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 prevented 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. While I try to get my thoughts in order after bearing witness to the first episode, I’m going to give you a few direct quotes, so you can see why I’m struggling.
“Let’s put the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork’.”
“My flight was turbulent and so is my mood,” says Liberty (Watts) to a man barring her way to a client.
“He’s wolf-like in his possessiveness,” says a client of her husband.
It’s so awful, it feels almost contemptuous.
I looked for Julian Fellowes’ name in the credits, but apparently this is all the responsibility of Murphy and his co-creators, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken. They are also executive producers, along with Kim K, her mother Kris Jenner, Watts, Glenn Close (who also has a small role as the protagonists’ early mentor – I cannot imagine what kompromat the Kardashian clan have on her that led to her participation in this dreadful business), Nash and many, many more. The list goes on for ages. I suspect a variation of the bystander effect (whereby the more witnesses there are to a mugging – for example – the less likely any one is to intervene) is in operation. Thus, the more exec producers linked to it, the worse the show.
Still, there’s worse and then there’s All’s Fair. 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.
‘Beyond the embarrassment of the script, there is the embarrassment of the performances’ … Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts in All’s Fair. Photograph: Ser Baffo/Disney
Kim K as Allura, married to a football star who is resentful of the shadow cast over his own success by hers, is as expressionless as you might expect, but is at least inoffensively useless. Watts preens and pouts and poses in search of a character, and reminds you of nothing so much as Ally McBeal at her very worst, delivering her lines so archly that you can almost hear her joints cracking. The guest stars are worse. Nash – an unstoppable onscreen force – fares better in a role where the comic intent suits her well. But how parts for Black women are still being written as nothing more than Loud! And Sassy! I do not know. The one good thing And Just Like That … ever did was seem to be the nail in that coffin. But All’s Fair makes it look like Heimat.
If this was all part of a lurid, camp drama played with gusto by all and narratively stuffed with treats, Murphy might have got away with it. But no one seems to know what they’re doing; the performances seem to respond to about nine different ideas of what show is and the plots are dismal. The trio (“You’re the best divorce lawyers in town – maybe the country”) wrap up multiple cases in the time it takes Kim K’s nail varnish to dry. There’s the younger wife who falls in love with the woman her husband hires for a threesome, then walks off 10 minutes later with a $210m settlement once Nash acquires video evidence of his extensive perversions. (“Sow teats” is all I’m prepared to say here. Do not let this tempt you into watching.)
There’s the older wife caught cheating (“He wasn’t even attractive! He just looked at me the way you used to look at me!”) and about to be thrown out of the New York marital home by her billionaire husband (“The guy who, like, owns all of cosmetics”) until Liberty flies out on the private jet to tell her she can take the $40m worth of jewellery she owns with her. These are fitted in around a couple of the worst kissing scenes ever seen on screen, the collapse of Allura’s marriage, a jarringly unfashionable obsession with brand names (“Let’s get those Goyard travel cases and start stuffing!”) and conspicuous consumption (“Oh my God – didn’t this belong to Elizabeth Taylor?”). All this, and a concept of female empowerment (“I settled … Did I not love myself enough?”) would have shamed the Spice Girls 30 years ago.
So bad it’s not good. Nowhere near.
All’s Fair is on Disney+ now.
