Netflix's New Show Has An Almost Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score But Is Still Largely Unknown

You might have thought that a 92% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes would be enough to get a streaming show wall to wall media coverage. Not for Netflix.

With thousands of titles in the streamer’s library it's inevitable that some shows and movies will slip under the radar even if audiences rave about them. A case in point is Boots, Netflix's latest dramedy set in the unlikely surroundings of the military.

Decades ago military comedies were all the rage. Following the success of the M*A*S*H television series in the 1970s came Bill Murray’s movie Stripes and Steven Spielberg's forgotten film 1941.

However, over the decades since then, military movies and shows have taken on a more serious tone in order not to be accused of glorifying war. That doesn’t mean to say there isn't an opportunity to poke fun at the institution and Boots finds that sweet spot.

As this report explained, military archetypes give the show humour which is tempered by the gravitas of a story centered on a gay and bullied teenager who enlists in the Marines. It has made Boots a critics’ darling with USA Today going as far as to say that it “may just be one of the best new series Netflix has produced in years.”

It has earned an average rating of 92% from 24 critics on Rotten Tomatoes while more than 100 audience reviews on the platform yield a score of 85% so its appeal isn’t just restricted to the media industry. That said, it has taken time for word to spread.

This is revealed in data from Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages.

Factiva’s data shows that so far in October, just 137 articles have mentioned ‘Boots’, ‘Netflix’ and ‘Marines’ – search terms which are necessary to weed out false positives.

The reports peaked on Thursday when the show dropped but there were still only 41. That said, this is more than the 38 which were published in the whole of September. It is also a sharp increase on the single-digit number of articles mentioning the show in each of the four months running up to its release.

Of course there isn’t necessarily a direct correlation between the number of articles mentioning a show and its popularity with audiences. However, the more coverage there is, the more likely it is that viewers will find out about it.

As things stand, the popularity of Boots seems to be driven by word of mouth as the low number of articles hasn't stopped interest in the show from spiking as my previous report about it revealed. If this trend continues then not only does it increase the chance that more media outlets will come across it but it also makes a second season all but a foregone conclusion.

Additional reporting by Christian Sylt