Is the Kim Kardashian drama 'All's Fair' really that bad?
Ryan Murphy's latest show feels less like a scripted drama and more like a compilation of Kim Kardashian's reels
It may seem like a soft target, I know, to go after a show that has received no positive reviews at all. You might well accuse me of piling on, of kicking a well-coiffed corpse that's already bleeding out. Yet I chose to write about All's Fair out of morbid curiosity, the impulse that makes you crane your neck at a particularly catastrophic car crash. Also, what is the benchmark for labelling a serious “worst drama ever"? Most US & UK critics, after all, don't have to endure the amateurish dreck that Indian critics suffer through, and so, as a seasoned veteran reporting from the trenches of mediocrity, I approached Ryan Murphy's latest travesty with a simple question: Is it really that bad?
Answer: It is.
All's Fair (streaming in India on JioHotstar) presents itself as a drama about an all-woman divorce law firm in Los Angeles, run by Kim Kardashian and staffed by actresses who deserve far, far better. The premise sounds vaguely promising, on paper: women wielding power in the legal arena, dismantling the patriarchy one divorce-settlement at a time. Yet what Murphy and his co-creators Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken deliver is unwatchable right from the start. The show unfolds not in scenes but in snippets, each one structured like a "previously on" highlight reel, all breathless exposition and zero substance. Nothing flows. Nothing connects.
The legal work performed by these couture-clad crusaders is less jurisprudence and more extortion. Their primary strategy appears to be blackmailing male clients; who needs nuance when you can have broad-stroke villainy dressed up as girl-power feminism? The show treats this as empowerment, as if threatening wealthy men into submission is the height of female achievement.
And what do these women want? Money. More money. Always more money. They speak endlessly about "adding another zero," as if that extra digit will somehow fill the void where character development should be. The fetishisation of wealth is obscene: every frame drips with designer labels, every conversation returns to square-footage and hedge-fund millions. These people unironically believe feminism means owning more Birkins than the next woman.
The budget is clearly enormous. For evidence, look merely at Kardashian’s shapeshifting hairstyles, which take on so many Old Hollywood looks that she goes from Veronica Lake to Lawrence Of Arabia. They change in every single scene — much like Salman Khan’s toupees in Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan. The mansions are lavish, the jewellery oversized. The writers, however, may not be the best that money can hire. The dialogue sounds like it was generated by an algorithm trained exclusively on Instagram captions. The show itself feels less like a scripted drama and more like a compilation of Kardashian's reels: glossy, vapid, and completely devoid of human emotion.
A photographer friend with a sharper eye than mine pointed out something intriguing: All's Fair has a serious fetish for gloves. In every other scene, one of the women — from these overdressed lawyers or their sapphire-toting clients — is wearing gloves. Whoever wears the gloves gets to "win" that scene, gets to have the last word, gets to drop the mic. They wear, of course, flamboyant hand-wear, long and outrageous, often impractical and obscenely expensive. In a world that cares only about money, this may be what matters. All you need is glove.
The all-star cast doesn’t get to shine. The luminous Naomi Watts plays "the British one," deploying her clipped accent to make "Mr Chow noodles" sound vaguely classy. The compelling Niecy Nash-Betts is reduced to playing "the Black one," which means she says "girrrrl" and "baby" every third sentence, as if Murphy's idea of diversity is dialect. Teyana Taylor — the firebrand from One Battle After Another — gets to be a sadly inconsequential sidepiece, her undeniable screen-presence squandered. Sarah Paulson has a bit of fun as the "bad lawyer," calling these vacuous women names, but even she can't salvage this disaster. And then there’s Glenn Close. The iconic Glenn Close is somehow entirely wasted here, saying stodgy things and cruelly styled to look like Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Is this the Kim Kardashian show? That may be the first fundamental misstep. Kardashian's expressions are immeasurably wooden, and her line delivery stiffer than my lower-back. Her reactions are detached from what other characters say… or from reality itself. The only time she shows genuine passion is when discussing surgical enhancement: a meta-commentary so perfect it almost feels intentional.
Speaking of intent, how can Ryan Murphy do this? Murphy, who makes more TV than most of us can watch, has always varied in quality, somehow going from the brilliance of The People VS OJ Simpson to this dreck. I started watching *All's Fair* hoping it might be "so bad it's good," some glitzy trash you can't look away from, but this… This feels so bad it might be deliberate, like some sort of small-screen version of Springtime For Hitler, the Broadway show mounted within Mel Brooks' The Producers: a disaster created to fail.
If that is indeed the scheme, then Murphy has another success on his hands. The show is out and widely loathed, and this column simply allows me to get in a few jibes. All, as the title says, is fair. All I’m really doing, as I’m totting up this report card, is adding another zero.
Streaming tip of the week
If you need a show so bad it really is good, let me point you to Riverdale (Netflix) where Archie Comics characters navigate murders, cults, serial killers, boxing matches determining town ownership, time-travelling comets, Russian spy grandmothers, and Betty’s serial killer genes. Gloriously unhinged.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.
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