{"id":115809,"date":"2025-11-05T00:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T00:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/115809\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T00:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T00:26:07","slug":"ryan-murphys-kim-kardashian-drama-is-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/115809\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Murphy\u2019s Kim Kardashian Drama Is Trash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, TV super-producer Ryan Murphy<\/a> was very good at his job. Shows like Glee, American Horror Story, and American Crime Story were massive cultural touchstones. He\u2019s won six Emmys on his own and received 39 nominations, and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame just this year. He, at one point, theoretically knew what good TV looked like. But All\u2019s Fair, the new \u201clegal\u201d \u201cdrama\u201d starring Kim Kardashian<\/a> alongside some actually talented actresses, is proof that he\u2019s lost his touch. And maybe his grasp on reality.<\/p>\n

The new Hulu<\/a> series, launching with three episodes today, feels like a fever dream, a peek into an alternate universe occupied by creatures who might look vaguely human but do not speak or act as you and I do. They preen. They pose. They say things like \u201cThere are rumors about you\u2026 I started them\u201d and \u201cMaybe her need for revenge\u2026 was unstoppable.\u201d The goal might have been camp. But camp\u2019s supposed to be fun.<\/p>\n

All\u2019s Fair begins with a prologue in which lawyers Allura Grant (Kardashian) and Liberty Ronson (Naomi Watts) have gotten tired of \u201cthe boys\u2019 club\u201d at their firm, deciding to start their own shop focusing on divorce cases. They bring investigator Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash-Betts<\/a>) along with them, and ten years later, business is thriving. Their speciality: Helping women trapped by iron-clad prenups get their due.<\/p>\n

Related Video<\/p>\n

These very rich women with very believable names live in beautiful homes, wear beautiful clothes, and are partnered with beautiful men. Things aren\u2019t perfect, of course \u2014 Allura\u2019s husband Chase (Matthew Noszka) is quickly revealed to be a cheater, while Liberty is insecure about the age gap between her and her younger boyfriend (The Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u2019s O-T Fagbenle). Glenn Close is also here, as a mentor to the other lawyers whose own husband (Ed O\u2019Neill) is fighting cancer.<\/p>\n

And when Allura and Liberty left their previous firm, they left behind fellow lawyer Carrington Lane (Sarah Paulson<\/a>), who has spent the last ten years being pissed about that and wanting revenge. Her primary tools of vengeance: Mean words, taking on Allura\u2019s cheating husband as a client, and sending an edible arrangement to the ladies covered in poop.<\/p>\n

As you might guess from reading the above, this is one of those shows where every actor on screen, with one or two exceptions, would probably get recognized while walking down the street. Grace Gummer is the featured client in the first episode. Judith Light, Elizabeth Berkley Lauren, Rick Springfield, and Hari Nef all guest star. Even a thankless one-scene role gets handed to E from Entourage! All of these people, of their own free will, chose to be a part of this show. One can only assume they weren\u2019t shown the scripts in advance. Because the alternative is that they never learned how to read.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the power of Murphy as a producer, a man whose success owes a lot to his relationships \u2014 nearly all of the actors listed above have appeared in at least one or two other Murphy projects, with Nash-Betts and Paulson amongst his most frequent collaborators. For their loyalty, they\u2019re rewarded with regular work and awards acclaim: Paulson has earned seven Emmy nominations, winning one, for her work on Murphy shows; Nash-Betts just won her first Emmy in 2023 for her work in Murphy\u2019s Dahmer \u2013 Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.<\/p>\n

Murphy never wrote a single episode of the American Crime Story anthology series, his most critically acclaimed show to date \u2014 Crime Story seasons were overseen by other writers like Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and Tom Rob Smith, with Murphy occasionally directing. But even the past shows where he did lead the writing had a little more coherency to them. Meanwhile, for All\u2019s Fair, Murphy co-created the series with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken and is a credited co-writer on the first three episodes. It confirms that he\u2019s lost whatever ability he once had to ground his writing in relatable human emotions \u2014 these scripts feel like the bad first drafts of a cheap soap opera, with none of the enjoyable punch that comes from that genre.<\/p>\n

Each episode ostensibly features a case of the week, but unlike an actually functional procedural<\/a>, the cases in question are largely a backdrop to lukewarm personal drama. Scenes stretch on way too long, riddled with cliches. No episode is longer than 45 minutes, which is theoretically a blessing, but also speaks to how fundamentally little the show has to say, or how little it reflects anything authentic about today\u2019s society.<\/p>\n

And if the show\u2019s a fantasy, it\u2019s certainly a fantasy I have no interest in having. Consider the five-minute cold open for Episode 3, \u201cI Want Revenge,\u201d which is literally just our core ensemble cast sitting at a fancy lunch and talking about various types of \u201cself-care.\u201d A fancy massage followed by masturbation is the least extreme option \u2014 the focus of the conversation is on fillers made with salmon sperm and NAD IV therapy and \u201cvaginal PRP\u201d (I Googled it, it\u2019s real, I regret everything).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all capped off with Glenn Close\u2019s character\u2019s words of wisdom: \u201cMy secret for staying young? Keeping up with all of you. I love you.\u201d Girl power!<\/p>\n

Kardashian does a good job of not looking into the camera when she says her lines, but her ability to communicate real emotion on screen simply isn\u2019t there. She does, however, get a wild moment in the second episode where she goes full Lemonade on a car. In a true triumph of originality and creativity, she wears a long yellow dress. (It\u2019s Doja Cat\u2019s \u201cPaint the Town Red\u201d on the soundtrack, though.)<\/p>\n

\"All's<\/p>\n

All\u2019s Fair (Hulu)<\/p>\n

As for the actual actors, they\u2019re all trying valiantly with the increasingly bizarre monologues they\u2019re given (Close has one particularly horny speech in Episode 2), but there\u2019s really nothing you can do with writing this bad. It\u2019s most frustrating to see someone like Teyana Taylor be wasted here: She\u2019s been a clear star since her breakout role in A Thousand and One, a powerful force in this year\u2019s One Battle After Another, and I wish it were possible to take more pleasure in her getting a big splashy project like this.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an actually good legal drama starring Glenn Close streaming on Hulu, if you\u2019re interested: Damages had its ups and downs, but it also had Rose Byrne and a killer first season. As for All\u2019s Fair, it doesn\u2019t quite hit the threshold of being an enjoyable hate-watch. It\u2019s more just a baffling exercise in wasting the time of everyone involved, each moment generating a new set of questions.<\/p>\n

Like, how many wigs does Allura have? Because the length of her hair changes on a scene-by-scene basis, with no explanation as to why. It\u2019s the sort of sloppy touch that showcases just how little thought went into throwing this show together, ultimately an exercise in shallowness. A show that might look expensive \u2014 but is cheap in all the ways that actually matter.<\/p>\n

The first three episodes of All\u2019s Fair are streaming now on Hulu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once upon a time, TV super-producer Ryan Murphy was very good at his job. Shows like Glee, American…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-115809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}