Chris Pratt Named His Fans 'Underserved.' Amazon Already Knew.
His 'unapologetic, patriotic' show got 37% from critics and 93% from audiences in Season 1. Amazon came back with Season 2 anyway.
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Chris Pratt appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this week to promote The Terminal List Season 2, which dropped all eight episodes on Prime Video on October 21, 2026. He made a claim that the show's entire existence depends on: that Hollywood has been systematically ignoring a large segment of its own audience.
"We kind of look at it as it's a bit of an underserved audience," Pratt told Fallon. "We just wanted to make an unapologetic, patriotic, kick-ass action show and the audience really turned up."
The Numbers That Made Season 2 Possible
Season 1, released in 2022, became one of the most data-revealing shows in recent streaming history, not because of what it earned but because of who disagreed about it. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes scored it around 37%. Audiences scored it 93%. That 56-point spread is not a rounding error. It is a thesis statement.
The critical consensus was "relentless grimness." The audience consensus was something closer to "finally." Amazon, reading the same numbers, ordered Season 2.
Authentication as a Marketing Strategy
Pratt did not lean on the gap abstractly. He got specific about what made Season 1 work: "We have 17 veterans on our production. Two or three special operators that are executive producers." This is not a PR talking point. It is a brand architecture decision. Having operators behind the camera is the production equivalent of a celebrity endorsement deal: it transfers credibility from a known source to a product that needs it.
Pratt even acknowledged the gap between his own credentials and the show's ethos. He said he learned combat from movies, not from real experience. That admission is deliberate. It positions the veterans around him as the authentic core while he plays the accessible face, which is exactly how endorsement structures work: the celebrity brings reach, the expert provides warrant.
What "Underserved" Actually Means for Advertising
Pratt's "underserved audience" framing has a direct corollary in how platforms and advertisers think about content. A show that critics ignored but audiences loved is, from a brand-safety and reach perspective, a perfect environment: high audience engagement, low culture-war surface area with traditional media, and a viewer demographic that is actively loyal to properties that acknowledge them. Season 2 dropped without controversy, without thinkpieces about whether it should exist, and with a built-in base that waited for it.
That is a different kind of value proposition than prestige TV. The Terminal List does not win awards. It wins repeat viewers. In a streaming economy where the core metric has shifted from Emmy nominations to hours watched, that distinction matters.
The Gap Is Now the Brand
Season 1 found its audience without critics. It did that because the gap between the critical score and the audience score became its own story, covered by outlets eager to explain why the two groups disagreed so sharply. The show did not just survive the gap. It benefited from it.
Season 2 inherits that position. Pratt is not trying to close the gap. He is branding it: "unapologetic, patriotic, kick-ass." These are not adjectives for a show chasing mainstream critical approval. They are a value proposition aimed precisely at the audience that critics dismissed. Amazon has now committed to that audience twice. That is a content strategy, not a fluke.
