Reception
During the 1993 November sweeps period, 4.1 percent of viewers aged 18 to 49 watched the episode, representing a 17 percent gain from the previous year's ratings, which scored 3.5. The household average for all dayparts scored 2.7/9. This means that an average of 2.7 percent of viewers aged 18 to 49, as well as 9 percent of all viewers watching television at the time, watched each episode during the sweeps. This represented an increase of 40 to 50 percent of the series' share of key demographic rating groups. Ratings reached 4.6 during the 1994 February sweeps.
Rick Sanchez of IGN wrote that the pilot episode "The Watchers" demonstrated "a huge leap in quality and style for the show that just keeps getting better and better by episode" and that "Season Two pretty much surpasses Season One in every way imaginable." Sanchez gave the season an overall rating of 8 out of 10. Two episodes were nominated for the 1994 Golden Reel Awards in the One Hour Series category: "The Darkness" for sound editing, and "The Zone" for ADR editing.
A February 1994 study by Samuel Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, found that the second season of Highlander was the most violent syndicated show of the 1993-1994 season. According to it, there were 31 scenes of violence in the premiere episode. Charret also admitted the series received adverse criticism for being too violent. Abramowitz disagreed that Highlander was violent and stressed that staff writers "work very hard at having MacLeod not take pleasure in causing death." Gord pointed out the non-graphic nature of violence in the show and likened Immortals to vampire mythology, saying, "The vampire sucks some blood and you stick him through the heart with a stake and nobody takes that seriously." Steven Maier, executive financial consultant on the second season, noted that the beheadings in Highlander might make the show look "extremely violent", but insisted that violence could be depicted in "non-graphic ways" and was "highly stylized" in Highlander.
Read more about this topic: Highlander: The Series (season 2)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)