A little over a month ago, Amazon Prime released its Chris Pratt-led series adaptation of former Navy SEAL turned author Jack Carr’s novel “The Terminal List”.
The show became a quintessential example of a work hated by critics but well received by its target audience, leading to critical aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes showing wildly differing scores (39% critics/94% audience).
Carr himself, who already spoke about the critical response a week after the series was released, was back again on Fox News recently following ratings data becoming available this week.
That data showed that in the show’s first full week of release (July 4th-10th), the series racked up 1.56 billion minutes viewed – the second most streamed show that week. It was well behind the “Stranger Things” S4 finale at 4.8 billion minutes, but ahead of the third week of “The Umbrella Academy” S3 (1.28 billion) and the final episode run of “The Boys” S3 (1.09 billion).
Pratt celebrated those numbers in a social media post linking to a Daily Mail article talking about the show’s success over “woke critics”. “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said he watched the show and didn’t see any political leaning in the material whilst also pointing out a review dubbing it a “right-wing fantasy”.
Carr ran with that, also disputing the labelling of the show as politically leaning a specific way:
“We don’t mention right, left, conservative, liberal, none of those things are even mentioned. The Daily Beast, in particular, their review was quite mean.
But they see an American flag, and they get upset. Or they see someone who is competent with weapons and has a certain mindset and holds those in power accountable for their actions they just kind of lose it a little bit.
There’s no ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke,’ but just because there’s not this ‘woke’ stuff that’s shoved into it, then it’s perceived – by critics, at least – as not promoting their agenda, so they’re going to hate it.”
Carr touted that the show’s intended audience was mainly military service members who have deployed in the last twenty years. Constance Wu, Taylor Kitsch and Riley Keough also star in the series that hails from executive producer Antoine Fuqua.
Source: Mediaite, The Playlist
