Night Country’ Scores Sink Right Back Down After Showrunner Comments

This week, True Detective season 4 showrunner Issa López complained that the show was being review bombed by “bros and hardcore season 1 fanboys,” requesting fans who liked the premiere of Night Country to log in to Rotten Tomatoes to help offset the audience score that had sunk a bit below the critic score.

López later retracted the “bros” comment, but indicated she was pleased with the way the audience score went up. But the whole thing was a bit bizarre, not just because of what she said, but because the score wasn’t even that low in the first place. When she complained, it was a 69%. When she posted the tweet about it going up again, it was at a 75%. But now a couple days after the premiere it’s…right back down to 69% again, where it was originally.

To be fair, for a show like this there are going to be some small pool of idiots complaining that it’s “woke” given that A) it stars two women, B) it focuses on indigenous women and C) there was at least one lesbian onscreen. But in this instance it feels more like viewers simply scored the premiere a 7/10, which, having watched the premiere, feels accurate enough.

It’s true that Rotten Tomatoes usually draws more binary 1 or 5 star reviews, but looking over the 1 stars from the last few days, it’s just a collection of “it’s boring, it didn’t hook me, I didn’t like the acting, the CGI was bad” etc. Little to nothing explicitly focused on culture wars for its own sake.

Over on IMDB, the episode has a somewhat improved 7.7/10 score with more overall users voting. And you can also see in the distribution of scores that this is…very much not review bombing. Here are the distribution of scores for the episode, with the biggest cluster in the 6-10 range.

But you want to see an episode of a show that was actually review bombed? Here is the score distribution for The Last of Us’s “Long, Long Time” when it launched, focused on a love story between two men, which absolutely drew review bombing for that reason. Just complete polarization, and no other episode received that high of a percent of one star reviews.

Again, it’s just one episode for True Detective: Night Country and to reiterate these scores are not that low. There is a difference between the audience scores and critic scores sure, but critics have also seen more episodes and this is just the initial impressions from the premiere for everyone else. With six episodes in total, there is plenty of time for the mystery to unfold. Viewers should not judge the entire show based on its premiere, and the showrunner shouldn’t start bringing out the “review bombing” defense when it really does not seem like that’s what’s happening here. Things will change in time, or if they don’t? I mean, maybe it’s just a 7/10 season.

Update: True Detective: Nighty Country’s scores have now dropped another percent, but Lopez hasn’t commented again on it, perhaps learning her lesson from the first time this happened.

Interestingly, I just saw an almost identical situation play out with Suitable Flesh, a new horror movie. Actress Barbara Crampton commented on the fact that they want to get the audience score up from a 58%, far lower than its 84%. Though in this case, I feel like it’s incredibly common for out-there horror movies to review well with critics and be trashed by audiences half the time. For example, 2023’s Skinamarink, often viewed as one of the year’s best horror films, if not the best, has a 44% audience score. Infinity Pool, one of my favorites of the year, has an 87% critic score and a 52% audience score, it happens.

It is an interesting trend, however, to see showrunners or actors directly petition fans for Rotten Tomatoes votes. Given that it does take a relatively small amount of votes to significantly move the score, you can see what “rallying the base” might do, whether it’s to fight alleged review bombing, or just people who didn’t like the movie or show. These ratings are often just 100-1,000 people with accounts voting up or down, and in this line of work I frequently hear that people don’t trust critics and are waiting for audience scores instead. So while I don’t think asking for votes is a great idea, on some level, I get it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.