4 TV Shows With Bad Reviews That Are Actually Very Good

How often have you wanted to start a show, only to check its reviews and wonder if you’d just be wasting your time? It happens, but it’s worth remembering that ratings don’t tell the whole story, whether they come from critics or from some of the people who have already experienced the series. Sometimes, a show gets hurt by overly high expectations, takes too long to find its footing, or just offers a type of entertainment that doesn’t impress everyone in the same way. That’s why you can still find plenty of viewers who end up enjoying them anyway. Of course, that doesn’t mean every poorly rated show is some unfairly overlooked masterpiece, but sometimes it’s worth putting the ratings aside and simply watching it for yourself.

Maybe, if you think about it, you can remember a few series that managed to pleasantly surprise you. So, on this list, you’ll find 4 examples that are both underrated and popular, and that have generally been criticized or are still criticized, but are actually much better than you might expect.

4) The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

It’s difficult to talk about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power without opening up a discussion about whether the show is a good adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien, but maybe that’s actually the problem: a lot of people seem to have made up their minds about it before even looking at what the show is trying to do. The story takes place thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and follows different characters throughout the Second Age of Middle-earth, as Sauron (Charlie Vickers) returns and the Rings of Power are created. And sure, the first seasons can be a little slow, with some storylines taking way too long to get somewhere, and it probably would have benefited from a tighter structure. Still, that’s far from making the show a complete disaster.

When The Rings of Power gets things right, it really delivers the kind of epic fantasy that TV rarely manages to pull off on this scale: Middle-earth feels absolutely huge, every place has its personality, and many characters get more interesting as the story comes together. Plus, the second season also shows how the series learns from its own mistakes. Overall, it gets more backlash from the Tolkien fandom than from critics, but that may be because some of the disappointment comes from issues that not many people are aware of. The truth is that if you go into it expecting a new version of Peter Jackson’s movies, you definitely won’t be satisfied.

3) Emily in Paris

Some shows almost seem to get criticized just for having another season — Emily in Paris is one of them. However, it’s pretty easy to understand at least some of it. In the story, Emily (Lily Collins) is an American working in marketing who moves to Paris without speaking French, starts working at a French agency and, while trying to adjust to her new job, gets caught up in friendships, romances, and a completely ridiculous number of situations that probably wouldn’t happen in real life. And the problem is that a lot of people insist on judging the show as if it were trying to be a realistic portrayal of Paris or some great comedy about the workplace, when it was never really that. It’s basically a “romantic fantasy” designed to be exaggerated and easy to watch.

The show’s criticisms mostly revolve around its abundance of clichés, stereotypical portrayal of the French, and lack of depth, yet it’s heading into its sixth and final season because it still has an audience. And you know why? The characters are all charismatic, the situations are easy to follow, the locations and outfits are part of the entertainment, and Collins’ performance is brilliant at playing a character who can be annoying without ever stopping being fun to watch. Emily in Paris doesn’t need to be smart to be good; it just needs to give that very specific kind of escapism where you sit down to watch one episode and, before you know it, you’ve already binged the whole thing.

2) The Crowded Room

The Crowded Room would have received a less hostile reception from critics if it had told its story in a faster way, but that would also take away part of the point of what the series is trying to do. In this overlooked production, we meet Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland), a young man arrested in New York in 1979 after getting involved in a crime, as investigator Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried) tries to figure out what really happened. The problem is that the answers take a long time to come, the story goes back and forth, information is revealed little by little, and sometimes it feels like it’s dragging things out right when you just want it to finally reveal what’s going on. But there’s an important difference between a show that takes its time telling a story and a show that doesn’t know what story it wants to tell, right? This one does.

When the revelations finally come, they start changing the way you see the protagonist, and the whole structure that could have felt frustrating starts to make much more sense, because the series is trying to build a mystery just as much as it is trying to build the character. And Holland is a huge part of that, since his performance in such a difficult role keeps you more and more interested in Danny. To sum up, The Crowded Room is a pretty convincing deconstruction of a serious disorder, and the whole plot rewards those who are willing to be patient with it. Its pacing isn’t really a problem, but it can certainly be one for anyone who prefers things to move a little faster.

1) The Terminal List

Another one that pretty much nobody talks about, The Terminal List, doesn’t really feel like it was made to be taken seriously by critics in the first place, especially when you look at the huge gap between its critic and audience scores. The story follows James Reece (Chris Pratt), a Navy SEAL who returns home after nearly his entire platoon is killed in an ambush and starts to realize that maybe the mission didn’t go wrong by accident. From there, we get a story of conspiracy and revenge involving the military, the government, and a list of people the protagonist believes are responsible for what happened to his team. It’s basically a thriller built around tension and paranoia, but one that isn’t afraid to pack in some action along the way too.

And make no mistake: this isn’t just your typical revenge story or something wrapped up in a philosophical discussion about war. The whole idea behind The Terminal List is to put James in a situation that keeps you getting worse, to the point where you just want to keep watching to find out how far he’ll go to uncover the truth. Some of the twists may not be that difficult to predict, but it’s still a show with plenty of originality and quality. It delivers what it promises, and you never feel like you’ve wasted your time, which is what matters most. Now that Season 2 is on the way, it’s a great recommendation for anyone who enjoys the genre and wants to check out something new.

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