For example, a show has 5 seasons, the first 4 are amazing, but the fifth one is rubbish.
Do you: -
A. Rate it highly because when it was good, it was very good.
B. Take an average.
C. Rate it poorly because that was your most recent experience.
First impulse is to say B, but sometimes a series changes so much from beginning to end that it's difficult for me to choose a rating. I suppose that may be why some series get a mediocre rating (in my mind) when actually, some years were really good, but others were lousy or almost unrecognizable from the good seasons. Some start out strong and finish weak, while others do the opposite.
To be honest, if a series changes too much and affects my enjoyment of it, I just stop watching. When this happens, I don't even rate the series. One that comes to mind is Ballykissangel, a series I really liked, at first. But I immediately lost interest when the two main characters were written out of the show at the end of series three. I guess I was so absorbed by them that I didn't even want to continue, meaning it's an obvious emotional reaction.
Generalized rating. If it was terrible overall but had good moments, I'll state that. If it was great except for a certain season, I'll say that. But if it's more complicated than that, I'll give it a rating that's more simple based on whether I thought it was worth watching or not.
shareIf you’re referring to IMDb ratings, I don’t even bother with them for TV shows.
Partly because, as you suggest, it’s rather difficult to figure. But also, one of my primary reasons for rating movies is simply to keep track of what I’ve seen.
Occasionally, when a movie comes up in discussion, I might have to check IMDb for my rating, just because I don’t always remember exactly what my opinion of it was. With TV shows, I’ve never had that issue.
So in terms of rating shows, I don’t assign a number value or anything. Rather, I’ll just say: “the first 3 seasons were great, but then it kind of falls off”, or whatever the case may be.
IMDb is quite limiting - I wish they allowed increments of a half for ratings; I have a lot of 7s that should be 7.5s.
shareI go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I don't really like decimal ratings and feel like a 10-point scale should be enough. But I get your point--there are definitely movies that kind of fall in between a 7 and 8, for example. I kind of like the 4 star rating system for that reason. 3 out of 4 stars often feels just right.
Of course, then there's cases where a 7/10 feels right, and with the 4-star system, I'm stuck between giving it 2.5 or 3 stars.
Life is tough.
I don't usually rate anything, but "A" is usually my thought process.
One thing I've thought about after reading this post is how I have watched very, very few TV series from beginning to end. Probably the two biggest TV series that I actually did were "Cheers" and "Seinfeld." I didn't really like the "Cheers" finale all that much and I definitely didn't like the finale to "Seinfeld," plus I felt like it wasn't quite as funny the last couple of seasons after Larry David left. However, I'd give both of them a 10/10 (I'm a pretty generous rater), just because I think that they were both so great during their runs.
On the flip side, I'm a huge fan of Seasons 1-14 of "Law & Order." However, I just can't watch the episodes after Jerry Orbach left...I have tried several times, but just can't do it. I'm not sure how I'd rate it overall, to be honest.
I completely understand where you’re coming from.
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