True Detective: Night Country's showrunner Issa López raised an interesting theory (and a few eyebrows) this week when she accused “bros and hardcore season 1 fanboys” of review bombing the popular HBO show's Rotten Tomatoes audience score rating in a (since deleted) social media post.
No doubt, bros and hardcore fanboys can generally be blamed for many 0f society's ills, but was it a particularly fair accusation to level in this case? Forbes did a deep dive piece on the controversy, debating how valid and/or widespread the True Detective showrunner's concern about “review bombing” really is.
Interestingly, the author of the Forbes piece notes that the Rotten Tomatoes audience score wasn't that bad when López weighed in (69%). It went up a bit after her critique (to 75%), but as of Friday is now back around where it started before the controversy, at 69%.
López's decision to since delete her inflammatory tweets may be an indication that she was a little premature in her judgment, but it raised attention to the issue of “review bombing” in general.
The Forbes piece argues that the practice definitely does exist — the True Detective case just wasn't the best example of it. The subtext of López's initial comment about “bros” and “fanboys” has an undercurrent of blaming the culture wars on the low rating, and the Forbes piece acknowledges the validity of that.
“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,” the Forbes piece explains.
It continues, “But in this instance it feels more like viewers simply scored the premiere a 7/10, which, having watched the premiere, feels accurate enough.”
The article does however feel that culture war differences were to blame for another popular HBO show's puzzlingly low rating for one particular episode. In the hugely successful The Last of Us, the show received its lowest ratings by far for its “Long, Long Time” episode from Season 1, which focused on a love story between two male characters on the show, Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett).
The Forbes piece called the audience score for that episode “Just complete polarization, and no other episode received that high of a percent of one star reviews.”
In short, review bombing does unfortunately seem to be a real practice on Rotten Tomatoes and other popular show review sites, and close-minded bros and fanboys may indeed be the culprits. But in the case of True Detective: Night Country, showrunner Issa López may be off the mark in leveling the accusation.
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