When articles are written about films, shows or comedy specials the reviewers often invest a lot of importance into something like the IMDB rating (or one of the other big ranking sites).

The problem is – none of them are much use. I’ll make my case.

For example – Last One Laughing UK spent 27 days at Number 1 (in the UK) and was Top 10 in a total of 17 countries. A big hit by any measure, with lots of positive noise across both the press and social media platforms.

Despite this some huge sites (such as Metacritic) don’t even list details for it. TVCharts shows it as 8.2 (but is taking that from IMDB) and Rating Graph has it as an average of 7.7 – but only from 691 votes. Rotten Tomatoes has fewer than 50 ratings and some pretty lukewarm reviews.

Much like the film / theatre critics of old – I’d say “ignore them”. Comedy, as with all entertainment, is subjective and possibly the only reviews that might be helpful are either the ones at the 0 end (absolute turkeys) or the 10/10’s (for “must watch TV”).

The problem with these sites that collect reviews is that:

• Some sites are frequented more by certain age demographics
• Some may be the preference of specific nationalities
• Only certain personality types like leaving reviews for anything
• These sort of review sites can be susceptible to campaigns that are either positive (fan groups) or negative (activists)
• Most people are blissfully unaware of their existence – hence the low number of ratings, across them all

All of which can inject a certain amount of bias into the results.

If we look at Jimmy’s stand-up special releases, as another example. Details below are ratings for 8 DVDs and 4 Netflix specials (taken from IMDB). The IMDB ratings / number of votes are from 18^th April 2025 and the Netflix viewing hour totals are to the end of 2024.

• As a number of the DVD specials have a roughly similar number of reviewers, should we assume that a lot of them may be the same people?
• Across the 12 shows the average is 7.59 and the ones that fall below that are the Netflix specials, which also have had many more votes. Does this indicate a different demographic than the people that were buying the DVDs?
• IMDB has a feature where a chart shows the spread of votes, from 1-10 (example below). If you click on each column, you can see the reviews that were submitted. When you click on the 10/10 columns it’s kind of amusing to see how many were downvoted – no matter how much effort went into explaining why the person liked the special. Why downvote someone’s well considered opinion?

If we look at Natural Born Killer (chart below) the majority of the rating are 6 and above. But would you take more notice of the opinion of 2,500 people (that took the time to write an IMDB review and/or applied a rating) or the 4.7m+ that watched it on Netflix?

If the DVDs sold 1.2m and the Netflix specials were watched by 10.2m – do we take notice of the 11.4m (presumably) happy viewers – or the %age of the 26,700 that headed to IMDB to leave a rating that was 5 or lower?

Massive variance in the numbers there.

Moral of the story is – ignore the review sites and trust your own instincts.