season two has already started, but we’d certainly like to hear more details.
The only details I’m actually interested in are when the next episodes are airing, and who the Stranger really is.
Now, I’d be interested to know if it truly tanked, meaning that there won’t be a next season, but short of that, the commentary and speculation is just useless blather. But then, it sounds like we’ve got about two years to fill, so blather on, blather on…
I think it is fair to question the numbers regardless. I mean, what is “most in-demand” what does that actually mean? Where does the data come from?
I love “Andor” I think it is excellent but I’m surprised that it sits at number 4 on a table that refers to “in-demand”. Again, I can only make sense of that with a better understanding of what that table actually means.
I think those that like it would certainly then be saying there was something dodgy about the numbers if it were nearer the bottom of the list.
(Which we know is the case because we’ve already seen it when it comes to audience reviews)
Hey, look, I agree with MrDibble! 
Especially as protagonists you are supposed to sympathize with , i,e. White idea that he would thereby provide for his family after his death from cancer. The IRS would take it all, and the other drug lords would kill his family… or worse. At the very best, his wife and family would have to live with the guilt that their Husband/Father was a monster and that money was soaked with the blood of innocents.
Amazon has promoted the show’s marketing consultant to head of marketing for Amazon Studios, which would seem to contradict the “they’re so disappointed that they’re firing the showrunners and retooling everything” narrative.
No-one said there was anything wrong with the marketing.
Do you think they’d be promoting the head of marketing if they thought the show was a failure?
If they are promoting purely on the job done (and not merely allowing her to fail upwards) then it doesn’t matter if the show is no good, what matters is how good the marketing was.
In fact, the worse the show you have to work with, the better the marketing looks if you manage to get a lot of people watching.
In other words, the show got great ratings and the studio is happy with the product.