Social media beats on 'Drumline 2: A New Beat' but was the overall reaction all that bad?

The film, shot in the spring in Atlanta and considered an update on the original 2002 film "Drumline," follows many of the same themes as the first movie on a much smaller budget. The original star Nick Cannon returns as Devon but now as a successful music producer. The lead is a female (played by Alexandra Shipp) trying to break into the A&T marching band front line drumline.

The original airing Monday night drew a solid 2.36 million viewers, comparable to its lead in "Love & Hip Hop Hollywood." Another 900,000 caught the encore at 11:30 p.m.

But that was only half as many viewers as those who caught VH1's Atlanta-shot film a year ago about the trio TLC called "Crazysexycool."

According to VH1, "Drumline: A New Beat" was the  No. 1 most social show (excluding sports) on Twitter and the top trending topic on Facebook throughout both the East and West Coast premieres. (The show was the third most Tweeted non-sports program of the week with 2.1 million followers reached from 362,000 tweets behind only "The Walking Dead" and "American Horror Story.")

Here is a visual image of someone who thought the "new beat" was decidedly less tasty - or literally less expensive:

And here are some negativos going after the poor film:

Apparently, a fake website posted this rather tone-deaf defensive item. This was not Vh1's site but a fan created it, VH1 told me:

Credit: Rodney Ho

Credit: Rodney Ho

I wrote a story about "Drumline: A New Beat" on Thursday but it didn't exactly win over the search engine gods and was barely read so the poll I posted so far has garnered all of 20 votes and of that way too small sampling, the votes were split among folks who liked it and those who didn't. So I'm going to post the poll again here, too:

And truthfully, some folks on Twitter defended the film, with varying levels of praise:

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