Is Sherlock Losing It? - follow up.

In my earlier post Is Sherlock Losing It? I had a look at the Amazon ratings (UK and US) for the recent special and compared them against those for the regular series.

I decided to have another look at the ratings (purely for the special) and see how they have fared in the two or so weeks since that post.

Here are the ratings as at circa 11am UK time today (Feb 3rd 2016).

I made the observation that the US seemed more pro the special than the UK and that appears to still be the case.

If you look at the 3 star ratings and lower the US have only 24% of their ratings at those levels. Whereas (if I've got my maths right) just over 40% of UK raters put the special in one of those three categories.

It was brought to my attention that many reviews on both sites and at all levels ought to be discounted because they were posted before transmission. This is a fair point but sadly I lack the time to go through them all and weed out those that were either posted before transmission or gave a rating that was to do with something other than the programme itself (i.e. It was damaged when it arrived etc.)

Whether doing so would radically alter the overall picture is something I will leave to others. I doubt it would change the basic message which is that UK raters feel that the special missed the mark far more than US raters.

I now find myself wondering exactly how much this was to do with the Victorian/Inception aspect of the special. I guess we'll only know the answer to that when series 4 finally airs. A return to the full-time contemporary Holmes should see a decline in low marks if the Victorian element is to blame.

Then again, will people who felt let down by the special judge future series more harshly because of their experience with the special?

It will be interesting to see.

Written by Alistair Duncan Buy my books here