Critics and TV journalists are eviscerating Ryan Murphy’s “All’s Fair,” starring Kim Kardashian, calling the new legal drama “existentially terrible,” “tacky” and a “disaster zone.”
The series, whose first three episodes are now available on Hulu and Disney+, follows a team of female divorce attorneys who open their own practice in L.A. “Fierce, brilliant, and emotionally complicated, they navigate high-stakes breakups, scandalous secrets, and shifting allegiances — both in the courtroom and within their own ranks. In a world where money talks and love is a battleground, these women don’t just play the game—they change it,” a synopsis reads.
In addition to Kardashian, the 10-episode series stars Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Teyana Taylor, Sarah Paulson and Glenn Close.
In The Times’ zero-star review of the series, headlined “All’s Fair review: this may be the worst TV drama ever,” deputy TV editor Ben Dowell wrote: “Well done, Kim. You must have quite a healthy ego yourself to star in what may well be the worst television drama ever made. Because ‘All’s Fair’ (Disney+) is so bad, it’s not even enjoyably so. It thinks it’s a feminist fable about spirited lawyers getting their own back on cruel rich men but is in fact a tacky and revolting monument to the same greed, vanity and avarice it supposedly targets. All scripted, it feels, by a toddler who couldn’t write ‘bum’ on a wall.”
Guardian TV critic Lucy Mangan also gave the series a zero-star rating, writing in her review, “I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad. I assumed that there was some sort of baseline, some inescapable bedrock knowledge of how to do it that now prevents any entry into the art form from falling below a certain standard. But I was wrong. The new series from Ryan Murphy, ‘All’s Fair’ – starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Niecy Nash as the founders of an all-female law firm delivering divorce-y justice to incredibly rich but slightly unlucky women under the azure skies of California – is terrible. Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible.”
Most reviews panned the performances — particularly Kardashian’s as divorce attorney Allura Grant — with The Telegraph’s Ed Power writing, “Amid this disaster zone of soapy plotting and reeking dialogue, it is perhaps unfair to single out Kardashian. Her participation is just one disaster among many (she is an executive producer alongside her mother and manager, Kris Jenner). Yet there is no glossing over her stilted acting, already confirmed by her guest appearance in season 12 of Murphy’s ‘American Horror Story.’ Even more striking than her lack of thespian chops, however, is her complete absence of screen presence. She has no aura, no unfiltered charisma. Forget an X factor, Kardashian has a Zzzzzz… quality that threatens to lull the unprepared viewer into a stupor whenever she opens her mouth.”
Dowell, meanwhile, said of Kardashian: “Does Kardashian (who plans to take bar exams, we are told) make a convincing lawyer? No, she does not. She is to acting what Genghis Khan is to a peaceful liberal democracy, though of course the dialogue — a tsunami of clunking cliché that drowns this whole enterprise in the first five minutes — doesn’t help her cause.”
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“All’s Fair” marks Kardashian’s second collaboration with Murphy after starring in the 12th season of “American Horror Story,” subtitled “Delicate.” The reality TV star also serves as an executive producer on the legal drama alongside Murphy.
Glamour editor Emily Maddick compared “All’s Fair” to watching an episode of “The Kardashians,” writing in her review, “And after sitting through the first episode of ‘All’s Fair,’ if ‘aspirational’ is what they’re aiming for, then god help us all. For it seems that Ryan Murphy, arguably one of the hottest names in TV, with countless brilliant and diverse, award-winning shows under his belt, including ‘Glee,’ ‘American Horror Story,’ ‘Pose,’ ‘Scream Queens’ and ‘Nip Tuck,’ has been fully Kardashian-ified. He’s drunk the Kris Jenner Kool Aid and the Murphy cinematic universe has been infected by this so-called ‘aspirational’ lifestyle the Kardashians dictate we should all be conforming to aspire to; which, in other words, translates as ‘behaving like a billionaire.’”
New episodes of “All’s Fair” will stream every Tuesday on Hulu and Disney+.
From Variety US