In case you hadn’t noticed, today brings the premiere of the sixth and final episode of Citadel‘s first season, drawing a line under the second most-expensive TV series there’s ever been in suitably underwhelming style.
There are twists packed on top of twists, unconvincing visual effects and glaringly bad green screens, questionable acting performances across the board, and lingering questions over how the hell this thing managed to cost $300 million. In fact, based on nothing but its investment-to-quality ratio, it wouldn’t be a stretch to submit Citadel for consideration as the worst show of all-time.
Let’s look at the facts; the globetrotting spy series averages out at $50 million per installment, each of which bar the exception of today’s final chapter runs somewhere between 39 and 43 minutes. That equates to over a million dollars per 60 seconds of screentime for a star-studded adventure that holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 54 percent, an audience approval rating of 67 percent, and doesn’t even try to bring anything new, fresh, or remotely inventive to its chosen genre of choice.
If you’ve been following the insanely convoluted plot – or even if you haven’t – then predicting where things would pan out by the time the credits came up was about as easy a task as possible. All of the pieces land pretty much exactly where you expect them to, and that even includes the supposed “major reveal” that sets up the already-confirmed season 2’s main storyline.
For $300 million, you could make The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King three times over and still have enough left in the budget to throw an after-party, with Citadel indicative of just how insane the world of streaming has become when there’s such vast amounts of cash to be thrown around.