Critics have weighed in on the new Hulu show All’s Fair with Kim Kardashian — and they’re anything but delighted. Ryan Murphy’s new legal drama about an all-female divorce firm — which stars Kardashian alongside acting powerhouses like Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Niecy Nash and Sarah Paulson — debuted on Nov. 4 with a three-episode premiere. Since then, it has received a 6% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and plenty of scathing criticism.
Anthony Hemingway, who directed episodes two, three, four and eight of the series, told the Hollywood Reporter that he’s taking the reviews in stride, noting that “you’re not going to please everybody.”
“I think the show holds a mirror up to each person who watches it,” he said. “It’s just about: Can you connect to it or relate to it and see yourself? It may be out of your league, it may not be anything you can connect to, and I think that goes for anything that gets presented on screen.”
While All’s Fair is disliked by critics, it’s worth noting that the show’s Popcornmeter rating, which reflects how much everyday TV viewers enjoy the show, is significantly higher: It currently sits at 64% after more than 500 ratings.
But what exactly have the critics said about All’s Fair? Here’s a breakdown.
The Hollywood Reporter called the show ‘unforgivably dull’
Angie Han called the show “empty” and “unforgivably dull” in her headline. She wrote in her review for THR that the stacked cast did Kardashian a disservice, as it made her performance (described by Han as “stiff and affectless without a single authentic note”) appear weaker.
Niecy Nash, Glenn Close and Kim Kardashian in “All’s Fair.” (Ser Baffo/Disney)
Han also criticized the show’s dialogue, as “when the dialogue isn’t so bland it borders on inane” it’s “so extravagantly profane as to be exhausting.”
“Not even Paulson, as villainous rival attorney Carrington ‘Carr’ Lane, can wrap her tongue around a line as over-labored as ‘I wouldn’t do [that] even if I were penniless and starving on a street corner, forced to blow a priest with chlamydia for a bowl of refried beans,’” Han wrote.
The Guardian declared the show ‘so bad it’s not good’
Reviewer Lucy Mangan didn’t mince words when she wrote in her review for the Guardian that “there’s worse, and then there’s All’s Fair,” declaring the new series “fascinatingly, existentially terrible.”
“Beyond the embarrassment of the script, there is the embarrassment of the performances; although I take the point that when someone — in this case, Murphy stalwart Sarah Paulson as psychopathic rival ‘lady’ lawyer Carrington — is required to scream ‘Are you calling me an ugly duckling? So what if I give myself home perms? It’s economical!’, while smashing up her mentor’s office, they are probably not going to be able to give their best,” Mangan wrote.
Vulture said the show is ‘satisfying and nausea inducing’
Roxana Hadadi wrote in her review for Vulture that the show is “pulp feminism from top to bottom” but admitted she “kept pressing play, my brain submitting to the might of another Ryan Murphy trash-TV spectacle.” She called the show “cotton-candy TV: sticky, airy, and, once it’s all gone, both satisfying and nausea inducing.”
Still, she wrote that “there’s no subtlety to All’s Fair’s interest in the problems of the wealthy,” noting that, unlike shows like Sirens, The Better Sister or The Hunting Wives, there’s no “gendered, class-based commentary” layered into the plight of the women on Murphy’s new series.
Teyana Taylor in “All’s Fair.” (Ser Baffo/Disney)
“In fact, it’s hard to tell whether Murphy adores or loathes these women,” Hadadi continued. “They’re paper dolls dressed up in the ugliest, most expensive outfits you’ve ever seen, adorned with all manner of little hats, veils, scarves, and rings while parroting paper-thin statements about what women deserve.”
Time wrote that the show is ‘simply bad’
Time magazine reviewer Judy Berman called the show “a girlboss fever dream in which a nine-figure divorce settlement constitutes the ne plus ultra of female empowerment” as well as a “longform commercial for a long list of brands.”
She also criticized the performances, writing, “You don’t have to worry about Kardashian holding her own among Close, Nash-Betts, Watts, and the rest. No one’s performance in this show is what you would conventionally describe as good; they match each other in hysteria and shallowness.”
USA Today called the series the ‘worst show of the year’
Kelly Lawler of USA Today declared the show “embarrassingly terrible,” with “scripts worse than what ChatGPT was spitting out two years ago and acting worse than your local Christmas pageant.”
Naomi Watts in “All’s Fair.” (Ser Baffo/Disney)
She wrote that Close, Watts, Nash and Teyana Taylor, who plays an aspiring lawyer, are “sleepwalking through their scenes, each one of them acting somewhat at a distance from the material and each other.”
“Perhaps they’re attempting to match Kardashian’s complete lack of acting skill,” Lawler continued, “for the reality star’s bland line readings can’t give her anything close to the title of ‘actress,’ no matter how many projects Murphy shoehorns her into.”