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Comment by tick_tock_tick | Hacker News Reader

I think anti-woke review bombing is vastly overestimated. I think the opposite is more common honestly news articles get written about something being "review bombed" and then you get a much larger sea of 5 stars artificially inflating the score.

The Watchmen TV show is a horrible example as it's literally fan-fiction with little to no real connection to the graphic novel. So that fact alone pissed a lot of people off.

It completely ignored the only actual "squeal" (Doomsday Clock) to create the story they wanted to tell while borrow the popularity of the name to get attention.

Even ignoring all that did you actually even watch it? 96% is complete bullshit. 96% means some of the best TV ever made. I don't think it's a 56% but the 56% is way closer to reality then the 96%.

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Yup, I watched it and it was great. And the fact that the show was review bombed by rightwing trolls was well documented by media coverage at the time, whether you believe that or not.

You seem not to understand the Rotten Tomatoes score though. 96% just means that 96% of critics gave it a positive review. That says nothing about how positive the review was.

Idk how many of them would describe it as one of the best shows ever, though that’d be an interesting score as well.

I was a huge fan of the graphic novel, but that show disgusted me from the moment I saw how they had demonized Rorschach. I'd tend to agree with OP that many fans of the graphic novel were turned off by the TV nonsense. 'Right-wing trolls' kinda seems like crying wolf - it's an easy scapegoat, but basically impossible to prove.

The show didn’t demonize Rorschach. The white supremacists in the show twisted his ideology to legitimize their beliefs and provide a powerful symbol for their cause.

You might disagree, but that’s just an example of what makes the show so good. It’s shocking and subtle and up for interpretation. It makes you think, regardless of whether you agree.

I can see how that could be interesting, but I didn't enjoy it cause I saw it as a perversion of an awesome character. That's a problem writers face when they reinterpret beloved series/stories. I've hated nearly all the recent TV/movie adaptations that were based on written series I love - foundation, eye of the world, the lotr show, watchmen, come to mind. One exception was the Dune movie, which I thought was rad, even though it didn't entirely align with the way I imagined it, their interpretation was great.

With these types of shows, the TV writing will almost certainly be orders of magnitude worse since the originals were written by great authors with great imaginations. So, the more the TV writers try to innovate, the more glaring it's likely to be to fans of the originals. Plus, the innovation typically involves TV writers just ham-fistedly hacking in the drama de jour. I just can't treat the TV versions as independent from the source material when I try to watch them.

You weren’t supposed to enjoy the that part of the show. It was the bad guys who did it after all.

The show had realistic bad guys who did things that the audience is meant to have a strongly negative reaction towards.

I’d take that over cookie cutter cartoon villains any day.

And the idea that TV writers aren’t capable of good writing is total BS by the way. Check out shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Chernobyl, Succession, or Severance.

The Wire and Sopranos are my two favorite shows along with Deadwood - amazing writing. Ill check out those others, ty!

Yeah, the show was incredibly good. A TV sequel to the comic is something I’d have bet money couldn’t be good—I’d have been skeptical of any sequel to it, really, but TV?—but damn is it perfect. It’s canon alongside the comic, to me. Right up there with it.

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