‘The Terminal List’ Is Amazon Prime’s ‘Yellowstone,’ In More Ways Than One

I had been avoiding The Terminal List on Amazon for a few reasons.

1) It’s hard for me to take Chris Pratt seriously in a non-comedy, action hero military role.

2) Critics were giving it pretty low scores.

3) The creator of the series said that critics were giving it low scores because it wasn’t “woke,” which I found annoying.

And yet, curiosity got the better of me. I spent the last few days watching the eight hour-long episodes of The Terminal List and…I actually kind of liked it.

While I think a different actor may have done better in the lead here, I didn’t mind Pratt, certainly, and he didn’t really prove to be an issue. Despite the creator using annoying culture war taunts, even as a mega-liberal myself, I didn’t find anything really all that anti-progressive about the show. It’s just about a white dude Navy SEAL getting revenge against corrupt figures in powerful corporations and government. Not the most original idea, I suppose, but not some MAGA-influenced screed against anything, either. It’s just a normal, solid, military-based revenge tale with good action and a decent overall plotline.

What this feels like to me is that Amazon Prime may have found its Yellowstone with The Terminal List, and I think both shows suffer from the same problems when it comes to critic reception being split from audience perception.

The Terminal List has a 39% critic score but a 94% audience score, a yawning gap, implying a disconnect from the general public. Similarly, the first season of Yellowstone got a 55% from 51 critics, compared to an 82% audience score, and the show went on to be a massive hit, and remains one of the biggest live-viewed series in the country to this day.

Future seasons of Yellowstone scored higher, but that’s because the number of critics actually paying attention to it dropped sharply. Season 2 has an 88%, but only based on eight critics. Season 3 has a 100% based only on six critics. Season 4 has a 90% based on 10 critics.

This is what I mean about a disconnect. It’s not just the scores, it’s the fact that you have one of the most popular shows in the country when it airs and you have anywhere from just 5-10 critics in the entire media ecosystem watching enough episodes to review it? That doesn’t make any sense.

There seems to be some sort of culture war thing going on here, but if you actually watch these shows, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense that these are supposed to be conservative series pissing off liberal critics. Again, even as a pretty hardcore liberal myself, I saw very little in The Terminal List or four seasons of Yellowstone now that feels like it’s pushing some sort of conservative agenda. The casts may generally be a little whiter, but they are really only “conservative” in that they focus on conservative fantasy occupations: being a Navy SEAL or a cowboy.

But in practice, there’s nothing all that conservative about them. Again, The Terminal List is about corporate greed and the government and military higher ups abusing their on-the-ground forces. Yellowstone is usually about the Duttons fending off some rival rancher or some corporation trying to take their land. I would argue that both of these shows with heavy anti-corporate/capitalist messaging is decidedly not conservative, in fact.

All in all, I think both sides are wrong here. Critics are wrong to dismiss these popular shows as much as they have, and fans are wrong to accuse critics of doing so because they hate Republicans or conservative values which…really is not what these shows are about. Sometimes things do align, like with Amazon Prime’s Reacher, about a jacked white guy military cop who bed ladies and kicks ass and is in theory yet another “conservative dream guy.” But both critics and audiences liked that one because well, honestly it’s a better overall show than The Terminal List, at least.

It’s a weird situation, but don’t let preconceived notions turn you away from shows like The Terminal List or Yellowstone (though the last season of Yellowstone was truly terrible). This is one case where making up your own mind will go pretty far.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.