I was surprised not to see The Wire among the shows listed. Its last season "subverted expectations" as d&d would say, but it still made sense: one crazy but in-character decision, others opting to collude with or ignore it, and institutional momentum handling the rest. It was crazy, but it worked within the universe of the show.
The contrast with Game of Thrones S6–8 is obvious. I suspect that the root cause is the big-budget TV show version of trying to do your homework on the bus on the way to school: expecting George R. R. Martin would finish the books before season 7, the show runners didn't put effort into writing the final storylines until it was too late. Instead of novel quality plot and dialogue, we got something between an outline and a first draft.
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I wouldn't take these GoT episode ratings on imdb as representative of the viewers' opinions. Here, the highest rated episodes are the spectacles of killing. Sure, some fans love the shock and the choreography of those scenes. But they are not what most sci fi/fantasy viewers look for, and not reflective of the dialogue and character development that many GoT fans love. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings reflect a diversity of viewers' tastes. They are better.
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'the cinematographer felt compelled to respond, saying, “The showrunners decided that this had to be a dark episode,” '
How dare we subhuman watchers question the judgement of the sublime cinematographer and the showrunners! I say we take all the complainers like myself and horsewhip them.
D&D deserves all the criticism and more. What a travesty to just phone in the final season and more or less ruining multiple plot lines from earlier episodes. Their interviews in the post episode show are similarly lacking in logic, making their explanations infuriatingly nonsensical to even a casual viewer who hasn't read the books.
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The scale is dishonest in that the base is 5, not 0. It visually implies twice as great a difference than there actually is. Something Trump would do. And I say this as someone who thinks season 8 is not as good as previous ones.
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IMDB ratings are wholly unreliable. The majority of user accounts are bots; hence, using IMDB ratings as any type of metric leads to flawed conclusions.
I know an online acquaintance who mass-created 5,000 bot accounts on IMDB, and his bot accounts "cast" their votes however he wishes when he executes a script file. Since many IMDB films have less than ten thousand votes, he can alter a film's rating in the blink of an eye with one click.
Welcome to the 21st century.
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