Earlier this month it became clear that Egyptian authorities were not happy about the new Netflix documentary titled Queen Cleopatra. Specifically, they were upset that Netflix and producer Jada Pinkett Smith had decided to race-swap Cleopatra, turning a Greek ruler into a black woman. “The Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities confirms that Queen Cleopatra had light skin and Hellenistic (Greek) features,” the SCA said in a statement.

The show has now been released and is streaming on Netflix. I noticed last night it was in the 10th spot for most watched movies. The show’s creator has been excitedly pointing to its spot among the top 10 shows and criticizing the critics.

#5 in UK #4 in US: Thank you to those who helped get us here. Including some angry folk who need to deal with the fact that melanated folk have been doing sh*t around here since day dot. Adam & Eve? I'm not even going to get into that… #Cleopatra #Netflix #jadapinkettsmith X pic.twitter.com/c39duJ8OVw

— Tina Gharavi (@Gharavi) May 12, 2023

But early indicators suggest the audience that has seen the show is not terribly fond of it. As of today, the show has a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 10 reviewers but the audience score is even worse. In fact, it seems to have set a record for the lowest score possible.

It has not just the lowest audience score in Netflix history, it has essentially the lowest audience score possible on Rotten Tomatoes, a 1%. Not a 10%, a 1%…

I’ve never seen anything like this. Not with bad shows. Not with politically controversial shows prone to review bombing. Never this bad, not in Netflix history. Honesty, I think not even in TV history, at least with this many reviews in (over a thousand).

The author of that Forbes piece was so astonished by the 1% score that he decided to watch a bit of it just to see if it was getting unfair treatment from haters.

It is not a huge shock to report that the show is…not good. While historical accuracy aside, Cleopatra Adele James is actually quite good in the part from what I saw (I could only do part of the first episode before I remembered I had about 12 other better shows to watch), the entire thing comes off like one of those bad historical re-enactment dramas I used to watch on the History Channel with my parents as a kid. The information, often inaccurate it seems, is also just very dull, and the entire thing feels like a dry soap opera. I am not shocked the critics are rejecting alongside fans not really even mentioning the issue of the Cleopatra’s casting.

It’s not only false, it’s also terrible. Here’s a sample of a couple audience reviews:

Leave aside the skin colour of Cleopatra. Not a single Egyptian cast & not a single Egyptian historian interviewed for this “documentary” on (supposedly) Egyptian history. If there was a ever case of cultural appropriation, this is it.

Another one:

It is hard to take this “documentary” seriously when there are errors in just about every scene. Ancient Egypt existed for three and a half millennia, and the Ptolemaic period of Greek control and its involvement in Roman policies, especially the Roman civil wars, is a very specific period. For example no Egyptian was spoken at the court, Greek was spoken. But getting costumes wrong, getting basic timelines of battles (like Actium) wrong, placing Cleopatra at events we know she was not present at, mixing up things done by Anthony with those done by Octavian and an unending series of errors just makes this hard to watch. It is clear no experts, or even anyone with a basic knowledge of the history of the time and place was involved, or if they were, their advise was clearly ignored. The dialogue is also laughably childish, so is the acting.

There are a hundred more like this. But there is some good news for Jada Pinkett Smith and the producers. As of today, the audience rating for the show has leaped upward! That’s right, it has gone from 1% to 2% and who knows it may even hit double digits one day. But for now it’s still probably the lowest rated show ever made.

Of course there are already articles from Vogue and Decider claiming the low scores are the result of racism.

Needless to say, the docuseries was horrifically review-bombed in a manner that is extremely unfunny and quite dangerous to the creatives involved in the production and the future of Black representation in entertainment. Netflix and James have thoroughly defended their portrayal of the famed ruler, time and time again, and the color of Cleopatra’s skin is discussed in the first episode of the series, so nobody has been left ignorant about the decision.

Before the show’s premiere, the series was criticized by the Egyptian government and others who condemned the show for not portraying Cleopatra with white skin. Many accused the creators of “robbing” Egyptians of their history. James addressed the backlash on The Wayner Ayers podcast, saying, “I find it sad that people are either so self-loathing or so threatened by Blackness that they feel the need to do that, to separate Egypt from the rest of the continent.” The next day, she called the controversy “fundamentally racist” on Steph’s Packed Lunch and said Cleopatra’s race is “a very small part of the conversation, really.”

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a racist nail. It’s worth noting that Queen Cleopatra was the second season of a show meant to highlight several black queens in Africa. The first season was titled “AFRICAN QUEENS: NJINGA” and while it got an 88% score from critics the score from the audience was just 18% earlier this week (now down to 14%). That suggests to me that the quality of this series wasn’t great even before the current controversy.