The 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 seeks to justify the reported $1bn it spent on a five-season commitment in 2017. For the rest of us, though, there’s a chance that the show itself will once again take a back seat to the discourse swirling round it. Because, while the first season of The Rings of Power could be a little slow at times, it was nothing compared to the absolute firestorm of backlashes it received.
Some of these were more justified than others. The show’s very existence felt unnecessary – its entire point seemingly being the bulking out of peripheral details from JRR Tolkien’s stories. At times, the acting was extremely dodgy. Plus, it featured the most questionable array of accents ever committed to screen, with the Irish ones so bad that it prompted the Irish Times to call it “famine cosplay”.
However, with grim inevitability, a huge chunk of the backlash was racist in nature. Diehard Tolkien fans took against the casting of Black actors (including Lenny Henry playing a Harfoot, one of the show’s proto-Hobbits). Elsewhere, the decision to give one female dwarf facial hair sparked fury from people who were either repulsed 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 for shows they disagree with ideologically, in an attempt to drag down their overall rating.
This was something that Amazon anticipated. Last year, its studio chief Jennifer Salke noted bleakly that “having insight into our global audience, we also have insight into the darker sides of how people can manipulate reviews” – so as a precaution it made the decision to impose a 72-hour delay on Rings of Power’s user ratings, allowing moderators to weed out bad faith reviews. But guess what? There was a backlash to that, too, leading to online theorising that Amazon was protecting its billion-dollar investment rather than allowing free speech, with flocks of Redditors making statements such as: “You know your show is garbage when you have to force feed it to people.”And:“the fact that they are controlling what people can say about the show means [it] is utter complete trash.”
Not that The Rings of Power is alone in getting a backlash. There seems to be a lot of it about at the moment. The Boys (also a Prime Video show) saw a catastrophic drop in its Rottentomatoes user rating this year. While its first season scored an impressive 91% from users, this year’s season four only mustered a measly 54%.
Although it wasn’t the best run of The Boys – it felt a lot like everyone was keeping their powder dry for next year’s finale – there’s a sense that many bad reviews came from angry Republicans who learned too late that the show was a satire on the Trump-era United States. This is backed up by the Rottentomatoes page, which is full of tossed-off half-star reviews such as “the people running it think it’s their job to make a show to air their values and beliefs instead of entertain” and, apparently alluding to one character’s growing sense of compassion, “the french is an asshole”.
Damon Lindelof knows about review bombing. His 2019 Watchmen series had to overcome a huge amount of backlash before it even began. First, Alan Moore – the co-creator of the source material – was publicly hostile about the adaptation, and then Lindelof had the temerity to not only cast a Black woman as the lead, but use the 1921 Tulsa race massacre as the show’s inciting incident. Despite universal critical acclaim, a noisy group of users bombed Watchmen’s Rottentomatoes page, taking its score down as low as 43%.
“I only have power over criticism that I feel is reasonable on my own terms,” Lindelof says of the response to Watchmen. “But review bombing is disproportionately because a beloved piece of IP has been rendered woke, or there’s too many women in it, or there’s too many people of colour in it, or it’s sympathetic to LGBTQIA+ issues.”
Does knowing that these reviews are politically motivated make it easier to deal with a tumbling user rating? “I can completely and totally dismiss it, because very often the individuals haven’t even seen it,” Lindelof says. “Any criticism once you’ve seen the thing doesn’t bother me. But criticism made by individuals 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 the majority of backlashes tend to happen to shows that already exist in one form or another. 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 noisy faction still protested about the new female-led direction, fanned by Pizzolatto’s inexplicable decision to amplify negative comments through 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 Doll’s Leslye Headland, or perhaps because it attempted to add some breadth to the Star Wars universe, a vocal minority of fans have trashed the show online wherever possible, with one IMDb reviewer calling it nothing less than “cultural vandalism”. When it was cancelled after only one series, its star Amandla Stenberg blamed it on “a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language toward us”.
Unsurprisingly, backlashes often don’t represent the true reaction. Despite everything, Night Country received the highest ratings of any True Detective series, and The Acolyte was consistently in the top 10 most-viewed shows across all streaming platforms. Meanwhile, Watchmen won 11 Emmys and a Peabody award, and was HBO’s most-watched new series since 2017.
Still, backlashes don’t always come from fans. Google “TV show backlash” today and you’ll likely find a results page dominated by one show. Piglets is an ITV sitcom by the creative team behind Green Wing, and to say that it’s had a bumpy time of it would be a colossal understatement. The show follows a band of trainee police officers, and before it had even aired, the Police Federation issued a statement decrying the title.
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“The new ITV show titled Piglets is highly offensive to police officers risking their lives to protect the public every day by providing an emergency service,” the statement read. “It is a disgusting choice of language to use for the title of a TV programme.” Additionally, more than 100 complaints were made to Ofcom about the show.
“We worked with police officers while we were developing it, and they genuinely said they thought the name was funny,” sighs James Henry, one of the writers of Piglets. “It’s about the cadets, so we thought it was a funny thing to call them. But it got a lot of people’s backs up.”
How has Piglets’ treatment coloured Henry’s reaction to the show? Happily, he seems sanguine about it all. “I’m quite sympathetic to people who didn’t like it,” he says. “Maybe they had a shit week, and they just wanted to laugh at something, and this didn’t do it for them. There’s a visceral reaction with comedy. And at least the people who reacted gave it a chance. They all sat down and watched at least 10 minutes of it, which they didn’t have to do.
“It’s a big daft 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 and misunderstanding each other and falling over, which I’m always a huge fan of.”
A backlash may be noisy enough to make the news, but there’s proof that it won’t affect how a show is perceived. At the time of writing, The Boys is the most-viewed original show on Prime Video. The Rings of Power was apparently its most-watched original show ever. And in its first week of broadcast Piglets was the second most-watched comedy on British TV.
What’s more, when a faction of people are trashing a show, it often makes true fans come out and defend it even harder. “Someone sent me a link to the Empire podcast, which I was nervous about listening to, but the host was raving about it,” says Henry. “He saw the first three episodes and he loved it.”
So, though you might assume a public backlash must be galling for the people who worked hard on a show, that often isn’t the case. If they’re able to stick to their vision, enjoy the work and maintain a healthy perspective, it’s remarkably easy to ride out the storm. Of course, it also helps to know that you won’t always be for everyone. “I found a school report the other day from when I was 10,” says Henry. “It says: ‘James’s sense of humour is not always shared by the rest of us.’ So this is nothing new.”