Following in the proud and noble footsteps of Sharknado, America took one look at the execrable Aaliyah biopic Aaliyah: The Princess Of R&B, and decided it was garbage. More importantly, they felt the need to tell everyone it was garbage, thereby ensuring the broadcast would shoot straight to the top of Nielsen’s Twitter TV ratings.
The two-hour exercise in ignoring Aaliyah’s family’s wishes generated tweets seen by more than 3.4 million people during the broadcast and three hours before and after—nearly 1 million individual tweets, almost quadruple the number of second-place finisher The Walking Dead. (Rather than make a joke about reanimating a long-dead corpse to shamble around for the amusement of others, we’ll all simply note the unfortunate irony and move on.)
However, Deadline notes that, in overall viewership, the movie earned 3.2 million viewers—a number that looks respectable until it’s pointed out that more people saw tweets about the biopic than the biopic itself. More importantly, it’s still barely half the number of Lifetime’s earlier Flowers In The Attic reboot, proving that, in the fight between campy fictional incest and unpleasant real-life statutory rape, America will take the hilarious fake incest, thank you very much.