Two NBC Shows Are The Only Network TV Series To Receive A Perfect Score On Rotten Tomatoes In 2018


While a comparison of the overall slate of network television can simply boil down to a matter of opinion– especially if you also consider the ever-growing lineup of streaming shows– NBC can boast that it was the only public television network with a show that received a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. Not only did it have one show, but it had two, as both the third season of The Good Place and new reality television series Making It both earned perfect scores from critics.

For The Good Place, the Kristen Bell/Ted Danson vehicle following a woman in the afterlife seeking to make amends for mistakes she made while alive, it was the second consecutive season that the show earned a 100 percent approval rating. The Season 3 critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes remarks that “Charming and curious as ever, The Good Place remains a delightfully insightful bright spot on the television landscape.”

Sam Anderson wrote in the New York Times that “The Good Place — the story of a group of recently deceased earthlings navigating the afterlife — is the best sitcom on TV. It is, in many ways, charmingly old-fashioned: a 22-minute glossy confection of family-friendly LOLs, featuring beautiful multicultural characters with perfect hair trading tightly scripted jokes as they learn life lessons. Grandchildren and grandparents could watch it together in relative comfort, laughing in heartwarming unison.”

“But the show is also, by network standards, quite radical. It attempts a clever gambit,” Anderson continues. “We expect half-hour comedies to pull off an impossible double duty: to both inject jokes into the national bloodstream and to enlighten us with high-minded moral instruction. We want not only zany catchphrases but wise life lessons…The Good Place tries, improbably, to fulfill both functions at once… Like any good modern comedy, the show is a direct IV of laughs, but the trick is that all of those laughs are explicitly about morality.”

Episodes of The Good Place can be streamed on NBC.

Making It, a handmade crafting competition hosted by comedians Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman, earned a perfect score from critics for its fresh, out-of-left-field take on the reality competition series genre. The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus says that “Making It puts a whimsical, refreshing new spin on reality TV — one made even more fun by well-matched hosts Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman.”

Alison Herman wrote in the New York Times that “Even if Making It can’t bring itself to do away with the prize money, then, the contest that supposedly frames the show is undercut at every turn. Poehler’s main running bit is mock-proposing not to eliminate anyone from the worthy pool of contenders; Offerman’s is refusing to announce who’s going home each week, instead delegating to Johnson or her fellow judge Simon Doonan. Every episode is sprinkled with silly segments that have nothing to do with the challenge of the week, featuring a ‘pun-off’ between Poehler and Offerman or a lesson from Offerman to Poehler in the basic terminology of crafting. And as if to demonstrate that hard feelings are nonexistent at the idyllic, Malibu-adjacent farm where Making It films, the first episode ends with a serene porch hang with Poehler, Offerman, and the kindly grandmother they just regretfully sent home… Making It aims to celebrate its crafters’ accomplishments more than it punishes their failures, creating a welcome oasis in the midst of a noisy summer landscape of Gong Shows and World of Dances.”

Episodes of Making It can be streamed on NBC.

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