This article, to me anyway, is emblematic of the kind of issue that we are seeing increasingly across various forms of media in our society -- a widening divide between the critics (journalists) and the audience/viewers of said media. I think a lot of this stems from the disconnect that many average people feel they have with the sort of folks who tend to work as critics or as part of establishment media in general; and oftentimes for good reason.

While there is certainly something to be said about how utterly cringeworthy it can be to hear some folks constantly whining about 'wokeness' and ranting from their soapboxes for the particular side they support in the "culture wars", there is more than a kernel of truth to the idea that there are certain narratives which these aforementioned members of the establishment/legacy media class tend to push and emphasize in their work.

There are plenty of examples which support this, available for anyone who isn't already convinced that this is happening to verify for themselves: simply take a visit to a website like Metacritic or, more notoriously, Rotten Tomatoes, and take a look at the striking disparity frequently observed between the "critics' score" on a film and the "audience score" for the same film. It had gotten so bad on Rotten Tomatoes that they wound up changing the way their whole site worked, so as to try and divert attention away from this phenomenon...obviously, it didn't work.

If I had to try and distill the reasons behind this kind of thing happening into a single issue/point, to me, this is merely another of many similar reactionary responses from the general public against those who they consider to be elitists, snobs. The sort of people who don't even bother to try and hide their obvious biases when writing a review about a movie or TV show, and worse still, find several ways to funnel their reviews through a political or sociocultural lens. In doing so, they turn what was supposed to be a piece on the actual merits of the underlying film or TV series itself (the writing, the actors' performances, the production quality, directing, etc.) into what comes across little more than an opportunity for the author to publish yet another piece about topics like diversity, racial/gender/sexual matters or other political topics that most people are tired of hearing about...of course, those who complain are typically labeled as trolls, incels, etc.

It's all rather exhausting tbh.

That said, there's actually quite a lot of good TV series that have come out in the last couple of years. Many of them wind up flying under the radar, of course a few of them do manage to become critical favorites (and lesser few still are actually as good as the gushing critics' adoration would suggest), but with the sheer volume of material being released every season, there's bound to be several that you've missed. I know it's happened to me, and I watch a lot of film/TV.

I'm happy to give some recommendations for good series in this thread if anyone wants any. A couple of entertaining series that I watched recently were "Sugar" (with Colin Farrell) and "The Gentlemen" (the Guy Ritchie series - which was much better than I'd anticipated it to be).