From Critic’s Plate to Viewer’s Scale: Assessing Citadel’s Ratings Amidst Critical Backlash

Citadel was Amazon Prime Video’s second-biggest bet in history. Jeff Bezos’ streaming platform spent a million last year on The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, the most expensive series in history, which, however, received almost no positive reviews. And it has done the same again with Citadel, the second most expensive series that… has had a similar result.

Since it was released on the platform with a weekly episode, the spy fiction directed by the Russo Brothers and starring Ricard Madden and Priyanka Chopra has had a rather negative review. It barely has 51% on Metacritic and 54% on Rotten Tomatoes, a very, very low rating considering its characteristics.

But is this series really a failure? Beyond the criticism, we must be clear that the audience is the one that rules in these cases. So we must be clear that the series may not have been a failure after all.

Does not stand out among the most viewed

The only data we have from Citadel are those provided by Nielsen, the US agency, which gave 306 million viewers to the start of the series in their country. This means that its first episodes went very well in terms of audience, but we have no more data so far.

In any case, the series is far from the main fictions that lead the Nielsen charts, being others like The Firefly Ball, Better Call Saul or Sweet Tooth the ones that stay ahead. This means that, really, Citadel is not making too much noise, and in the absence of official data… it is clear that it is being a bit of a flop.

Prime Video is not one to cancel just like that, so a second season has been announced. But where Citadel stands out the most is in its spin-offs. The fiction wants to make its own Citadel in each country, and it is in this formula where it seems that it can be a success.

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