TV Review: Ryan Murphy's All’s Fair is a complete trainwreck

By now you have probably heard two things:

Kim Kardashian’s new legal drama, All’s Fair, sucks
Kim Kardashian failed the California bar exam

Are these things related? Only in spirit!

You might also recall that I have mentioned a game I play with myself when it comes to Ryan Murphy’s television shows, which is called “how long can I watch this”. Sometimes, I can make it all the way through (American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson, Doctor Odyssey); sometimes I make it one and a half episodes (Monster: The Ed Gein Story); and sometimes I make it barely half an episode (Grotesquerie). So of course, I sat down to play “how long can I watch this” with All’s Fair. How long could I watch it?

I’m proud and horrified to say four episodes. I have seen all four available episodes of All’s Fair (now streaming on Hulu). The show is fascinatingly terrible. It is uniquely bad. It is improbably, almost spitefully awful. Rarely have I seen such a collection of talent given such absolute dog sh-t writing, has such craft been in the service of such vapidity. Even by Ryan Murphy Series standards, All’s Fair is a half-baked turd, a televisual misfire of breathtaking proportion. It’s not so bad it’s good, it’s a complete trainwreck, impossible to look away from, so bad it defies reality itself. It’s an SNL sketch of a “sexy legal show” stretched to series length.

Kim Kardashian certainly doesn’t help, her acting is so poor as to be non-existent. There is a scene in which her character, the improbably named Allura Grant, is supposed to cry and Kardashian so clearly has saline drops dripping down her face, completely unconnected to her tear ducts, that it is laughable. She’s terrible in a way that should kill her acting career but probably won’t because we live in an era without public shame.

But she isn’t the only problem with All’s Fair. No, that would be the writing. Because while Kim K has the screen presence of a wood block, no one has ever accused Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Sarah Paulson, Teyana Taylor, or Niecy Nash-Betts of lacking on-screen charisma, and yet, not even they can save All’s Fair. And baby, they try. They try SO hard. Niecy Nash-Betts is out here acting like there’s another Emmy in it, but not even she can save All’s Fair. Sarah Paulson also gives it her all, chewing scenery and spitting lines like poison, but All’s Fair defies even Paulson’s most poisonous deliveries.

It's almost impossible to explain how bad this show is, it’s so specifically and individually horrid. I’m not even sure where to start. The dialogue sounds like it spawned from a meme generator, and the plot is like the fever dream of a broke law student after a third night with no sleep and a handful of caffeine pills. The basic gist is that after spending years dealing with the boys’ club of a major law firm, Allura Grant (Kardashian), Liberty Ronson (Watts), and Emerald Greene (Nash-Betts), are encouraged by the lone female partner at their firm, Dina (Close), to form their own, all-female firm. They do so, but they do not include Carrington Lane (Paulson), who is a better lawyer but a total pill to deal with. Ten years later, the firm of Grant, Ronson, and Greene is wildly successful, and Carrington Lane has become their archnemesis. Each of the women is dealing with circumstances in her personal life, too, and often “Car”, as they call her, is their rival in a related court case.

Sounds juicy, right? It should be! But in reality, All’s Fair is as juicy as the floor of Death Valley. It actually boggles the mind because some of the situations are built to be fertile dramatic ground. Emerald, for instance, after going the single mother route—with strapping triplet sons who adore their mother and are all Ivy-league bound because this show is nothing if not pure escapist fantasy—finally goes out for a night on the town…only to be drugged, assaulted, and subjected to revenge p-rn. This is the kind of arc Nash-Betts should be able to make hay out of, but the writing is so terrible and the handling of this plotline so ham-fisted, it is actually distasteful and appalling.

To be fair, though, there is one moment that shows what All’s Fair could have been, if the writers and producers behind the show cared about, you know, quality filmmaking and not just doing it for the lolz. In one conference room confrontation, Carrington Lane, who has become something of an anti-feminist defending “vulnerable men” in reaction to her foes becoming known for their brand of Girl Boss Lawyering, starts spitting invective about protecting men. It’s obvious Carrington just says whatever sh-t she thinks will get a rise from her nemeses, but in this case, she treads too close to Emerald’s recent trauma. When she catches that Emerald is not reacting as expected, a tiny flicker of concern flashes on her face, only to be wiped away in the next instant because Carrington cannot back down from her hatred of these women. The moment sings because Sarah Paulson and Niecy Nash-Betts are consummate damn actors, but there are not nearly enough of these moments to carry the show.

And yet it remains watchable because of how incredibly poorly the show handles all such plots. Dina is in a long, satisfying marriage that is fraying under the weight of prolonged illness. She is suffering caregiver burnout, which is another rich plot for a great actress to mine. But again, it falls flat because it is all surface and gloss. Not even this roster of great actresses can make anything of their characters because it’s like this whole show was made just to clip for social media. The only person who seems suited to her character is Kardashian, her carboard acting matches the half-assed writing perfectly.

I made it through four episodes of All’s Fair, but I will not keep watching. Even though I am sort of curious to see which rabbits they end up pulling out of the hat—four episodes in and Allura and Emerald are both set up for potentially disastrous consequences—life is too short to watch something so purposefully, knowingly terrible. It’s not just that All’s Fair is bad, it’s smug about being bad. It’s like the opposite of Doctor Odyssey. That show was plenty bonkers, but the characters were rooted in understandable context, and they made decisions consistent with their presented desires, goals, and interests.

The characters in All’s Fair do not behave like recognizable human beings. They don’t even behave like parodies of recognizable human beings. The characters of All’s Fair were made in the Yass Factory for TikTok clips.