Outer Banks is one of Netflix’s most successful series. It’s made it to five seasons and been allowed a series finale to end on its own terms. Netflix doesn’t even want to fully let it go, as a new prequel series set 20 years earlier, Kildare, is now officially in development with the Outer Banks creators.
So, why do essentially no critics care? We are in a very strange, very unusual situation where, days after the release of Outer Banks season 5, which immediately went to #1 on Netflix, there are not even enough critics who have watched and reviewed it to give it a Rotten Tomatoes score. Just four reviews are in, and while them all being positive would in theory produce a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, it’s not enough to “count” right now.
This is unusual. While shows that aren’t the highest-profile on Netflix may not get enough reviews for a score either, a show like Outer Banks, running five seasons into a grand finale, not even getting five reviews across the entire industry reflects an odd state of the TV criticism scene. In contrast, a much, much lower profile series like My Brilliant Career has two dozen reviews in, giving that series a verified 100%, a significant figure on Rotten Tomatoes when the total passes a certain threshold.
It’s part of a pattern here with Outer Banks. Only season 1 has even more than 10 reviews after all this time, yet viewership that has allowed it to sail to five seasons. It’s a different story on IMDB where fans have voted and awarded the series its first 9/10+ episode for the grand finale (although its overall average is below season 2’s). It is currently the seventh most popular series on all of IMDB, only behind the likes of Lanterns, Reacher and Ted Lasso.
Part of this is Outer Banks itself, but it is also part of a disparity I’ve noticed in the allocation of critical resources across the entire entertainment community, which is heavily skewed in favor of movies, and even video games, while television is often left behind with a fraction of the attention. Take It Ends, the highly scored but extremely limited release (so far) horror movie. It has 73 reviews in, thanks to concentrated critics attending early/festival screenings. Another high-scoring horror movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, already has 232(!) reviews, and it only finally opened wide this weekend.
It’s not that these movies don’t deserve a critical eye, but given the breakdown of the current age of entertainment, it is strange that so few TV shows get close to the amount of attention from critics when they are more widely watched by audiences than anything else here. A lot of this is a problem of resources. Journalism, and entertainment journalism in particular, is not exactly in a healthy state. Though here, allocation seems off given the changing landscape of media. I wonder if many outlets will ever catch up, or if this is only going to get more pronounced in time.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
