Review aggregators are an interesting phenomena in show business. Oftentimes if I’m watching TV I’ll see commercials for movies, TV shows, and even video games throwing up all sorts of graphics saying “Rated Fresh On Rotten Tomatoes”, but does this even matter?
Check out this new study that has revealed the most overrated Netflix Original films and TV shows. The study by British gaming site Amazon Slots looked at Metacritic reviews for Netflix Originals, and ranked each one by the difference between their verified critic and user review scores, to find which are the most overrated.
Metacritic was scraped to find every Netflix Original. TV shows and films were then ranked by the difference in the overall score between critics and users. User scores were transformed from ‘0.0 to 10.0’ to “0.00 to 100” for ease of ranking. Entries with fewer than 100 user reviews were omitted to avoid skewing the rankings due to potentially review-bombed or unreliable review scores.
As you can see, Big Mouth is in fifth place with a score difference of 18 points. The 2017 animated comedy show was extremely well-received by critics, scoring 83 out of 100. However, users only rated the show 65 out of 100. Says an Amazon Slots spokesperson:
“The study highlights a noticeable gap in perspectives between critics and the public, prompting a deeper exploration into what may shape these divergent opinions. One contributing factor could be the pervasive hype and social media buzz surrounding an upcoming movie or TV show. Despite their best efforts to remain fair and impartial, critics can still be inadvertently swept up in the prevailing excitement of a new release and offer a slightly more generous review than might be merited. Users, many of whom view the release at a later date, are not necessarily subjected to the same external pressures, and may find they can offer a more objective review of each title.”
Of all the series sampled the numbers are rather telling. Critical acclaim and a number of Emmy awards for Maya Rudolph probably helped contribute to Big Mouth being part of Netflix’s top 20% most-watched being adult animation for the first six months of 2023, however, if you look at the numbers for The Midnight Gospel, the consensus seems to be more unanimous in that both critics AND fans seemed to have enjoyed the Duncan Trussell-fronted series, even more so than the seven season run of Big Mouth, which makes one wonder why we didn’t get more seasons of the series despite the fact that Duncan had at LEAST one more season in mind if not a potential for a real world-building phenomenon ala Rick and Morty that would’ve potentially paid off for Netflix for years to come.
Regardless, it seems as though review aggregators have no real bearing on whether or not any animated television lives or dies as critics scores seem to indicate you can have nearly identical review scores and not have the same length in production cycles. Another case-in-point, the seventh season of Rick and Morty that just wrapped a couple of weeks ago. Despite getting positive feedback from critics, the viewership was in the toilet with the overnight ratings not even making it over 500,000 viewers an episode at any point during the season, with some episodes even staying under 300,000 viewers. Clearly, the numbers showed (along with the social media outrage that wanted to see him come back after being exonerated of all legal charges) that fans were not having it with the new voice actors replacing Justin Roiland in the title roles, and it didn’t matter HOW much Adult Swim was trying to spin the negativity that had followed, the overnight viewership numbers did not lie, the network had already successfully killed it’s biggest franchise and did so without due cause.
Sometimes when even Bubbleblabber posts reviews, we’ll get emails or DMs, and even comments from the producers and creators of their respective series thanking us for covering the series, and most of the time it’s pretty cordial. Other times, especially when we post negative reviews, we’ll get some petty responses as well. But, I always tell everyone, don’t let the positive reviews go to your head, nor the negative reviews to go to your heart.
Maybe networks and major studios should start following the same methodology.
[h/t: Amazon Slots]