So there may be two things going on here. Men may be lashing out against female-oriented programming in a gamergatey kind of way, or they may downvoting out of a passive sense of entitlement. That is, they feel as though they are, or should be, the target audience for everything, so a show is therefore flawed if it fails to cater to their interests. Women don’t expect everything to be directed at them, so they’re not downvoting Airwolf, though they may find it just as tiresome.
I’m sure both factors are operating. If you want to parse out how much is misogyny and how much is general male entitlement (or aggressiveness), then the next question to ask might be something like “Do men who hate science tend to downvote Nova documentaries more often than women who hate science?”
I will admit a lot of my appreciation of Carter comes from Haley Atwell. They show also had a “Murderers Row” of fun supporting actors (Enver Gokaj, Ray Wise, Ken Marino, James_D’Arcy, Kurtwood Smith).
If there is a show with a gorgeous actress in a regular part, it will have my attention. I am easy to please that way. Its about the only thing I can explain as to why I sat through the first 4 seasons of Desperate Housewives (Terri Hatcher and Marcia Cross…sigh).
You think women’s show are a problem, check this shit out:
imdb rating for Dora the Explorer - 3.8/10
Not educational at all (1/10)
I find it to repetitive to be honest… (1/10)
Poor! (3/10)
Don’t like it at all (1/10)
From a review entitled “My god, this show is TERRIBLE!”
The Swiper scenes. Dora tells your child to say “Swiper no swiping!” and 95% of the time he stops in his tracks and says “Oh man!” If a robber ever tried to steal something from you if you said “no swiping” like they would really stop? NO. How unrealistic and dangerous to teach little kids.
I was one! I think it would help a lot if someone video-edited SITC and put floating text over all the men’s heads showing occupation and salary at all times. That would at least help men keep up with the plot.
IMDB does have some sort of recommendations engine, but I don’t think it’s very pervasive. If you were trying to game that system, you might think that a 1/10 would represent “Not Interested” in the absence of a distinct option for that.
I doubt that there are more people interested in the IMDB recommendations than there are terrible misogynists, but I suppose it’s possible and I might just be jaded.
The crazy thing is a lot of them aren’t. One of the reviews was about how the reviewers sister told them about how lousy the show was after babysitting. They hadn’t watched a full episode.
That’s actually a missing piece from trying to understand why people write bad reviews of shows - people apparently write reviews of shows they have never even seen based on descriptions they have heard.
Of course some of them are parents complaining that the show isn’t educational. Every time I see that I want to reach through the screen and shake them. “Is your kid having fun watching the show?!? Then shut the fuck up about education!”
iZombie has been doing something interesting with its overall season long villains. They seem to keep 2 villains going on at the same time. An active villain who drives the season’s plot and a passive one who is in the background as a looming threat. They are not “bigger and badder” and much as different. One villain is gone but a new one enters with a different agenda.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned IMDB’s well known voting bias against black-ish movies. I first noticed it myself a decade ago in the voting for Drumline (2002) when it was rated in the low 4’s. Today the rating is up in the mid 5’s but it took years and years to bring it up.
You can still see some of the original down-voting in the vote distribution where 9% of the voters gave it a 1 which is way out of proportion for the normal bell-curve distribution of most films with average ratings (usually about 2% give them a 1).
That’s 9% of men who had an opinion strong enough that they felt they had to share it on IMDB.
… which is, I guess, half of the point of the article. That this self-selected group of voters is more interested in letting people know what they don’t like.
So shows aimed at women, children, black people all get bad ratings.
Wow, if I didn’t know better I would think a bunch of white men felt a need to have their opinions heard on subjects that largely don’t affect them.
A friend liked the first movie and went to see the second. After watching the second they looked vaguely unhappy. I asked them how it was and got an answer to the effect of, “We’re never going to talk about it.”
