Like the subject says, can metacritic just stop including TV Guide reviews? They're crappy, and are almost always either 40 or 60, even when they are ecstatically praising or spectacularly scornful.

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Originally posted by Guy:
Like the subject says, can metacritic just stop including TV Guide reviews? They're crappy, and are almost always either 40 or 60, even when they are ecstatically praising or spectacularly scornful.

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Guy:

Actually, I think you're exaggerating a bit when you say that. If you take a look at the TV Guide Critics Page on which we maintain meticulous stats about each publication, you'll see that out of 100 points, TV guide grades, on average, only 3.8 points lower than other publications on our list. And you'll see that they give plenty of non-60 and 40 scores.

We can argue all day about the relative quality of TV Guide's reviews as compared to those of other publications, but I want to offer one particular important reason why we added TV Guide as one of the initial Metacritic publications back in 1999. They provide more comprehensive coverage of independent films each week than just about any other publication except The New York Times. That is and was extremely important to us because we wanted to spotlight independent, arthouse, and limited release films at a time when nobody else (i.e., our competition) was doing so. Because, from our launch, we covered virtually EVERY film release each and every week, we forced everyone else in our business to follow our lead, which is a great thing for independent filmmakers who don't have the budgets to get the word out about their art. Without publications like TV Guide, there wouldn't be enough reviews from professional critics out there to give a good, solid span of reviews to our users.

Thanks!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Metacritic Games Editor,

Hahaha! Oh man, Guy you just got served!

K-Dog

Served indeed, dawg. Well, while TV Guide may have been important in the formation of metacritic.com, I don't see why they should remain. I look at all the independent film review pages, and I have yet to see a film that was reviewed solely by TV Guide.

Besides, are you trying to say that if metacritic.com removed TV Guide reviews, the entire independent film industry would come crumbling down?

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Originally posted by Guy:

Besides, are you trying to say that if metacritic.com removed TV Guide reviews, the entire independent film industry would come crumbling down?

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Crumbling down indeed.....

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Crumbling down indeed.....

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Alright, let's check out the TV Guide review scores for the movies currently listed on metacritic.com front page.

Saved!: 60
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: 60
Coffee and Cigarettes: 50
Day After Tomorrow, The: 40
Soul Plane: 30
Shrek 2: 70
Troy: 50
Super Size Me: 70
Van Helsing: 50
Laws of Attraction: 30
Mean Girls: 60
13 Going On 30: 60

Perhaps I was being was exaggerating when I said they only give 40's and 60's. However, it is no surprise to me that their scores are only 3.8 points lower than the average publications. They only give average reviews.

To verify this, I took a look through their "Reviews by Critic" page - there are over 40 pages of reviews in the list so I only looked through half. The vast majority of movies score between (inclusive) 40 and 60, and the only movies to receive 100's were a few re-releases, The Godfather, Chinatown, and Dr. Strangelove. NO movies received a 0 score and very few (around 1 out of 100) received lower than 30.

But scores aside, perhaps I didn't articulate the bigger issue here. The publication's name is TV Guide. As in a guide... for TV. It's not a movie guide, nor news publication, nor art critic magazine. When I read TV Guide, I don't read their movie reviews, because I know they are poorly written, regardless of whether I agree with the score they give. I foolishly assumed everyone else knew this too.

They review independent films, and at the time metacritic.com was started, they were one of very few. This isn't true anymore, and metacritic.com doesn't need TV Guide to spotlight independent movies, and you know it.

It's on.

K-Dog

I think metacritic should include reviews from Time Out NY (too bad Mike D'Angelo left - he may be the best film critic EVER) and maybe even Slant Magazine, though Ed Gonzalez does seem to hate every movie that doesn't translate into an AIDS metaphor...

And yeah, I am getting a bit tired of TV Guide never rating any recent movie above an 80. It's ridiculous.

I didn't realize that TV Guide tends to rate most movies in the middle, but knowing that, I'd vote for keeping them in there! It seems like they're on a Bell Curve, where most are rated average, and a few are rated as very good, and a few are rated very bad. I don't know about others, but that's pretty much how I classify the films that I see! With all due respect to Platypus Quest, to criticize a source for not rating enough films above an 80 makes no sense to me.

Although I'm poaching on another board, would people rather have critics like Roger Ebert in MetaCritic calculation, where just about EVERY SINGLE FILM is rated as a must-see? I don't. If it wasn't for his notoriety in the field, I'd dump him from this site before I would dump TV Guide. I'm glad Joel Siegel's reviews are NOT included in the MetaCritic score...my guess is he's just like Ebert.

Yeah, if you've read my thoughts on the Ebert board, you know I agree with you 100%. He is not a good critic.

However, I don't see how you can say that about Ebert but then have different thoughts towards TV Guide. To me, it seems like they do the same thing: they both give the same scores everytime (I'm just going to assume Guy's facts are accurate). If the scores they give are relatively the same everytime, then they may as well not give scores at all. I used this analogy in the Ebert board already, but I'll say it again here. To simplify an equation, just cancel out the common denominator. From what I'm hearing on this forum, TV Guide is another common denominator.

K-Dog

Hmmmm....

I mean, if 100% of their reviews are alike, OK. But I really doubt that. I'm thinking it's my "bell curve" theory, where there's a few films rated highly, and a few films rated poorly. And I'm fine with that (as if what I think matters of course).

The fact that the MetaCritic analysis of TV Guide reviews being towards the norm makes me think they're probably doing a pretty good job (even though it's fun to jump on critics from a magazine like TV Guide).

Unfortunately, Ebert's Bell Curve is skewed towards liking everything.

Actually, I think it's quite normal if most of the scores are the same if most of the scores are average scores. If you are going to grade creative endeavors on their merit, then in my mind it should tend to fall out that way. Almost everything should be average ... average means it's the norm. To be above average or below average, it should be extraordinarily good or bad.

I remember back in high school a teacher went on a rant, about parents' expectations of their children, but I think it applies to our whole society and our expectations of ourselves and the things around us. She complained that students and parents got so upset when they got a C, and as a consequence C had become a "bad" grade and as a result were given out less. When in reality, C is supposed to mean average, and should be given out more than any other grade. But in our society "average" = bad. Everyone is expected to be extraordinary, but that's totally impossible ... normal should not be a bad thing, it should be just fine! Yes, we should strive to rise above average, but we shouldn't be so disappointed if we don't. All it means is that we are normal. That we are like most other people. Which is the weird thing about it, it is a society that wants so much to be a part of the group, the norm, to not be different, yet at the same time we all want to have above average looks, intelligence, talents, skills. It's like we want to be Einsteins and Shakespeares and Helen of Troys and yet still "fit in with everybody else." When the very thing about being extraordinary is that it is impossible to fit in with everbody else.

Anyway, this is turning into a manifesto, so back to my point, which is that most movies should receive scores in the average range, some should receive scores above or below the average, and only a very few should receive scores at the opposite ends of the scale.

I don't see anything wrong with the scores shown above, it seems that most movies were average, meaning good, not great and not bad. The Day After Tomorrow was a bit below average. Some were awful: Soul Plane and Laws of Attraction. Super Size me was better than most films. The reviewer hasn't yet seen anything that's blown him away. I don't see anything wrong with that ...

These are only the recent films ... if you look at the critics page that Games Editor posted, they do give scores ranging from 20 all the way up to 100 (I don't know if they've given less than a 20 because I didn't have time to look at all 1000-whatever scores). It's just the scores of 30 and below and 80 and above are very rare, as they should be.

Granted, I think there are much better reviewers, and it's definitely more fun to read someone who has strong opinions and is a good writer to boot. But I don't think that means something like this should be discounted totally. The goal is to get a wide range of scores and points of view ... the minute you start throwing things out for whatever reason, because they are "too average" or "to out of whack with what everybody else thought" or "I don't like that critic" then it starts to become too subjective. I'd prefer that Metacritic include as many legitimate sources as they can than start weeding things out left and right based on subjective reasons.

Yeah I agree, the more the merrier.

However, I wasn't saying that TV guide should be dismissed because they only give average scores, I was saying they needn't be calculated because they give the SAME score everytime. However, I don't even know if that's true. I'm just taking Guy's word for it.

In response to your lecture about our perceptons of what is average and what is not, I agree, but I also think it's only natural. I don't think this is something that is isolated in the U.S. only. It's human nature to be better than everyone else. No human being is content with average. Just look at the world. It's just one huge-ass competition. We as human beings are programmed to seek progress. What happens when progress is made? The standards are raised. Thus the fact that we feel the need to be better or unique or whatever is simply a natural occurrance. There's no way to change or avoid it.

I mean just look at how everyone on this forum always has to have the last word. Not a single person has admitted they were wrong. Everyone here has the need to show that they in some way are superior to the other. It's sad, but true.



Someone give me my poll rights.



K-Dog

This message has been edited. Last edited by: K-Dog,

I was most annoyed at TV Guide giving Minority Report a 40! I loved that movie and everyone else gave it 60+

In my opinion, tv guide is just a magazine for americans who arent that intelligent or sophisticated.

New to the forum, so sorry if I'm beating a dead horse:

I can't say that I really read TV Guide's film reviews (does anyone, really?), but the magazine does have the good sense to employ Maitland McDonagh, an excellent voice in contemporary criticism whose voice is clearly sanitized when it appears in TV Guide, but who has produced some excellent pieces for Film Comment. She also wrote an excellent book on Dario Argento a while back.

uh...gee whiz for not having the patience to read through all of the lenghty posts concerning this topic.
My thoughts are - why is TV Guide around nowadays anyway? If you're on cable you have a channel lineup 'channel', if you're on sat - you have aguide that extends fairly far in advance....hell - even my 25' RCA has a built in guide to pick info off even air reception. OH..I GET IT - people read it for the reviews! duh - I didn't know people still did that, I would think you could tune in and decide within the first few minutes wether or not the show was going to be to your taste or not. I wouldn't think you would map out your entertainment via TV Guide, but the geriatric pop is growing at an exponential rate.
Whoa - this is getting longwinded just like so many posts prior to this one.
Who would have thought TV Guide would wield such might!!!!!