I'm sure we all know about the low audience scores given to The Acolyte. Rotten Tomatoes was sitting down at 14% since around the third episode, and was that low up until at least the last episode. Now that it's nearly a week out from the season finale, I figured I'd take another look.
The Rotten Tomatoes score has gone up to 17% and other review platforms have gone up a bit also.
So I decided to read through a few of the recent ones. Here are two examples:
The showrunners accuse fans of "review bombing" but are apparently just fine with artificial review boosting. I saw a bunch of these double reviews and nearly every single one talked about things like diversity, a "fresh take", production values, etc, all in that typical bland corporate-speech type of language.
Whereas the negative reviews are detailed and specific without ever getting into racism, bigotry, sexism, or other things fans are often accused of. If you read through the negative reviews they are often well thought out criticisms of the story itself and the quality of acting.
I just wanted to bring this fake review boosting to the community's attention. If you enjoyed the show, that's awesome. But it's dishonest to dilute honest and fair criticisms of a show.
Both the ones getting paid for review boosting and also the ones who are, for some particular reason, blindly following the new Star Wars bad except Andor trend.
At least the first group is explicitly getting paid. I can't make any case for the second group - they could try growing a piece of criticism on their own, but it's likely that they are youngsters trying to fit in. They don't get paid either, so why do they even waste their time?
I've mentioned this in another comment, but out of curiosity I've read through a whole lot of the comments and reviews. The vast majority of positive reviews are bland "as a long time star wars fan the diversity of this show is great" types of language. Whereas the majority of the negative reviews were unique and valid criticisms with no racism, sexism, bigotry, or anything like that and were all worded uniquely.