‘You Know Your Show Sucks!’: The Biggest Backlashes on TV | Television

TThe second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is here. This is a big deal for Amazon Prime Video, as it looks to justify the reported $1 billion it spent on a five-season commitment in 2017. For the rest of us, though, there’s a chance that the show itself may once again take a backseat to the discourse surrounding it. Because while The Rings of Power’s first season may have been a little sluggish at times, that was nothing compared to the absolute barrage of backlash it received.

Some of this was more justified than others. The show’s existence felt unnecessary – the whole point, it seems, was to fill in the peripheral details of JRR Tolkien’s stories. At times, the acting was extremely shoddy. On top of that, it featured the most questionable array of accents ever to appear on screen, with the Irish accents being so bad that the Irish Times called it “famine cosplay.”

However, with grim inevitability, much of the backlash was racially motivated. Diehard Tolkien fans turned on the casting of black actors (including Lenny Henry, who played a Harfoot, one of the show’s proto-Hobbits). Elsewhere, the decision to give a female dwarf facial hair sparked outrage from people who were either disgusted by the idea of ​​female facial hair or outraged that her beard wasn’t as big as it could have been. As such, the show became a potential target for review bombers: people who deliberately and maliciously give low user ratings to shows they ideologically disagree with, in an attempt to drag down their overall ratings.

This was something that Amazon foresaw. Last year, studio chief Jennifer Salke had gloomily noted that “we have insights into our global audience, we also have insights into the darker side of how people can manipulate reviews” – so as a precaution, it decided to impose a 72-hour delay on Rings of Power’s user reviews, so that moderators could filter out bad reviews. But guess what? That also sparked a backlash, leading to online theories that Amazon was protecting its multi-billion dollar investment rather than allowing free speech, with hordes of Redditors making statements like, “You know your show is trash when you have to force it on people.” and, “the fact that they control what people can say about the show means[it]is complete trash.”

Not that The Rings of Power is alone in receiving a backlash. There seems to be a lot of it at the moment. The Boys (also a Prime Video show) saw a catastrophic drop in its Rottentomatoes user rating this year. While the first season scored an impressive 91% user approval, season four this year only managed a paltry 54%.

While it wasn’t The Boys’ best run – it felt like everyone was keeping their powder dry for next year’s finale – there’s a sense that many of the bad reviews came from angry Republicans who belatedly discovered that the show was a satire of Trump-era America. This is supported by the Rottentomatoes page, which is littered with throwaway half-star reviews, such as “the people who run it think it’s their job to make a show that promotes their values ​​and beliefs rather than entertains” and, apparently referring to one character’s growing sense of compassion, “the French are assholes”.

Damon Lindelof knows all about review bombing. His 2019 series Watchmen had to overcome a slew of backlash before it even began. First, Alan Moore—the co-creator of the source material—was publicly hostile to the adaptation, and then Lindelof had the audacity to not only cast a black woman in the lead role, but also use the 1921 Tulsa Massacre as the series’ inciting incident. Despite universal critical acclaim, a vocal group of review bombers took to review bombing Watchmen’s Rottentomatoes page, causing its review score to drop to 43%.

“I only have power over criticism that I find reasonable on my own terms,” Lindelof says of the reaction to Watchmen. “But review bombing is disproportionate because a beloved piece of IP has become woke, or because it has too many women in it, or because it has too many people of color in it, or because it is sympathetic to LGBTQIA+ issues.”

Does knowing that these reviews are politically motivated make it easier to deal with a declining user rating? “I can completely and utterly ignore it, because a lot of times the person hasn’t even seen it,” says Lindelof. “Criticism once you’ve seen it doesn’t bother me. But criticism from people in a review-bombing context usually happens before they’ve even seen it. You have to taste my food before you spit it out.”

Lindelof is right that most backlash occurs against shows that already exist in some form. Just look at True Detective: Night Country from earlier this year. Taken over by Issa López after three seasons of diminishing returns from creator Nic Pizzolatto, Night Country was widely seen as a return to form. But a vocal group still protested the show’s new, female-led direction, fueled by Pizzolatto’s inexplicable decision to spread negative comments via his Instagram account.

Then there’s The Acolyte, the most recent Star Wars series to air on Disney+. Perhaps because it has a female showrunner in Russian Dolls Leslye Headland, or perhaps because it attempted to add some depth to the Star Wars universe, a vocal minority of fans have slammed the series online wherever they can, with one IMDb reviewer calling it nothing short of “cultural vandalism.” When the show was canceled after just one series, star Amandla Stenberg blamed it on “an outburst of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol and prejudice and hatred and hate speech toward us.”

Unsurprisingly, backlash often doesn’t reflect the true reaction. Despite everything, Night Country enjoyed the highest ratings of any True Detective series, and The Acolyte consistently ranked in the top 10 most-watched series across all streaming platforms. Meanwhile, Watchmen won 11 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and was HBO’s most-watched new series since 2017.

Backlash doesn’t always come from fans, though. Google “TV show backlash” today and you’re likely to find a results page dominated by one show. Piglets is an ITV sitcom from the creative team behind Green Wing, and to say it’s had a bumpy ride would be a colossal understatement. The show follows a group of police officers in training, and before it had even aired, the Police Federation released a statement criticising the title.

“The new ITV show Piglets is deeply insulting to police officers who risk their lives every day to protect the public by providing an emergency service,” the statement said. “It is a disgusting choice of language to use for the title of a TV programme.” In addition, more than 100 complaints have been made to Ofcom about the show.

“We worked with police officers when we were developing it, and they genuinely said they thought the name was funny,” sighs James Henry, one of Piglets’ writers. “It’s about the cadets, so we thought it would be funny to name them. But it got a lot of pushback.”

How has the treatment of Piglets affected Henry’s reaction to the show? Fortunately, he seems optimistic. “I can sympathize with people who didn’t like it,” he says. “Maybe they were having a shitty week and just wanted to laugh at something, and this didn’t do it for them. There’s a visceral reaction to comedy. And at least the people who did give it a chance. They all sat down and watched it for at least 10 minutes, which they didn’t have to do.

“It’s a big, crazy comedy,” Henry says. “It’s not about people getting over trauma, or mental health issues. There’s more serious stuff underneath, but it’s mostly people being silly, misunderstanding each other, and stumbling, which I’m always a big fan of.”

A backlash can be loud enough to make headlines, but there’s evidence that it doesn’t affect how a show is perceived. At the time of writing, The Boys is the most-watched original show on Prime Video. The Rings of Power was apparently the most-watched original show ever. And in its first week of airing, Piglets was the second most-watched comedy on British TV.

And when a group of people trash a show, true fans often show up even harder to defend it. “Someone sent me a link to the Empire podcast, which I didn’t want to listen to, but the host raved about it,” Henry says. “He watched the first three episodes and loved it.”

So while you might think that public backlash would be annoying for the people who worked hard on a show, that’s often not the case. If they can stick to their vision, enjoy the work, and maintain a healthy perspective, it’s remarkably easy to weather the storm. Of course, it also helps to know that you’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. “I recently found a report card from when I was 10,” Henry says. “It says, ‘James’ sense of humor isn’t always shared by the rest of us.’ So this is nothing new.”