Wisdom of the Crowd is a new TV show that can be found on CBS. Its name is a reference to a curious phenomenon when a crowd of sufficient size can produce an answer that is even better than that of a single expert on their own, though it is important to note that it has some serious limitations. For example, a homogeneous crowd won’t be able to produce an accurate answer because the phenomenon is based on filtering out the inevitable “noise” that comes from a single person’s judgment. Likewise, when a crowd is asked at the same time, the most influential members can throw off the results by causing others to converge on their opinions. Summed up, the wisdom of the crowd is a real thing, but there is a reason that we don’t use it beyond a limited set of circumstances.
The TV show of the same name has no such sense. In short, it is centered around a tech magnate who will use his own social media platform to solve crimes better than what the police and the rest of law enforcement can manage, which is inspired by the numerous cases of Internet vigilantism that have happened in recent times. For people who remember how a lot of those cases turned out, it should come as no surprise to learn that Wisdom of the Crowd is a really, really stupid TV show.
Can Wisdom of the Crowd Make It?
On October 1, Wisdom of the Crowd managed to bring in 8.9 million viewers, which made it the single most watched scripted series on Sunday night. However, it managed no more than an average of a 1.4 rating with adults between the ages of 18 and 49, which suggests that most viewers were less than impressed with what they saw on the TV screen. As a result, considering that October 1 was the TV show’s premiere, it is possible that its numbers will be falling from this point forward as the initial surge of interest fades without being replaced by true fondness. With that said, there are plenty of TV shows with flawed premises that have managed to become huge successes, meaning that it is far from being impossible for the people behind Wisdom of the Crowd to bring up its numbers by smoothing out the numerous problems that new TV shows are bound to encounter.
For those who are curious, the initial episode consisted of the tech magnate sacrificing some of his fortune to fund a social media platform that will help him find his daughter’s killer, which he believes to be necessary because he thinks that the man caught by the police isn’t the real killer. It set up a long-running plot by failing to resolve this case in the first episode, but instead had a second case be solved through the use of the social media platform instead. Unfortunately, there was a lack of tension because there was no real doubt over what should have been some of the most important conflicts with the TV show, with examples ranging from whether the tech magnate would want to use the social media platform to solve crimes in spite of all of the legal, social, and other problems that will come up to whether the tech magnate can convince the police to sign on with the project.
Should Wisdom of the Crowd Make It?
Speaking bluntly, it might be best if Wisdom of the Crowd failed to make it because its premise is just that bad. Even worse, it made a hilarious attempt to hand-wave the inherent problems with its premise, as shown by an example of the tech magnate dismissing a bad result produced by his social media platform as having been caused by sabotage. A dismissal that ignores the sheer number of Internet users who would be willing to mess with such efforts out of sheer boredom if nothing else. Never mind the numerous examples of Internet vigilantes who have ended up going after the wrong people with catastrophic consequences in real life.
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