Subjectivity isn't the issue. A gross objective inflation of aggregated subjectivity is the issue, and a glaring tell.
I agree we live in a golden age of television, or at least we were in one, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the Paste Magazine shitshow that has infiltrated the ranks of surveyed critics. There are still critical surveys that are phenomenal like the
Sight & Sound's once-a-decade poll for movies. So this is partially about the quality of the critics, and also their number (used to be hard to gain the esteem to be counted, and they even separated the "Cream of the Crop" for site-goers to see although they didn't count their scores differently). Too many bloggers are being counted, now. I blame Berardinelli. Everyone thought they could be him.
Furthermore, the methodology behind the
Sight & Sound poll is entirely transparent. That's what I want, but I want it as an entertainment service, not an academic service to cinephiles delivered decennially.
That's the real problem: a lack of transparency in how everything is scored. Metacritic has been nailed in the VG section for artificially "weighting" certain critics, or at least so say them, but the truth is that like ESPN's advanced sports metrics, we don't know
how they weight their Metascore anymore. That wasn't the way it always was:
http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores
In other words, since they don't publish the methodology, the way IMDb publishes its precise weighting equations, we have absolutely no idea how they arrive at their scores. This means they can openly fudge numbers whenever they feel like (i.e. get paid for) it.
Clearly they're selling.