Despite the torrential flood of white tears that has rained down since Netflix announced the recently released original series Dear White People, film and television critics have given the show a 100 percent score on the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
Created by Justin Simien, who wrote and directed the feature film of the same name, Dear White People looks at race relations through the microcosm of the fictional Winchester University. The 10-episode season of 30-minute episodes debuted on Netflix on April 28, amid much controversy.
Groups (organized by the outspoken activist Wyatt P. Pole) threatened to boycott the streaming site when Netflix released the first trailer for the show in February. (You read that correctly: not the show, but the trailer for the show.) A number of people took to Twitter, threatening to cancel their subscriptions because of the series.
The threats did not stop Netflix from releasing the much-anticipated comedy to much fanfare. When television critics reviewed the show, they seemed to unanimously agree that the satirical series artfully tackled the complex issues of race and society.
Dear White People is one of the few TV shows or films with a perfect rating. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t actually review films and television series; the website describes its “Tomatometer” scoring process:
The Tomatometer rating—based on the published opinions of hundreds of film and television critics—is a trusted measurement of movie and TV programming quality for millions of moviegoers.
The Tomatometer rating represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show.
Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Wypipo is furious, and its members are letting their feelings out on social media:
Meanwhile, black Twitter thinks this is all hilarious.
We are awaiting a statement on whether Caucasians will now collectively boycott Rotten Tomatoes, television sets, the internet, math or the concept of numbers as a whole.