A TV Tomatometer

Big things are afoot in the world of television criticism. Rotten Tomatoes, the now ubiquitous movie review aggregator site, just announced that they would be creating a Tomatometer for television reviews. Seasons rather than individual episodes will be rated, and only scripted series will be covered. Reality shows need not apply for now. Over at the AV Club, they've announced a new TV Reviews section, specifically to provide reviews that match this criteria, instead of their usual episode-by-episode analyses.

The logistics are going to be more complicated than with film reviews. In the Variety story announcing the expansion into television, the site's editor-in-chief acknowledged that ratings would be more fluid and subject to change, especially in the case of series that are currently airing. Because standard network television seasons run for eight months and roughly two dozen episodes, a show has plenty of time to go from being great to ghastly, or vice versa. The TV Tomatometer's launch coincides with the start of the new fall season, and the reviews for new shows will be based on the handful given to critics early. Many of those initial grades could be completely different by midseason in December.

On the other hand, many of us don't consume television the traditional way anymore. Thanks to streaming services, many viewers discover shows online after several seasons are already completed. I started watching "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" through Netflix. Television series, not films, have become the major engine behind the success of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Instant, and Hulu, with all three now producing their own original series to keep feeding their content pipelines. In a week, we're about to witness the first Emmys where web-exclusive shows like "House of Cards" are in contention for major awards.

A TV Tomatometer makes sense now where it hadn't in the past, because now we have ready access to so many seasons of so many shows, and have the ability to pick and choose between them. Many of us already do - watching "The X-files" up to season six only, for instance, or skipping over year four of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," where she was dating a non-vampire. I expect that it'll also be helpful with the new fall premieres, helping to give a boost to the critical favorites, or even the mostly trashed shows - FOX's "Dads" has been marketing itself on the basis of its most unfavorable reviews lately.

Of course the biggest winners here will be the television critics themselves. A TV Tomatometer gives them a new kind of clout, putting them on equal footing with their movie reviewing counterparts. And this is yet another sign that television and movies are now just about on the same level of relevance in the popular culture. There aren't many television critics who are household names, though there are certainly some worthy of discussion, and this might provide the impetus for people to start paying more attention to their oft-overlooked species, if only to start complaining about them.

And more importantly, serious television criticism itself is getting more attention. Because of all the challenges with variable review formats (Are they reviewing by episode? Season? The whole enchilada?) and the time commitment necessary to fully review a show, it's always been more difficult to provide reader-friendly analysis of a television series. However, some of the most interesting media conversations in recent years have been about television, about Tony Soprano and Hannah Horvath and Stringer Bell, who loom larger than any movie counterparts in recent years you could name.

I, for one, welcome our new tomato overlords, though I'm well aware this experiment could turn out to be a bust. Tomatometer scores have always been reductive and problematic, but they've had their impact. The Tomatometer is more accessible than any of the individual columns or publications that the best TV critics write for. Rotten Tomatoes alternative, Metacritic, has been offering television reviews for years, but never got much traction with them. Maybe it's because Metacritic is a smaller and less trafficked site. Maybe it's because TV criticism hasn't quite caught on yet.

The only real negative that I'm worried about here is that because Rotten Tomatoes has chosen to focus on season reviews, it might incentivize some critics to spend less time on individual episode reviews, which are by far my favorites. I read the Alan Sepinwall, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Todd VanDerWerff recaps after I've finished off my own write-up of the new "Breaking Bad" episodes every week. Then again, the AV Club is choosing to keep their episodic coverage and expand into season-long reviews, and there's no reason to think that won't be the case with most outlets.

Mostly, though, I'm excited that the Tomatometer will provide a good conversation starter for future discussions of TV, just as it has for the movies.
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