Film and Television in Social and Cultural Context.

Television reviewing has a significant impact on how the industry works; specially because in this high unified mediatic world, individuals have the need to speak their mind about their experiences and become an influence to other people’s choice of entertainment, and as this choice is being crafted by society, so is the cultural context and the “rules” of what makes a TV product good, interesting or enjoyable. A proof of that is the large network of magazines, newspaper columns and websites dedicated to the TV reviewing activity, such as the popular internet tool: Rotten Tomatoes. (Rotten Tomatoes, 2016)

The website describes this way: “Rotten Tomatoes and the Tomatometer rating is the most trusted measurement of quality entertainment. As the leading online aggregator of movie and TV show reviews from professional critics, Rotten Tomatoes offers the most comprehensive guide to what's fresh. The world famous Tomatometer rating represents the percentage of positive professional reviews for films and TV shows and is used by millions every day, to help with their entertainment viewing decisions. Rotten Tomatoes designates the best reviewed movies and TV shows as Certified Fresh™. That accolade is awarded with Tomatometer ratings of 75% and higher, and a required minimum number of reviews.” (Rotten Tomatoes, 2016).

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The brand identity is shown by the website in the description and aim for being the website that users trust the most. Rotten Tomatoes tries to accomplish certain standard of quality, and their method is to select what sources and critics can be approved to base their Tomatometer rating. The criteria to the approval of their sources and capable critics is that they must fit in a set of standards, they must come “from accredited media outlets and online film societies” (Flixter, 2016). As well Rotten Tomatoes require experience from the critics, asking for no less than a hundred publications on film or TV. Also they have to be employed as a film critic in a publication certified by the website for at least two years. The website uses the same list of critics to evaluate each movie and TV show, it claims that this way the Tomatometer is consistent and unbiased.

Television reviewing, for the website has been growing over the past years. The website started as movie rating tool, but it has it’s own TV section in the main display of the website, in which the user is able to see the ratings of the most popular TV shows on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest rated ones, the new TV episodes that air every night and a “certified fresh pick” (Rotten Tomatoes, 2016), which is a recommendation based on popularity.

The website has an interesting user-website interaction because it’s meant to “guide” those who are struggling to make a decision on entertainment choices, and one way they do it is to present a rating that has been obtained from certified experts. This means that Rotten Tomatoes acknowledges that the user isn’t an expert but is looking for expert quality reviews, and wants quality in the content that receives.

Also the website does a segregation on opinions. It has the Tomatometer which ensures an unbiased quality standard rating by the selectiveness already explained, but it also provides the “audience score” (Rotten Tomatoes, 2016). This score lets the audience participate on the website. According to Flixter, which is the costumer portal, the audience score works this way: “Users like you can submit a rating out of 5 stars (including 1/2 stars) and a written review on a movie page. Rotten Tomatoes then calculates an Audience Score by taking the percentage of users who rated the movie 3.5 stars or higher.” (Flixter, 2016).

The primary focus of the website is the reviewing on film making. The website presents to the user a larger amount of options to get to a recommended movie rating, apart from searching specifically for it, than for television shows. An example is the section “Top Movies” (Rotten Tomatoes, 2016) which provides a list of the top movies of all time (according to their ratings), and a lists of other top 100, with different genre or context criteria with a total of 25 different Top 100 sections. In the case of the TV section, Rotten Tomatoes provides only nine of these. Another detail to see is that when a user goes to the costumer portal to investigate what the website stands for, there are many pieces of evidence that say that the website reviews movies, and does not include television, such as the quote of the audience score above, “users like you can submit a rating out of 5 stars (including 1/2 stars) and a written review on a movie page.” (Flixter, 2016), not TV shows. Another proof is that a TV show, in order to be certified fresh has to have 75% of positive reviews and at least 20 reviews from the Tomatometer critics; opposing to 80 reviews, in the case of a widely released movie. This suggests that the perception of television is still valued lower than the movies.

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Sherlock (PBS-BBC, 2010- )

“This is a different attempt on crime-solving television shows that successfully gets the attention of the audience by presenting

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