• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, March 17, 2017

What goes up must come down. After years of nearly universal fawning press notices, Netflix might be feeling a little prickly heat this weekend. It has a great big failure on its hands.

With its presentation of Marvel's "Iron Fist,' fourth in the Marvel collection, Netflix is having its own "Ishtar" moment.

The series, which is available starting today is being savaged by critics. Says TV Line,  “a key issue with [the “Iron Fist” debut, which hasn’t gone unnoticed in reviews: In the span of an hour, nothing really… happens.”

There’s a lot of woe out there. Here are some choice words from the beginning of Variety TV critic Maureen Ryan’s review:

“Marvel’s ‘Iron Fist’ is deadly — in all the wrong ways. Quite a few dramas in the streaming arena have pacing problems, and even Netflix’s better Marvel programs have displayed an affinity for contrived, time-killing subplots. But ‘Iron Fist’ is the most frustrating and ferociously boring example of Netflix Drift in some time. Not one element of this plodding piece works. The action scenes lack spark, snap, and originality. . . Good luck, bingers: Getting through two episodes was a challenge.”

That’s a peculiarity of Netflix dramas. They need to advance in a certain binge-logical kind of way, because, literally, the scripts are on the clock. So, says The Independent, get on with it, whatever it is.

Instead, says its critic, in “Iron Fist,”  “Everything must be said, repeatedly. Two people have sexual chemistry? Make sure to tell the audience. Two characters form a father/son bond? Don’t let that go unnoticed. It becomes tiresome, particularly in episode two when the characters basically explain what happened in episode one - a huge issue for a Netflix show people will no doubt binge watch.”

If you were angling on “Iron Fist” to be a good time-chewer during a long weekend of first round March Madness “action,” maybe you have to think again. Or maybe not. Personally, I love to watch marketing disasters, so I’m quite likely to get the take-out surprise from Chipotle’s and knock open a can of New Coke and watch the video train wreck in front of me.

Critics, really, have gone a little cuckoo over “Iron Fist.” In Vanity Fair, for example, Richard Lawson calls it,  “staggeringly incompetent series, one that’s so toxically bad that I kind of hope it takes the whole enterprise down with it. Not Netflix itself—just this iteration of Marvel world-building, slapdash and dismal as it is.”

I’m checking my supply of Valium.

The New York Times’ handy Watching blog does a good quick rundown of the raspberries and amplifies the controversy that preceded the debut. “Iron Fist” has been criticized for casting a white man as the master of  “distinctly Asian traditions of fighting. What could have been a rare chance for an actor of Asian descent to land a high-profile role at a time when that is still relatively rare went instead to the actor Finn Jones,” the blog reported.

 It just gets better, in a bad kind of way. Jones took to Twitter to defend himself, and that too was a disaster.

So it would appear there is a lot to not like. On Rotten Tomatoes, “Iron Fist” started with a 14 rating--something akin to what Americans think of Congress, or journalists. It’s gone up to a  19.

Is it that bad?   “Not exactly,” offered Mike Hale in his Times review. “Through six episodes it’s blandly mediocre, though it starts to perk up a little in Episodes 5 and 6. In the Netflix-original catalog, it’s well ahead of ‘Fuller House’ and ‘Hemlock Grove.’ ”

Really, I can’t wait.

pj@mediapost.com