83% of critics gave it a positive review on a binary scale. Not an average rating of 83%.
Whereas 38% of audience gave it higher than 3.5 stars.
They aren't exactly comparable.
I knew some LOTR superfans who were upset with the first three Peter Jackson movies only being about a thousand hours long and omitting various plots and characters.. but these people were a minority and most loved the new thing. And then when Jackson made the hobbit movies the reception was very different. The audience didn't change, his new movies just weren't up to the same standard they expected. And if the show is getting hate, I think it's fair to assume that's because the show isn't good either. Maybe it would get better reviews if it were original IP and didn't have Jackson's first three LOTR movies casting a shadow on it, but blaming the fans for this isn't right.
But, it's doubtful I know anyone well enough to ask their opinion on a fantasy series who hasn't read the Silmarillion.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
I mean, just to be silly, if we translate it to typical US grade scale… that’s like on the B to B- cusp which seems reasonable for the show.
The formulation is a way to collapse precise scores into a binary classification of thumbsup or thumbsdown. So, another way to put it would be 83% of reviewers 'liked it'
Side note, I used to really like Rotten Tomatoes 10+ years ago but I noticed a drop in quality, likely Goodhart's law in action as some other commenters here have pointed out.
I was surprised when watching the first episode, after seeing 83% from critics on RT. It did not match my expectations from prior RT scores. I remember one movie that had a 90-something rating from critics and 30-something rating from viewers, whose name I unfortunately can't remember. It was strange, like a C movie from an alternate universe with different tropes. I can imagine being a reviewer, bored to death of the endless rehashes I have to watch, enjoying it because at least it's different. Rings of Power, not so much.
They decided to slap the name on a show that only represented LOTR in name. So, I think they fairly get to receive the backlash of an obvious money grab.
And shows are often reviewed after only a few episodes. Typically two to four episodes are released to reviewers before the premiere, and this is what the review is based on.
So a high rating means most reviewers reacted positively to the first few episodes.
I have seen Rotten Tomatoes apparently just glitch out scores, too. Wheel of Time season one has 94 reviews with 64 positive, which is 68% positive, yet the tomatometer says 81%. Sometimes that is because of the episode-by-episode reviews, which are overwhelmingly from recap blogs that only cover what they like, but even in this case, that doesn't make up the difference.