Hollywood critics sneered at Chris Pratt’s Navy SEAL series as a flag-waving fantasy for the wrong kind of viewer.

Then the show came back, and the people they mocked showed up again.

And Pratt told Jimmy Fallon one word about those viewers that Hollywood never wants to hear.

Chris Pratt Named the Audience Hollywood Forgot

Pratt stopped by The Tonight Show to talk up the second season of The Terminal List, the Prime Video series built on former Navy SEAL Jack Carr’s best-selling novels.

He skipped the usual Hollywood chatter about algorithms and marketing budgets. He went straight to the folks on the couch at home.

Pratt said the show “connected with an audience” that his team views as “a bit of an underserved audience.”

Underserved. Sit with that word for a second, because it lands like an indictment of an entire industry.

Pratt said the goal was a patriotic, hard-hitting action show with no apologies attached, and “the audience really turned up.”

But he didn’t puff himself up into some battle-scarred tough guy, either. He owned up to where his combat knowledge came from.

“You know, everything I learned about combat, I learned from watching movies and stuff. I have never been to Fallujah or anything like that,” Pratt said.

So he brought in men who had been there. Pratt told Fallon the production carries 17 veterans, with “Two or three special operators that are executive producers.”

“We just have Navy SEALS all over the place, it’s really cool,” he added.

Former SEAL Ray Mendoza is among the veterans who have worked on the franchise as writers, actors, technical advisers, and directors. And Pratt said that crew catches the details a Hollywood prop department never would.

“These guys have a real eye for combat based on their experience and it’s really authentic,” Pratt explained.

He said veterans stop him to tell him so. “Veterans will come up and say, ‘You know, I served. I did a couple deployments and the action, the behavior, the tactics, the jargon, the decorum, all of it is really authentic,’ and I think that’s why people like it,” Pratt said.

The Critics Wrote This Show Off Before the Credits Rolled

Anyone who remembers the summer of 2022 knows why Pratt chose his words so carefully.

The Terminal List premiered on July 1, 2022, and the professional reviewers went after it like it had insulted their mothers. The Daily Beast slapped a headline on its review calling the show an “Unhinged Right-Wing Revenge Fantasy.” A Guardian critic called it an “ill-concealed rightwing conspiracy.”

Rotten Tomatoes told the rest of the story. Critics gave the first season a 39 percent. Regular viewers gave it 94 percent.

And those viewers didn’t just leave nice reviews. They watched. The series racked up 1.6 billion minutes of streams in its early run, and Carr said at the time it ranked as the number two streaming show in America, trailing only Stranger Things.

Pratt had some fun with it back then, posting a headline to his Instagram story about the show defying the “woke critics” and climbing the charts anyway.

Carr put it even more bluntly during an appearance with Tucker Carlson. “We didn’t make it for the critics. We made it for those in the arena,” Carr said.

Now, a critic can dislike a show for honest reasons. Some reviewers griped about pacing, and nobody owes a slow episode a standing ovation.

But a pacing complaint doesn’t come with a political label stapled to it. The “right-wing” sneer gave the game away. The reviewers weren’t grading the plot so much as grading the people they figured were watching it.

Four Years Later, the Snobs Are Quietly Changing Their Tune

Funny thing happened on the way to the franchise’s funeral. It never came.

Amazon greenlit a prequel, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, starring Taylor Kitsch, which landed in August 2025 and drew noticeably kinder reviews than the original.

Then all eight episodes of season two dropped on Prime Video in October 2026. Pratt told Fallon the new season shifts from a dark revenge story to a globe-trotting thriller, saying “it’s about espionage.” Early reviews on Rotten Tomatoes put the critics’ score at a provisional 67 percent, a long way up from that 39.

Maybe the show got better. Maybe the writers sharpened things up.

Or maybe the critics finally noticed the scoreboard. Hard to say which, and the honest answer is probably a little of both. But the audience didn’t wait four years for permission. It made up its mind in the summer of 2022 and never budged.

That same summer, Top Gun: Maverick was packing theaters with grandparents and grandkids sitting side by side. Two hit stories, both built on the radical idea that American servicemen can be the good guys.

And Hollywood still acted surprised.

That’s the real meaning behind Pratt’s choice of words. An “underserved” audience isn’t a tiny niche. It’s tens of millions of Americans who love their country, respect the military, and go to church on Sunday, and who’ve spent years watching studios lecture them instead of entertain them.

Pratt has never hidden where he stands on faith, either. He has said publicly that faith is the most important thing he’ll pass on to his four kids. In a town that treats believers like an oddity, that alone takes some backbone.

The money keeps flowing toward stories that respect the people paying for them. Whether the studio bosses in Burbank ever learn the lesson is another question entirely, and plenty of executives would rather lose money than admit the flyover crowd had it right.

Pratt said it with a grin on a late-night couch, but the point cuts deep. Hollywood didn’t lose these viewers by accident. It walked away from them.

In 2022, the critics gave The Terminal List a 39 percent. The people they looked down on gave it 94.

Sources: Fox News, “Chris Pratt says audiences are hungry for ‘unapologetic, patriotic’ action stories,” Janelle Ash; About Amazon, Terminal List season two announcement; Official Jack Carr site, season two premiere announcement; Man of Many, The Terminal List season two preview; Looper; First Things, “Just Vengeance in The Terminal List”; Athlon Outdoors / Fox News, Jack Carr interview; Movieguide, Jack Carr on Tucker Carlson; Inside the Magic, Chris Pratt Instagram post; RedState; 3DVF, Dark Wolf prequel; The Week, season two preview; Cinefilos, season two Rotten Tomatoes debut