Hey Paula lost more than half of its viewers over six episodes

Bravo’s docudrama about Paula Abdul’s life featured plenty of Paula insanity, but that was not enough to keep viewers engaged. The show, which concluded last Thursday, lost more than half its viewers during its run.

The penultimate episode was watched by “a paltry 272,000 viewers, less than half of its weak July premiere (619,000),” USA TODAY reported in advance of the finale.

The final episode “betrays the series’ few remaining fans by presenting a season finale made up of old clips and cutting-room-floor debris,” the subhead to Michael Slezak’s Entertainment Weekly recap announced, and was followed by a discussion of the “slapdash, half-finished Hey Paula season finale dropped like the sickening first squeeze from a long-dormant mustard bottle: watery, insipid, and best rinsed right down the drain.”

Meanwhile, recall Paula’s insistence that she’s not on any Page Six report from a “spy” who said, “There’s a salon chair in her house where [Paula] gets her hair and makeup done every day. She’ll sit in it, set an alarm, and then, because she’s on so many painkillers, pass out while her hair and makeup guy gets her ready for the day. When the alarm goes off she’ll wake up, and God forbid the poor guy isn’t done yet. All hell breaks loose.”

The only part of that Paula’s spokesperson refuted was the alarm: “There’s no alarm that I’ve ever seen.”