What’s on?

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

As of the start of the weekend, Star Wars: The Acolyte, House of the Dragon and The Boys were the most popular topics on Rotten Tomatoes, with average critics’ scores of 86%, 90% and 93%, respectively.

Those are good numbers for what are two prequel spinoffs of iconic media franchises and a hard-R-rated comic book adaptation. 

The Acolyte, House of the Dragon and The Boys, respectively. Courtesy photos.

Both HotD and The Boys have established themselves with at least one previous season, and premiered their most recent installments with fans already waiting to see where those stories go. The Acolyte must still prove itself as yet another add-on to the Star Wars universe, which has grown ever-more cluttered by Disney over the past 10 years.

Meanwhile, like many other Star Wars offerings before it, The Acolyte has fallen victim to review bombing — that is, communities of outraged so-called “fans” activated by the online echo chambers of their own discontent who stream to sites like RT and IMDb to drive down the stats on how a given film or series has been received by viewers.

While The Acolyte scores an 86% “fresh” rating from critics, it has only garnered a 17% from audience members. On IMDb, the series gets an overall rating of 3.8/10, but that’s because about 21,000 people have decided to give it “one star” — which is clearly the result of a smear campaign. 

Go to Reddit and you’ll come away with the idea that The Acolyte is a detestable piece of “woke” propaganda. Go to rogerebert.com, and you’ll read that the series “gives you more to think about than any recent Star Wars installment outside of Andor,” which scored near-universal acclaim.

It’s the same old beef: A bunch of internet dudes are unhappy that Star Wars media features central characters who are female, non-white and non-heterosexual, and are congenitally unable to handle any piece of media that passes the Bechdel Test — and The Acolyte does include all those elements.

Set a century before the rise of the Galactic Empire (and therefore a prequel of the prequel trilogy of films), The Acolyte revolves around a pair of twins — one who trained with, but later left, the Jedi Order, and the other who is serving a mysterious master on a quest to kill four Jedi masters whom she contends did her dirty.

The series starts off as a detective story about a series of murders, but turns into a broader investigation into the fault lines of familial loyalty and what The Force means and who it’s even for. 

After four episodes, this reviewer says it’s safe to ignore the madding internet hordes. Stream new episodes Tuesdays on Disney+.

House of the Dragon requires much less introduction, with its first season tapping into a modest but willing fan base and coming to audiences as a prequel to the events of Game of Thrones — itself the small-screen adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s epic and still unfinished Song of Ice and Fire novels.

Episode 1 of the second season of HotD puts us right back in the dim-lit corridors of power in Westeros, where House Hightower and House Targaryen are vying for control of the Iron Throne and rule of the Seven Kingdoms in their fictional late-medieval world. 

As with its first season, HotD S.2 E.1 has the curious quality of turning drama into white noise. There isn’t a single character worth rooting for in the (literally) incestuous infighting over who will rule, to the point that there’s no obvious reason why we should care about any of it at all. It could be called beating a dead dragon, but HotD was DoA and illustrates why this entire media property needs to go away.

The Boys, however, is grotesque, blasphemous, unpatriotic, so cynical it borders on nihilistic, deviant, depraved and — as one of its lead characters likes to say — “diabolical.” You will find almost nothing on the big or small screen to rival its dark-hearted, disgusting and hard-eyed portrayal of the emptiness of hero worship, which is a brutal tonic for this age of blind tribalism.

The new season, on Amazon Prime, hits MAGA so square between the eyes and in such ways that one wonders whether the Libertarian Party had a hand in inspiring it, though something tells me that the showrunners are too libertarian even to join the LP.

This show, and the comic on which it’s based, has never been for the faint of heart and should under no means be watched by anyone with more than one or two sensitivities. However, seen beyond its gory, sensational trappings, it’s a primal scream against the socio-political, economic, media and religio-cultural insanity of our current day.

Stream it at your own risk, but it’s worth the risk.