Everybody Dance Now
Season 1
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
1 stars
*
The joy of a Reno 911 reunion between Niecy Nash-Betts and Cedric Yarbrough isn’t enough to make up for what this episode puts Emerald through.
Photo: Ser Baffo/Disney
Much has been made over the fact that Kim Kardashian was given top billing on this show, and I have to agree that there is a more worthy recipient of that status: hats. The real star of All’s Fair isn’t one of the many esteemed actresses under Kim on the call sheet, but rather the hats that the costume department puts them in. Everything that happens in terms of character and plot on this show is simply meant to serve as a vehicle for these hats to shine. And shine they do — particularly on the head of Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash-Betts), who wears what feels like dozens of large fedoras over the course of this episode alone.
She’s also the character at the center of this week’s story. As we know, Emerald doesn’t have any interest in finding a partner, instead valuing her lavish solo nights like the one we see her have at the beginning of the episode with caviar and vibrators (which sounds like the title of a Real Housewife’s dance single). This is despite the fact that everybody in her life, from her sons to her co-workers, keep insisting that she get out there and start dating. The women at the firm even encourage her to go to a friend’s singles mixer over one of their Sex and the City lunches that they have in that bizarre, windowless break room, which looks like the turret from The Traitors if it was designed by Nate Berkus.
Allura even takes her shopping for the occasion, which is where I notice one of Kim’s strengths as an actress — the fake laugh. Kim is plagued by one of the classic ailments facing beautiful people: a weird, honklike laugh. We know this via years of watching her on reality television, but thus far what I’m most impressed by on this show is her ability to bring forth that genuine laugh anytime Allura has a chuckle of her own. It’s also one of the few times that the otherwise flat Allura feels like a real person.
With the encouragement of her girlfriends, Emerald heads out to the mixer, dressed so glam that her weird 25-year-old high-school sons tell her she looks “bangable.” But it’s at this mixer that the episode takes a dark turn. Emerald arrives, spots a suitor from across the room, they start to have a nice night, and then something bad happens. “Everybody Dance Now” comes on, but no, that’s not the bad thing. It’s then that Emerald begins to black out, and it becomes apparent that she was drugged. We cut to her waking up the next day with ripped, bloodied stockings as she has spotty flashbacks of fighting this man off. As these disturbing flashbacks play out, depicting an attempted rape, the show bizarrely decides to keep playing “Everybody Dance Now.” It even doubles down on the song by making it the title of the episode. Yet again, I can’t believe that this is a real television show.
As she struggles to put the pieces together, she turns to her friends and co-workers, both for support and as she sets out to get justice. But even amid this trauma, they have cases to work on. This week’s client is Cheryl Goodfader (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), a successful tech entrepreneur whose husband is trying to bleed her dry in their divorce because she refused to give him a child. First of all, naming a man who wanted a child “Goodfader” is truly out-of-this-world work. But thus far, the problem with this show’s case-of-the-week format is that the case is usually the least interesting part of the episode. They’re either too boring to care about, or, when they actually are interesting, we breeze through them so quickly that we don’t even have time to get invested. We have Jennifer Jason Leigh here, literally the woman whose real divorce inspired Marriage Story, and we’re wasting her on this anti-climactic dud of a split? This whole dispute about wanting kids versus not wanting kids is just meant to hold up a mirror to Allura’s own secret insemination that she did without her ex’s consent. That doesn’t even get explicitly brought up at all, but at one point she pensively holds her stomach, which is this show’s code for “pregnant.”
One bright spot of this case, though, is that Mr. Goodfader is being represented by America’s Sweetheart, Carrington Lane. After greeting Allura and Emerald as “Beef Curtains” and “Black Mae West” (all she’s missing is a track suit and slushie to throw), Carrington explains to them that her leverage is Cheryl’s secret abortion ten years ago. But before things can get messy, the case gets wrapped up in a neat little bow after Mr. Goodfader gets his new girlfriend pregnant. With his dream coming true elsewhere, he has no need to punish his ex anymore and drops the case. I wonder if any of these cases will ever make it to an actual courtroom, or if production can’t afford a courtroom set after blowing the budget on various fireplaces.
Meanwhile, Emerald is focused on tracking down her attacker with the help of the other women. Though they keep hitting dead ends, she eventually gets a text from an unknown number with photos of her bound and gagged. Allura cleans up the images and one of them reveals an envelope with an address on it. They’re able to identify the man, and it’s revealed that his father killed himself after Dina went after him for a Ponzi scheme — meaning this attack may have been just the first step at getting revenge.
With this information in hand, Emerald goes to meet up with her old police partner at a classic detective meet-up spot: empty parking lot, parked driver’s-side window to driver’s-side window. Best of all, this former partner is played by Cedric Yarbrough, who played Deputy Sven Jones on Reno 911! alongside Nash-Betts as Deputy Raineesha Williams. If only the hair department brought back Raineesha’s sideburns for the occasion. Unfortunately, he seems to be playing just as bad of a cop as he did on Reno, because he breaks it to her that there isn’t enough evidence for them to take any action.
But later in the episode, he shows up to the law firm with a new development in the case: The man who drugged and attacked Emerald was found dead, with a single gunshot wound to the head that appears to have been a suicide — but he warns her that since they haven’t yet ruled out a homicide, she should expect to hear from investigators. But if it was murder, who did it?
Thus far, every single twist on this show has been exceedingly predictable, almost as if to be deliberately cliché. If that pattern holds true, given that we just saw Emerald tell her boys about the attack, the assumption would be that one of her triplets took justice into his own hands. But even that has to be too obvious for this show, especially since we see Emerald have that same thought herself. She goes straight home to ask her boys outright, all of whom deny involvement and offer up alibis (some stronger than others).
The person who I think would be the far more interesting killer is Dina Standish. After all, she likely feels some responsibility given that it was her case that brought this attack about (and it seems like Emerald agrees given the way she snaps at her at the end of the episode). But is this show interesting enough to give Glenn Close a gun and make one of its leads a revenge killer? Or will it do the obvious and make the one triplet who was alone that night watching YouTube videos the perpetrator? Or even worse — what if after all this it does turn out to have just been a suicide after all? Given this show’s penchant for the anti-climactic, that could be the safest bet. In any case, I hope the investigation requires the work of a whole team of detectives played by Kerri Kenney-Silver, Thomas Lennon, and Wendi McLendon-Covey.
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