My Brilliant Career holds Netflix's rare 100% from critics — so why are audience reviews so mixed?

My Brilliant Career sits at 100% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score has been hovering in the low-to-mid 50s — Forbes clocked it at 55% on August 19, 2026, while CBR reported 52% earlier that week. On IMDb it's a more forgiving 6.9 out of 10. The gap is roughly 45 points.

What critics liked

The adaptation, developed and co-written by Liz Doran with Alyssa McClelland and Anne Renton directing, takes Miles Franklin's 1901 novel about a headstrong farm girl chasing a writing life in 1900s Australia and plays it with more wit than reverence. Reviewers were near-unanimous, and most of them landed on the same name.

Philippa Northeast is "the shiny thing from which we cannot avert our eyes," wrote the Wall Street Journal in 2026.

Variety called the show whimsical and sharp. TechRadar went further and suggested viewers forget Bridgerton. The Australian's Geordie Gray argued the Bridgerton comparison misses — the show is closer in spirit to Sofia Coppola's films about girlhood. Decider's Joel Keller noted it occasionally reaches too hard for style, then said the performances outweigh it.

What viewers complained about

The recurring objections in audience reviews are specific and mostly structural:

• The love triangle — it isn't in Franklin's novel. It was added to give Harry some competition, and it's the single most-cited grievance.
• The music — modern needle-drops over 1900s Australia divided people sharply.
• The casting — a chunk of one-star reviews simply argue the leads are wrong for the roles.
• The ending — several reviewers said the final episode veers away from where the plot appeared to be heading.
• The Bridgerton framing — viewers who arrived expecting that show found something quieter, and said so.

Does the split actually matter?

Not to Netflix, apparently. My Brilliant Career hit the platform's top 10 English-language shows at #4 within five days on 3.3 million views, charted in 54 countries, and went to #1 in Ukraine.

Is there more coming?

Unconfirmed, but the door's open. Netflix is calling it season 1 rather than a miniseries, and Franklin wrote a direct sequel — My Career Goes Bung, published in 1946. A renewal will come down to viewing numbers, which currently look considerably healthier than that audience score.

For comparison: the 1979 film version with Judy Davis and Sam Neill holds 86% from critics and 67% from audiences. The critic-audience gap isn't new to this story. It just got wider.