{"id":266833,"date":"2025-11-06T15:59:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T15:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/266833\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T15:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T15:59:10","slug":"is-kim-kardashians-legal-drama-alls-fair-really-the-worst-tv-show-of-all-time-us-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/266833\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Kim Kardashian\u2019s legal drama All\u2019s Fair really the worst TV show of all time? | US television"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you get a secret thrill from reading bad reviews, this week has basically been your Christmas. This is when the embargo dropped for Ryan Murphy\u2019s new Kim Kardashian<\/a>-starring Hulu legal drama All\u2019s Fair, and hoo boy. Lucy Mangan\u2019s zero-star extravaganza<\/a> was a classic of the form, starting with the line \u201cI did not know it was still possible to make television this bad,\u201d and only getting more despairing from there.<\/p>\n

But then something incredible happened. More All\u2019s Fair reviews started popping up, and they were just as scathing. Every last one of them, without exception, absolutely hated it. In his zero-star review, The Times\u2019s Ben Dowell observed<\/a> that the show felt like it had been written \u201cby a toddler who couldn\u2019t write \u2018bum\u2019 on a wall.\u201d USA Today\u2019s Kelly Lawler wrote<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s so stilted, artificial and awkward not even a glass of wine and leftover Halloween candy can make it remotely enjoyable to view.\u201d The Wrap said<\/a>: \u201cOne wonders if Murphy is engaged in some sort of social experiment to see if he can get away with making the most transparently terrible show on Disney\u2019s dime.\u201d In his one-star review (comparatively a rave), The Telegraph\u2019s Ed Power called<\/a> the show a \u201cdisaster zone of soapy plotting and reeking dialogue\u201d.<\/p>\n

For over 24 hours, All\u2019s Fair had to endure a zero% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That has crept up a little now (almost entirely thanks to a vaguely positive review from Decider, that seems to have been written with a gun to the back of the reviewer\u2019s head) and now stands at a majestic 6%. Do you have any idea how hard that is to achieve? For comparison, even MILF Manor \u2013 an actual reality show that really exists and is exactly what you think it is \u2013 managed to claw 14% from reviewers. Not for nothing is All\u2019s Fair destined to go down as one of the worst shows in history.<\/p>\n

And the thing you need to understand is that reviewers really don\u2019t want to give anything zero stars. This isn\u2019t necessarily because they\u2019re kindhearted folk who like to see the best in everything, but a zero star rating basically represents a warped kind of achievement. Everyone knows that truly bad shows get two stars, because that\u2019s the score you give something if you can\u2019t summon the energy to care about it. But zero stars? Well, that has to be spectacular.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I have to admit that, as much as I trust the judgement of my peers, I did briefly wonder whether there was an agenda at play. Perhaps the reviewers were being snobby about the participation of Kim Kardashian<\/a>, or maybe they were attempting to clip Ryan Murphy\u2019s wings a little. But then I actually watched All\u2019s Fair and, no, they all basically were spot on.<\/p>\n

Everything about All\u2019s Fair, on both a micro and macro level, is terrible. The scripts are terrible. The performances are terrible. The grotesque demonstrations of wealth porn are terrible. Everything is both far bigger and far flatter than it needs to be. All\u2019s Fair is the Kansas of television.<\/p>\n

You know about the premise, of course, because you\u2019ve greedily lapped up every stinking review with the same amount of glee that I have. All\u2019s Fair is about a team of divorce lawyers who are all so extremely rich that their faces stopped moving a decade and a half ago and also they have to wear clown outfits for some reason. Their jobs ostensibly involve getting the best settlements for their clients, but in reality revolve around saying things without a trace of subtext in a manner that suggests they are actually reading them from a too-small napkin located 100 feet away in a rainstorm. It\u2019s less a drama and more a malfunctioning proof of concept for a haunted TikTok filter specifically designed to give you nightmares.<\/p>\n

There is so much wasted talent here \u2013 Naomi Watts<\/a> is in it, for god\u2019s sake! Glenn Close is in it! \u2013 that you\u2019ll find yourself developing theories about why it is so horrible to sit through. My current one is that all the good actors had to make their performances operatically large as a deliberate counterpoint to Kim Kardashian\u2019s central performance, which is so relentlessly listless and monotone that it just sort of sits there like a fart cloud at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.<\/p>\n

You will also find yourself wondering if this is supposed to be a joke that we\u2019re meant to be in on. It certainly feels that way sometimes. Kate Berlant is in it, and she\u2019s usually funny. The outfits are genuinely hilarious; at various points during the same episode Sarah Paulson wears a shoulder-width bowtie and Niecy Nash-Betts wears a hat that makes it look like she has a little orange bus on her head. There\u2019s even a wedding scene, where the rings are so comically outsized that the bride and groom basically have to hoopla them on to each other\u2019s fingers. That\u2019s funny, right?<\/p>\n

But despite this there\u2019s a weird sense that, no, this is all the result of ineptitude and misplaced aspiration, and none of the show\u2019s 26 credited producers, co-producers and executive producers possess the ability to discern just how bad a thing this actually is. We had it right first time. All\u2019s Fair\u2019s Rotten Tomatoes score is now 6% too many.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you get a secret thrill from reading bad reviews, this week has basically been your Christmas. This…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":["post-266833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}