I have one rave 'New York Times' review framed next to a flop 'Los Angeles Times' review. And it's for the same show. These people watched the same show. That's what happens. They love it, they hate it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.
You've got to not care about what people think. You learn that as an actor. If you get a bad review, will you be destroyed by it? Or will you think you're God's gift when you get a rave review?
We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves.
There's two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say.
The cliche was always that 'everybody's a critic,' but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover - somewhere in the thickets of the Internet - reactions to shows from people who've seen them in previews.
I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction.
I don't think the audience always listens to the critics. That's been proven time and time again.
It's still word of mouth that is going to make or break a show, and while critics can't help a show, they can hurt it.
I don't care what reviewers think. If somebody hates a performance of mine, I kind of get a kick out of it. It amuses me when critics take something so irrelevant as a movie so seriously.
I don't do shows. I don't have reviews. I'm not putting the clothes on every celebrity so that by the time they reach the store the customers are sick of seeing them.