Alix Earle’s Netflix show gets rough reviews from TIME and Variety
Earle Meets World dropped Sept 4 with eight episodes. Critics at TIME and Variety say the big reveals never really arrive; Netflix views grew in week two.
The tea in 3
- Earle Meets World hit Netflix Sept 4: eight episodes, each under 40 minutes, per TIME.
- TIME calls it "a tediously extended version of the Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos"; Variety's headline says it is "Like Watching Paint Dry."
- Deadline reported 1.8M views in its first three days and 2.3M in week two, up more than 127%.
Alix Earle’s first big swing at TV is on Netflix, and two major critics are not impressed. Earle Meets World, a reality series built around the TikTok star and her blended family, was released Sept 4 and runs eight episodes of under 40 minutes each, according to TIME’s review.
The headline critique from TIME: it plays like one very long Get Ready With Me video. Variety’s critic landed in a similar place.
What the show is
Earle, 25, became famous with GRWM TikToks as a college student. The series follows her launching the skincare brand Reale Actives alongside family storylines: her sister Ashtin, her dad TJ (also her manager), her stepmom Ashley and her mom Alisa.
TIME says the show also covers her parents’ divorce, her breakup with NFL player Braxton Berrios and her falling-out with former boss Alex Cooper.
What critics said
A “tediously extended version of the Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos.”— Judy Berman, TIME, Sept 4
Berman writes that the “bombshells teased in months’ worth of promotional materials aren’t especially explosive,” and that no cast member emerges as a breakout personality. Her bigger point is about format: the show suggests “less overlap than you might expect” between what makes a successful influencer and what reality-TV stardom takes.
Variety’s Alison Herman, in a review headlined “Like Watching Paint Dry,” says the series goes to show that short clips don’t easily stretch to TV. She describes Earle’s on-screen signature as “a bland neutrality” and the show as one “of strikingly limited range.”
Herman also points to the Cooper storyline. Earle says on the show that she feels “betrayed” by Cooper, but Variety writes that she never tells her full side. Cooper does not appear in the show, TIME notes.
The numbers
Critics weren’t the whole story. Deadline reported that the show only narrowly cracked Netflix’s Top 10 with 1.8M views across its first three days, then grew its audience by more than 127% in its first full week, to 2.3M views. Deadline notes it is hard to compare with other Netflix titles because the streamer hasn’t launched many traditional reality shows lately.
Bad reviews, growing audience: both things can be true.
What happens next
Variety reads the finale as a setup for a second season, but we found no season two announcement from Netflix as of Oct 19. The real test is whether the week-two growth holds.
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