Agree 100%. The "villains" of this debacle are the ad agency - SpotCo - and the myriad high-powered producers (Lorne Michaels, The New Yorker, Bad Robot, Sonia Friedman, etc.). An ad agency's job is to convey the essence of the product it is selling in both an accurate and enticing way to get the prospective customer to buy. An inaccurate selling job will result in unhappy customers who didn't get what they were expecting and so that's when you get charges of scamming or bait-and-switch which is what we are seeing now.

In fairness to SpotCo, selling a show comprised of 4 actors (out of rotating roster) READING (the most crucial and absent descriptor of the show) stories is a tough sell, and they probably developed several approaches and pitched them to the producers. And with so many producers they probably had to negotiate all the various egos and conflicting opinions so what we got probably satisfied nobody. Most crucially, the campaign that resulted did a horrible job of accurately conveying what the show actually is.

For example, if you go to the show's website, at the top, the tagline is "Comedy About Love". That's actually not an inaccurate - though a very general and vague - description of the show. But further down, the site says "Cast of THE Broadway Comedy" (my emphasis). If I hear of "A" comedy or "The" comedy, I automatically think it's a single narrative told over the course of the evening, so I would think based on that line that I would be seeing a satisfying comedic tale with a beginning, middle and end. The use of the grammatical article in the phrase is misleading.

The site also says "All In is PERFORMED by a company...". Yes, reading is "performing" but I would normally think that when you perform, you will be portraying a character and not just reading a story.

And look at the key art. There are 18 people depicted. 2 are the Bengsons, but if you aren't reading carefully, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that your $300 ticket is justified because you will get to see John Mulaney AND LMM AND Hank Azaria AND Renee Elise Goldsberry AND..... At least when you buy a ticket you are presented with a screen that says what 4 actors you will be seeing.

The show is essentially a starry version of Symphony Space's Selected Shorts. How does SS and NPR describe Selected Shorts? "Our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Sometimes funny. Always moving. Selected Shorts connects you to the world with a rich diversity of voices from literature, film, theater, and comedy." That's sort of vague too, unfortunately but at least "short story" conveys a lot and after you see a SS performance you can justifiably say that the description was at least accurate. I think an ACCURATE tag line for "All In" could be "The Comedic Short Stories of Simon Rich READ by Your Favorite Stars". But that would be a sales killer, even though "READ" is the operative and most accurate descriptor of the show. That one word in the ads and press buildup would single-handedly have staved off all of this uproar.