All’s Fair ★
Don’t bother with the Emmy campaign. In All’s Fair, a legal drama that is at best awkward and at worst atrocious, Kim Kardashian gets top billing as Allura Grant, the queen of Los Angeles divorce attorneys. While she’s a walking billboard for costume designer Paula Bradley, Kardashian’s performance is monotonal and emotionally negligent. Imagine a void, daubed with designer product placement and nihilistic girlboss mantras.
Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts star in new Ryan Murphy drama All’s Fair.
Still, it’s always slay time in the first three episodes of All’s Fair. A cold open flashed back 10 years, with Allura, fellow divorce lawyer Liberty Ronson (Naomi Watts) and investigator Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash-Betts) fleeing a boys’ club firm to set up their own shop, solely representing women. Now, as a new client declares with reverence: “You’re the best divorce lawyers in town, maybe the whole country.” There are old shovels less blunt than the exposition dialogue thrown around here.
The show is slight yet somehow deeply questionable. It ticks off its aims with clunky sequences and then ignores the ramifications. Created by Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story), Jon Robin Baitz (Feud: Capote vs. the Swans), and Joe Baken (Doctor Odyssey), All’s Fair is unreservedly ambitious and ready to go big, which takes it to the edge of parody and self-incrimination.
Primed with wealth porn aimed at the billionaire class, the narrative tends to zip through the cases the firm collectively represent. A wronged woman, played by famous names such as Elizabeth Berkley or Jessica Simpson, explains how terrible her husband is (the men are either darlings or douchebags). The two sides meet, and the arrogant bros on the other side of the table get their comeuppance, usually via dirt dug up by Emerald and some coercive negotiation that is possibly blackmail-adjacent.
Sarah Paulson, Kim Kardashian and Niecy Nash-Betts in All’s Fair.
The show’s backbone is how the women, soon joined by their original mentor, Dina Standish (Glenn Close), deal with their work/life crises. Liberty is nervous about marrying her famous doctor boyfriend because she constantly sees bad divorces, but the driving force is the collapse of Allura’s marriage to Chase Munroe (Matthew Noszka), a superstar footballer 10 years her junior with a vast collection of designer singlets and off-the-shelf affairs.
Loading
Chase’s conflict is the entry point for another Murphy regular, Sarah Paulson, who comes in nuclear reactor hot as Carrington Lane, an abrasive former colleague the women left behind who is now their nemesis. “How are you holding up, you poor discarded cum rag,” Carrington asks Allura, with the character living out every bitchy fantasy the writers can collectively muster. It’s camp fun, but All’s Fair doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. Carrington plainly yearns to be one of the girls, and her lip quivers with self-doubt. She should be impregnable.