The Witcher

I see people pointing out the ridiculously high rotten score for the Witcher series. But rotten score can be misleading and tricky to understand.

For example, season 2, has a rotten score of 95%!!!! But looking at the score more closely, it has a medium rating of 8. And if you choose "top critics" it will drop to 82% with an average score of 7.5!! To make it all much more confusing, the same season has a metascore of 69 which is mixed/average and tbh pretty low for a high budget tv series.

But how can these numbers be so different? The answer is in how metascore and rotten score are calculated.

Metacritic uses a simple but solid method. It uses the scores given by critics, convert them to out of 100 scores (4 out of 5 star=80 and so on) and calculates the average score.

Rotten tomatoes on the other hand uses a totally different method. It gives any reviews a fresh or rotten score, based on their interpretation of the review, and then calculates the percentage of "fresh" reviews. And this is the source of all the problems. A critic might give a show a pretty lukewarm review, and still be considered "fresh"!

Let's look at an imaginary scenario:

Five critics gave a series their reviews. Two of the gave it three out of four stars. Two it two and a half and one gave it zero.

Meta score will be (75+75+62.5+62.5+0)/5=55" 55 is considered mixed/average and is a fairly low score.

Rotten score will be "(1+1+1+1+0)/5*100=80%"

As you can see the results are vastly different. One can say rotten tomatoes favors mediocre shows and gives them inflated scores. This is why, I, like many other more serious movie enthusiasts, usually use metacritic as our reference. Specially as rotten uses some less credible/amateurish critics which sometimes clearly doesn't have any idea what they are talking about.

Tldr: rotten system of scoring is highly flawed and should be taken with a grain of salt (or three).