There’s a well-recognized TV discourse taking form on-line proper now, the type that I think will look awfully acquainted to you if you happen to bear in mind the best way Sport of Thrones crashed and burned in its eighth and ultimate season. Principally, it’s now Squid Sport’s flip.
Netflix’s Korean juggernaut, as soon as a world phenomenon and inventive lightning bolt, simply dropped its third and ultimate season over the weekend — a season, simply to clear, that no person actually requested for, and one which many viewers appear to actively remorse watching.
Squid Sport Season 3 is, to make sure, presently the #1 present within the US on the streaming large. However that high rating, spectacular because it sounds, doesn’t inform the present’s full story, both. In accordance with knowledge from Samba TV, for instance, 1.6 million US households watched the premiere over its first three days. That’s a giant quantity — and but it nonetheless marks a 17% drop from the Season 2 debut. A few of that could be a perform of timing: Season 2 dropped the day after Christmas, when plenty of individuals are sitting round at house because of vacation day without work from work.
That mentioned, it’s a bit of extra revealing how sharply Squid Sport has slipped in viewers sentiment. The Rotten Tomatoes knowledge actually tells a narrative of diminishing returns:
- Season 1: 95% critics’ rating / 84% viewers rating
- Season 2: 83% critics’ rating / 63% viewers rating
- Season 3: 80% critics’ rating / 50% viewers rating
By way of the viewers response, that’s a free fall. Accordingly, the net commentary from followers has been fairly brutal. “This ending sucked and felt like a money seize for an American Squid Sport,” one viewer wrote on X. Added one other: “There was no want to separate this into a 3rd collection … really, no must make one other collection after the primary.” Many echoed the identical grievance — that Season 3 felt bloated, poorly written, and pushed extra by company math than inventive imaginative and prescient.
Right here’s the reality: Squid Sport by no means wanted a second season, not to mention a 3rd. It’s the peak of irony to me {that a} present concerning the evils of dog-eat-dog capitalism has type of … nicely, strike that. Not type of. Has very a lot develop into a sufferer of that very same capitalism the present skewered in Season 1. Squid Sport’s ultimate season was full of contrivances and baffling character selections that, if you happen to ask me, made the present’s whole emotional logic collapse (“456 went via all that simply to by no means discuss to his daughter once more?” one Rotten Tomatoes viewers reviewer requested. “Critically?”).
For Netflix, the numbers could justify the choice. For the remainder of us, that is one other reminder that the world of TV was not constructed by individuals who know the best way to depart nicely sufficient alone. Likewise, streaming TV shouldn’t be a recreation the place subtlety or quitting whilst you’re forward ever appear to rule the day. For those who do resolve to make the leap and watch Season 3, don’t be shocked if, when it’s over, you end up wishing the video games had ended a very long time in the past.
