Assistant Madams is the show everyone loves to hate

The most fascinating thing about Assistant Madams is that it's so bad it's almost like it's deliberate.

Like there was a team meeting and everyone unanimously voted to make a terrible show just to see how people would react to it, as some twisted social experiment or something.

The amount of time it takes for different viewers might vary a little, but it doesn't exactly take too long to realise that Assistant Madams is not a very good show.

The web series, which premiered in January 2020, scopes in on the fabulous lives of three young ladies - Chioma (Osas Ighodaro), Tamara (Sophie Alakija), and Lara (Tana Adelana).

Without giving away too much, the lives of the girls revolve around men and how they use them to fund fabulous lifestyles they can't afford on their own.

Assistant Madams cannot be accused of lacking imagination. In fact, the problem is that it has too much imagination that it has no idea what to do with it all and ends up soiling itself with an unending cringefest.

The minute the show starts, it embarks on a race to the bottom, and every time it finds itself in a hole, it keeps digging.

Most strikingly, like everything about the show, dialogue feels as unnatural as running into a polar bear rollerskating on Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos.

Like its characters, the show lives in a world of convenience where everything falls in its lap without even pretending to work for it.

Leaps in logic abound so much that it's not enough for the viewer to suspend disbelief for this show; you need to carefully detach your brain, keep it on ice to preserve its innocence, and reattach it when you're done.

L-R: Osas Ighodaro, Tana Adelana, and Sophie Alakija are the stars of Assistant Madams but can't do enough to save it [Instagram/@assistantmadams] Pulse Nigeria

However, despite its festival of limitations, Assistant Madams has an unexplainable allure that only a few bad shows can lay claim to.

There are only two kinds of people who watch Assistant Madams - people who love themselves and stop watching almost immediately; and people who simply have no respect for themselves, like crackheads always itching for their next fix even though they vowed to quit the last time.

I happen to belong to the second category, unable to stop myself from this car wreck that's caught in a loop of bad decisions.

The writing is offensive, the acting leaves a lot to be desired, and there's a general lack of effort to respect the viewer's time.

A casual search of Assistant Madams on social media websites would throw up uncountable number of comments that are unflattering about the show's existence, but these people also cannot stop watching, waiting for it to get better, or worse, most likely.

Everyone is complaining about the same things, but most of everyone also return for every new episode for their fix of casual masochism masked as harmless fun at the show's expense.

If the deliberate plan behind Assistant Madams is to consistently confuse viewers and keep them guessing until the very end, then it is doing a very great job.

If not, then wetin be this?