There being—famously!—no accounting for taste has always been a pretty big relief for TV creators, who can cheerfully alienate and irritate as many critics as they’d like, as long as people tune in to watch the damn thing. And when said damn thing is Hulu’s new Ryan Murphy/Kim Kardashian legal soap All’s Fair, that’s exactly what’s happened, with the streaming service claiming the show has just posted its biggest scripted debut in the past three years.
Kardashian—who’s pretty good at this whole “online self-promotion” thing, turns out—actually poked some light fun at the show’s critical reception, making an Instagram post that showed its 0 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. (A few more critics have since chimed in, bumping the legal series’ rating up to a slightly better, if also slightly less funny, 5 percent.) Critics have savaged the show for being glossy, overly stylized filler, with only Sarah Paulson escaping ire, safely ensconced in her position as the (apparently) only person in Hollywood who can manage Murphy’s taste for excess without turning into a complete cartoon.
None of which has apparently mattered to audiences, who have flipped on the series to the tune of 3.2 million views in its first three days of streaming. And, sure, we might be curious about the motivations for those clicks, but the fact is that “hate watches,” “‘It can’t be that bad’ trainwreck check-ins,” and actual engaged viewership all spend the same, especially when it comes to premieres. (Whether the show can maintain anything even remotely like those numbers over its nine-episode first season remains to be seen, but Murphy’s shows have always relied on a bit of shock-and-awe when it comes to first impressions, so you could argue that All’s Fair has basically already done what it set out to do just by generating this initial burst of, let’s call it, “interest.”)
[via Deadline]
