For a full month, the cast of All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s latest show, has been promoting their series in America and abroad. It’s rare that a TV show gets the kind of European promotional tour similar to a movie, so my antenna was already up: why were they spending money to send Kim Kardashian, Teyana Taylor and Sarah Paulson around the world with these big premiere events? Well, now we know. They embargoed reviews of the show until the very last minute in the hope of getting people excited about “Kim Kardashian’s first major role!” It didn’t work out that way, because apparently this show is one of the worst things ever made.
Kim Kardashian’s new legal drama, All’s Fair, has yet to impress the TV critics. The Hulu series debuted its first three episodes on Tuesday, November 4, with a zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, which measures the percentage of professional critics who give a film or TV show a positive review. Meanwhile, on Metacritic, All’s Fair currently has a Metascore of 11 out of 100 — described as being “overwhelmingly disliked” by critics — and a user score of 2.4 out of 10, or “generally unfavorable” among viewers.
In a zero-star review from The Guardian, TV critic Lucy Mangan wrote that she “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,” Mangan continued. “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.”
The Times’ deputy TV editor Ben Dowell also gave the show zero stars, writing that the series “may be the worst TV drama ever” in the review’s headline.
“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,” he wrote. “All scripted, it feels, by a toddler who couldn’t write ‘bum’ on a wall.”
Dowell wrote of Kardashian, 45, “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.”
Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter critic Angie Han described both Kardashian’s acting as lawyer Allura Grant and the writing as “stiff and affectless without a single authentic note.”
A consistent issue, cited by reviewer after reviewer, is that the writing is absolutely horrendous. Which makes sense when you realize that the script quality on ALL Ryan Murphy’s productions have dropped off significantly in the past ten years, to the point where no one can tell if this sh-t is being written by AI or what. Something else I didn’t know: All’s Fair is executive produced by both Kim AND Kris Jenner. Jeez. What a mess. Anyway, this should keep Kim away from the acting profession for a while, hopefully.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
