327,000.
That’s how many people watched Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Showtime show “Who Is America?”
“Among the key demographic of adults 18-49, Who Is America? pulled in a low 0.1 rating. That put the secretive and controversial Who Is America? in the hinterland of the 70th highest-rated original show on cable on July 15,” Deadline reported.
What shows beat him? Nearly everyone.
In comparison and airing in the same 10 PM ET slot as Who Is America?, Fox Sports 1 had UFC Fight Night with a 0.3 rating and 754,000 viewers. Over on Home, House Hunters Renovation snagged a 0.3 in the key demo too. However, the politics free HHR also pulled in an audience of 1.4 million.
Cohen was pummeled at in the 10 p.m. slot, Showbiz411 reported.
“Mexico Life” was among the shows on cable that did five or six times the business. (1.9 million viewers). Something called “On the Case with PZ” on Discovery had 1.5 million. “History of Comedy” on CNN had 764K. That’s twice as many as Cohen’s show.
But Showbiz411 said Showtime claimed the numbers were much higher. “Showtime says ‘Who is America?’ actually was seen by over 1 million people when [you] include all platforms including several showings that were streamed and beamed and telegraphed.”
But the showbiz website also said, “Basically, ‘Who is America?’ didn’t make the top 25 cable shows on Sunday night. It was a bust.”
Cohen, the infantile actor who made it big playing “Ali G” and “Borat,” didn’t receive much good press before the show debuted. Dominic Patten of Deadline completely destroyed the show with one word — boring.
“Full of mild shock, zero awe and a lot of recycled scenarios, the flabby, seven-episode dupe-the-dimwits endeavor from the once blighting satirist certainly provokes a great inducement to change the cable channel,” Patten wrote.
While the author called Cohen “the premier provocateur of our time,” he said this latest show is dreadful. “Or to paraphrase a true great provocateur, Johnny Rotten: Boring, Sasha, boring.”
Though Ali G was genius and Borat was brilliant, the subsequent offerings leading to Who Is America? intimate that the decline and fall of the comedy of Sasha Baron Cohen is almost complete with this pointless and tub-thumping exercise in ritual humiliation.
About as “dangerous” and “cold-blooded,” to quote WiA’s promos, as a multi-colored inflatable pool unicorn, this series is murky on who is being more humiliated, Cohen or his patsies. It is, however, definitive on giving 2016 flick The Brothers Grimsby a worthy rival for the stupidest thing Cohen has ever conceived.
Via DailyWire
