Angry dudes are downranking woman-oriented TV shows on review sites

[jerwin]

@anon50609448

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.”

In SAC2, Stanford marries Anthony.

[ficuswhisperer]

As a cis male who watched all of Sex and the City (not the movies) it was… fine. I don’t consider it an affront to masculinity or anything. My main gripe was I found many of the characters to be thoroughly vapid and unlikeable and some of the plotlines were just downright insulting (some were also great). This is a show that has a very specific demographic and if you’re not in it, you probably won’t like it.

[dman]

TFA ends with such a cute line:

… it’s time to ask whether user scores are truly as objective as they purport to be.

That’s adorable.

{insert gif here}

[awfulhorrid]

@anon50609448

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.

I strongly regret that I can only like this comment once.

[TheUnspokenName]

@chgoliz

The point of a ratings system is to indicate how well the show does what it’s supposed to do. I’m not a fan of soap operas, let’s say, but I can understand that for those who are interested in watching them, some shows do the genre much better than others. Those fans are the ones whose rating actually means something.

Something is making non-fans of certain genres game the system by artificially lowering the stats. Why is that effort so important to them?

Maybe that’s the point of some ratings systems. Maybe it’s the point of your ratings system. But Netflix? No. The ratings you assign on Netflix are used by Netflix algorithms when it calculates how much you’ll like other shows you haven’t seen yet. Rating a show on Netflix has absolutely nothing to do with telling other people how much the show meets some arbitrary pseudo-objective standards as set by chgoliz. It has everything to do with informing the Netflix software what kind of movies you personally like/dislike, including how much you dislike them, to improve the recommendations you get from it for what to watch, or how much it thinks you will like a show you’re browsing.

Maybe you’re happy getting lots of 5 star recommendations from Netflix for movies that “do what they’re supposed to do”; but I much prefer to have movies recommended on whether or not I’ll enjoy watching them.

[manybellsdown]

Mr. Bells likes sitcoms a lot. I prefer slow-paced murder mysteries. He doesn’t make me watch Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I don’t make him watch Foyle’s War. He jokingly calls my Netflix choices “the Boring Show.” But I don’t go downrating “Always Sunny” just because I don’t think it’s funny and he doesn’t downrate my shows just because they’re full of grumpy old British men.

@Mangochin

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.

Another show that does this is the Australian Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. There’s the “murder of the week” which is different in each episode, and then there’s an overarching season plot with a shadowy bad guy that some or all of each episode’s murders will tie into.

Incidentally, I started watching Miss Fisher because of negative Netflix ratings. Apparently, people were downvoting it because the heroine is a woman of approximately 40, who sleeps with anyone and everyone she likes. In 1927. Numerous Netflix reviews complained about her being “too slutty” so I was like “hmm I need to watch THIS!”

[milliefink]

@manybellsdown

Incidentally, I started watching Miss Fisher because of negative Netflix ratings. Apparently, people were downvoting it because the heroine is a woman of approximately 40, who sleeps with anyone and everyone she likes. In 1927. Numerous Netflix reviews complained about her being “too slutty” so I was like “hmm I need to watch THIS!”

[dman]

@JamesBean

way out of proportion for the normal bell-curve distribution of most films with average ratings

Interesting to see that it really is a bell-curve… https://www.quora.com/Do-the-user-ratings-on-IMDB-follow-a-bell-curve-If-so-what-is-the-mean-and-standard-deviation

As I personally never bother to vote online unless I really have an opinion to share, and don’t bother to vote at all on mid-range feelings - I’d actually expected to see some sort of polarised inverse bell, or at least a flatter one due to the activities of superfans and haters being more active than folk who log in just to say that things are sorta OK.

I was totally wrong, so that’s good to have learned.

[jyoti]

Also @milliefink : off topic, but Essie Davis, who plays Phryne, is evidently currently shooting scenes for Game of Thrones, if you happen to also be into that…

[KarlS]

At least in my case I rate primarily to keep track of movies I have seen. Years ago I used a list for that, but the integration is much better if you rate. That results in many middling ratings.

[Phrenological]

Geez, I was not prepared for iZombie to be nearly as badass as this show has become.

I liked Veronica Mars, but the dialogue and characters, while similar have attained new heights, and the stakes have gotten RIDICULOUS.

[sdmikev]

@KarlS

Granted, if only the averages were different, but that doesn’t really explain the extreme votes. Is it really reasonable to rate something 1/10, especially if you don’t consider yourself part of the target audience

You have a point. This is why I pretty much gave up on Yelp a long time ago.
Some dummy would go to an English Gastropub style restaurant and rate it low because there were not enough “vegetarian and vegan choices”. What kind of special idiot is that?
Or starts off a sushi restaurant review (this is real) with “I don’t like fish”. Which makes me hate that person anyhow, but WTF.

[rossleonardy]

I know you’re joking, but I think in a way you just demonstrated the problem here. It’s not so much genre disinterest that drives these negative reviews, but actually an inability to understand different value systems because of one’s life experiences.

SATC isn’t primarily, or even secondarily, about the men the women date, who are mostly interchangeable and irrelevant. Nor do the four main characters all have the same goal of ‘marrying up’ or dating rich guys; in fact, the show is often about the social resistance that happens when they do the opposite, the lack of fulfilment they might feel when they do, etcetera. All four of them have completely different goals with relationships that all change over time; and fwiw, they’re all career women with financial independence from the men they date. For a lot of men socialized in america, I would argue that this crosses over from an uninteresting topic to one they actually might not have the experience to understand.

Sorry for the long essay, but I really do feel like it’s actually an incredibly important show that gets a bad rap in mainstream culture for being seen as frivolous.

[piratejenny]

Miss Fisher is THE BEST. And I have to give my sweetie credit for discovering the show. I think I’ll keep him

[anon50609448]

@rossleonardy

Sorry for the long essay, but I really do feel like it’s actually an incredibly important show that gets a bad rap in mainstream manstream culture for being seen as frivolous.

See what I did there?

[Zaphod]

@chgoliz

If you don’t enjoy watching a show – and thus probably don’t even watch the show – why would you go out of your way to rate it online?

Well, if someone is logged into IMDB a quick search and a vote is not exactly a huge effort.
You don’t have to go out of your way to rate anything.

@chgoliz

The point of a ratings system is to indicate how well the show does what it’s supposed to do.

To me a rating system is a way i express how i liked, or disliked, something.
A smart system would then give a rating customized on how a similar group evaluated the movie/book/other stuff.
We’ll get there, eventually.

[Mangochin]

I started watching out of timeslot inertia initially. (Veronica Mars was one of those shows I should like but just never got around to watching) But it had me hooked. Such great bantering. Dynamic character development. Plus like Hannibal, this is a show whose “long pig” cooking sequences look pretty tasty.

[jerwin]

@Zaphod

To me a rating system is a way i express how i liked, or disliked, something.

if the rating system is used to “match” or “reccomend” otherwise obscure items to me, the ratings I assign won’t be carefully considered critiques.

[macunningham]

From the article:

Nearly 60 percent of the people who rated “Sex and the City” on IMDb are women

[Zaphod]

@Boundegar

Do they have to be angry?

You miss the part where a secret pressure sensitive button records the strength of the vote-clicks!
Much much anger!