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I've heard only negative things about it from anywhere online that wasn't part of, or tangentially part of, the mainstream media. I'm actually surprised it's rated at 61% (though almost anything below 90% for a TV show on RT is abysmal). But it should be noted that reviews are just not worth anything anymore. Almost everything receives either universal acclaim on Rottentomatoes which translates to about 70-80 on metacritic, almost anything outside of this usually comes from a much lower amount of reviewers even bothering to review the media to begin with.
Night Country was interesting to me because I was kinda annoyed that they brought in new people but Pizzolato last two seasons were underwhelming (Though, to me, I'd put that on mostly not having Cary Fukunaga to direct every episode). I was waiting for it to finish but it was heavily advertised and I noticed it a lot. Basically it was on my tablet when opening an empty tab in Brave it puts paid news there if you scroll down and Night Country was there every week like clockwork. First, it was the rave reviews, then the huge viewership numbers, and then it was basically articles taunting people who disliked it by saying that despite a small number of online detractors it was the most successful True Detective season ever both critically and in viewership numbers. When the finale rolled around it literally used the Rolling Stone review that said it was the best ending the series has ever had.
Naturally, I went to reddit's television to see what they thought and they were aghast. Game of Thrones season 8 levels, and this was in normal non-fandom subreddit. The show's main subreddit was just memeing all over it. The best people could come up with was meek, "I didn't think it was that bad." being heavily downvoted at the bottom.
I half expected this because we're in a revival era, but nobody who actually made the original shows is participating in the revivals. They brought back Justified to make a show that was nonsensical and bad but worse was not really in any way the show that had come before. They didn't bring back any of the writers and didn't really bring back anyone but the main character, and Olyphant brought his daughter in real life to play his daughter in the show and it was just painful to watch. They brought back In Treatment but replaced Gabriel Byrne with Uzo Aduba and I just didn't even want to deal with it because aside from not bringing back the star they also didn't bring back the creative team. Frasier they brought back Kelsey only and it really shows. It's just a modern shitty/middling sitcom that happens to have the same character. Why are they not even bothering to try to make these good at all? The exception I'll give is Party Down which, funnily enough brought back everyone they could, including the creative team. Even when it was blatently political and culture warring it was still better than these lazy ersatz elevator-music cover songs of something people used to like.
Night Country is just an example of things that have come before and haven't been noticed because most of the time things can squeeze by with just the right amount of mediocrity. They put their leads and creative lead front and center and girl-bossed their way into being called a good show, after they stole another show's name for seemingly little reason other than marketing. But all these things compound the other way. The better your show is supposed to be the worse it seems when it's not and this goes similarly to taking another's show's name for no reason. The culture war only exists when these projects fail, you don't like it you're sexist/racist/etc, otherwise it's yaasss queen slay even if it's just barely clearing the bar of success.
I think there is a simple explanation for this dynamic. Imagine you're big media conglomerate such as Disney, and you own an innumerable number of IPs. If you try to do a "full revival" of a reasonably old show with not only all/most of the cast but also all/most of the original creative team, you'll run into the problem that media has not only a particularly extreme rate of turnover and both mobility and stickiness at different points in the career. Some people will not even be in Showbiz anymore and you will have to hunt them down, some will have become so sucessful that they're exceptionally well-paid, some will have carved out a comfortable main role in a mediocre but long-running TV show that they flat-out refuse to join the revival no matter what. It's tedious, it's expensive, and you might still just end up with a few anyway since the others refuse. So you ONLY attempt this if you're really, really confident about its success.
Now imagine you want to do a fully new IP. It has no old fans that you can appeal to, it has no basic structure that you know to work. So it's inherently risky.
On the other hand, a "lazy revival" is easy & cheap . It's basically all the upsides of a new IP, but much safer; You're almost guaranteed to have a lucrative first season, and if the viewer numbers are visibly crashing on the later episodes than you just discontinue it right there. And it costs you nothing extra as you're already owning the old IP anyway. You just send a call out to a small number of original cast members that seem likely to join and add to the recognisability. You hire a bunch of cheap, new creative members who get a chance to show their chops or get the cut. And the woke/SJW worldview lends itself very well to replacing most of the cast, so you use that as the cover ("we're just updating this old, beloved western classic to be more in-line with modern global viewer preferences"). Not that people don't believe that worldview, but the other way around, people tend to believe worldviews that are convenient for them.
Obviously, there is always some cases where it seems to be just dumb; Buying an expensive IP and then ruining it with a bad new cast & creative team. But I think it has become an almost industry-standard because of the former. And in some cases, such as Star Wars, they arguably did put in a lot of work; They got decent parts of the original cast, J.J. Abrams, whatever your opinion of him, is a sucessful movie director and they clearly tried to replicate the structure of the old movies (and too much so, in my opinion).
I think the problems with the Star Wars sequel trilogy can mainly be blamed on Iger rushing it to theaters.
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I think that about the third time I watched a "certified fresh" Marvel movie and walked out of the theater feeling like it was a mediocre waste of time I fully updated on critic reviews being compromised. To be clear, it's not just Disney movies that this applies to, but they do seem to be the biggest benefactors.
At this point, I get my film recommendations either from RedLetterMedia or the MauLer Clique (the Efap podcast), and even with the latter, only the core three plus maaaaybe Critical Drinker; too many partisan hacks further down the ladder.
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