Is All's Fair really the 'worst TV drama ever'?
HuluCreated by super-producer Ryan Murphy and with an all-star cast led by Kim Kardashian, legal series All's Fair has had savage reviews. But viewers have been celebrating its mix of high-camp, statement fashion and spotless interiors.
Since it debuted on Hulu on Tuesday, the glossy new legal drama All's Fair has been roundly savaged by critics. In the UK, The Times opined that it "may be the worst TV drama ever", while The Guardian branded it "fascinatingly, existentially terrible"; both newspapers awarded it zero stars out of five. All's Fair currently holds a rare 0% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which indicates universally negative reviews. It's certainly the most slated show of the year so far. So surely this nine-part series from Ryan Murphy, the Emmy-winning mastermind behind Glee and American Horror Story, is now dead on arrival?
Perhaps not, because All's Fair is showing early signs of being a hit, at least on social media. On X, fans have called it "gloriously silly", "my type of nonsense camp show" and, perhaps most insightfully of all, a show that's "very fun" to watch because it "isn't afraid to be bad". The exceptionally terrible reviews combined with the show's high-profile cast – Kim Kardashian, in her first lead role, is at the centre of an ensemble that includes Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson and Teyana Taylor – have made it an instant object of fascination. It helps that the three episodes that premiered on Tuesday contain plenty of jaw-droppingly awful standalone scenes that are just begging to be shared on social media. One clip that has already gone viral shows Close's character Dina Standish asking Paulson's Carrington Lane about her mother's decision to eschew birth control in shockingly vulgar terms.From an actor of Close's stature – eight Oscar nominations, three Emmys, three Tonys – it's high camp.
High camp is probably what creators Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken were going for, at least in part. It's presumably no accident that Paulson's character shares part of her name with Alexis Carrington Colby, Joan Collins' arch villainess from the ludicrously entertaining 1980s primetime soap Dynasty. All's Fair has some of that show's alpha female energy, but adds a procedural element to the mix. It centres on Grant, Ronson and Green, a mercifully fictional Los Angeles law firm founded by Kardashian's Allura Grant, Watts' Liberty Ronson and Nash-Betts' Emerald Greene (yes, that is her actual character name). The firm specialises in securing hefty divorce settlements for wronged wealthy women, but the founders are also locked in a perpetual battle with Paulson's rival lawyer, Carrington Lane.
In the first episode's prologue, set 10 years in the past, we see Lane spitting feathers when she isn't asked to join their all-female firm. This sets the scene, sort of, for the frenzied revenge she's after today. So far, Lane hasn't been pushed into a lily pond, a fate that befell her namesake on Dynasty, but she has she has lobbed a particularly imaginative expletive at Kardashian's character.
Paulson is one of the show's 17 executive producers – as are Close, Kardashian, Nash-Betts and Watts. At times, it feels as though they're all directing themselves, too, because these central performances are rarely complementary. Close seems to be enjoying herself and Nash-Betts manages to sell some painfully leaden dialogue, but Watts never looks comfortable, and Paulson is ferociously over-the-top. In fairness, when you're asked to deliver a line featuring three F-bombs in five words, you may as well commit fully to it.
Kardashian is a curiously inert presence who exhibits a kind of mesmerising anti-charisma. A montage scene in which she struts through her outrageously lavish California mansion to a Janet Jackson bop should feel aspirational and fabulous, but somehow ends up falling flat. At the same time, it's impeccably on-brand. Kardashian has built a stratospherically successful career from serving a similar blend of blandness and luxury on her hit reality shows, Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007-2021) and The Kardashians (2022-), which also airs on Hulu. It's worth noting that Kardashian's business-savvy mother, Kris Jenner, is an executive producer here, too. And as reviewers have pointed out, All's Fair also shares a certain sensibility with other hit reality shows featuring glamorous women who don't always get on, such as Selling Sunset and the Real Housewives franchise. As with those shows, a combination of discord, statement fashion and spotless interiors seems key to its appeal.
HuluIt seems unlikely that anyone involved wanted All's Fair to be rubbish – Murphy has devised some absolutely brilliant TV series, including 2016's The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, which featured an award-winning performance from Paulson, while his co-creator Jon Robin Baitz is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who wrote another superior Murphy series, Feud: Capote vs The Swans. But it is tempting to imagine that at some point in production, they realised that All's Fair was never going to be the next Succession, and instead remodelled it into a future camp classic. Certainly, All's Fair feels primed to fill the hate-watching hole left by And Just Like That, the recently axed Sex and the City spin-off series that bemused and amused viewers in equal measure.
The show's rollout also looks smart. The first three episodes dropped on Tuesday, which gives viewers time to acclimatise to its unwieldy dialogue and discordant performances. But the next six will premiere weekly, which means a steady supply of high-camp content for meme-makers to disseminate.
In the highly competitive world of streaming TV, it's harder than ever to cut through the glut of sometimes very good, sometimes pretty middling drama series. Could this one rise to the top by being noticeably worse than the rest? Let's just say that for Hulu, all's fair in the streaming wars.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for the Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
