Netflix’s Arnold Action Comedy ‘Fubar’ Reviews Badly, Rockets To #1

It’s one of those strange occurrences where something think something like a new action series starring Arnold Schwarzenegger should be a huge deal when it drops on Netflix, but if you’ve barely heard of FUBAR until right now, I wouldn’t blame you.

The action comedy is already starting to pick up traction on Netflix, however, debuting at #1 despite relatively little promotion or fanfare ahead of time. People see Arnold, they watch. And especially since he’s rarely on film all that much anymore in his post-Governator days.

However the show is…not reviewing especially well. With 41 reviews in, it has a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten, but also pretty poor in the scope of most TV high profile shows which review higher. The only recent shows I’m seeing review worse are 20% for Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra, the very bad, historically inaccurate documentary, and HBO’s The Idol which critics are essentially describing as “Misogyny: The Show.”

Arnold’s FUBAR is better by comparison, but I am getting Space Force vibes from it, the high profile Netflix comedy starring a post-Office Steve Carrell that had a 58% and was cancelled after two seasons. FUBAR does have a 71% audience score, but there are not all that many ratings in yet. Space Force had a 77%.

The show is eight nearly hour-long episodes. I watched a little bit of it, and the tone reminded me somewhat of Amazon’s Citadel, jokey but not actually funny. Joke-adjacent, like the cover art which has Arnold holding a “World’s Best Dad” mug being shot with a bullet. That’s kind of the level of humor you see in the series. It’s definitely more of an explicit comedy than Citadel, but it doesn’t seem to land. A much better spy option, and one on Netflix, would be The Night Agent, the hugely popular series from a few weeks back. And while it’s not quite a spy action series, for intrigue, I’d also watch Netflix’s The Diplomat.

We’ll see how FUBAR does. Netflix does not need shows to review well, it needs people to watch them. But I would argue more often than not, badly reviewed shows do tend to fade quickly because they don’t carry much word of mouth, and will have a harder time attracting an audience. Not that highly reviewed shows are guaranteed a pickup of course, as there are dozens of examples where that hasn’t been true.

I do wonder that if Arnold is on board as the star for this, if he could command say, a guaranteed two season deal for FUBAR before it event started, but who knows.

Watch it for yourself and decide if you like it, but initially here it does not seem great.

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