Hollywood has long specialized in creating trainwrecks so shiny that we can’t look away. But All’s Fair isn’t just a trainwreck—it’s a whole luxury rail system collapsing into a canyon while Kim Kardashian adjusts her contour lighting and Glenn Close wonders how to activate her “I’m not really here” clause.
Ryan Murphy, the man who gave us American Horror Story and Feud, has now unleashed something that could charitably be called Divorce Court: Botox Edition. This show is so bad, it loops back around into performance art. The problem is, it doesn’t know that.
1. The Plot (Or Whatever’s Left of It)
The series follows three high-powered women running an all-female law firm that supposedly delivers justice to the ultra-rich. Think Suits, but without the suits, structure, or sense. Kim Kardashian plays Allura—because of course she does—a glamorous attorney whose main skill seems to be talking in contour-perfect lighting while blinking with the rhythm of a legal disclaimer.
Naomi Watts plays Liberty, a lawyer who channels Ally McBeal’s chaos but without any of the charm—or pants. Niecy Nash, normally a radiant comedic powerhouse, spends the show shouting life lessons like she’s trapped in a wine commercial written by ChatGPT circa 2022.
Their firm supposedly fights for “female empowerment,” but if empowerment means having your therapist on retainer and a yacht named Prenup II, then yes, they nailed it.
2. The Writing: A Crime Against Dialogue
Lucy Mangan wasn’t exaggerating when she called it “existentially terrible.” The script is so tone-deaf it makes you wonder if AI wrote it after bingeing every bad Lifetime movie ever made. Sample dialogue:
“My flight was turbulent, and so is my mood.”
That line should’ve stayed in the first draft of a Hallmark Christmas movie where the editor got electrocuted halfway through.
Or this gem:
“He’s wolf-like in his possessiveness.”
What does that even mean? That he howls at the moon when his wife updates her Instagram bio?
Each line sounds like it was written by someone who’s never heard human speech before but once read a perfume ad.
3. Kim Kardashian: The Emotional Flatline
Let’s be honest: Kim Kardashian isn’t here to act. She’s here to expand the Kardashian cinematic universe, and maybe prove she can emote beyond “concerned selfie.”
Her performance as Allura is, in a word, beige. It’s not offensively bad—it’s just there, like a hotel painting that vaguely resembles a landscape but mostly makes you question your life choices.
When she delivers lines about heartbreak and betrayal, her face doesn’t move. Botox? Maybe. But more likely, it’s just her trying to remember which camera she’s supposed to look at.
Glenn Close, meanwhile, drifts through scenes like a ghost who made a wrong turn on her way to The Wife 2: Still Mad About It. You can see the resignation in her eyes. Somewhere deep down, she’s thinking: I have eight Oscar nominations. I killed a man’s rabbit for this?
4. Ryan Murphy’s Greatest Miss
Ryan Murphy has always had two settings: “deliciously camp” and “chaotic nonsense.” All’s Fair lives in the uncanny valley between them—a place where tone goes to die.
You can almost see what he wanted: a slick, feminist legal dramedy dripping with style and sexual tension. What we got instead feels like The Real Housewives of Jurisprudence directed by a Roomba with abandonment issues.
Murphy once made Nip/Tuck, a show that turned plastic surgery into a metaphor for moral decay. Now, he’s made All’s Fair, a show that turns plastic surgery into character development.
5. The Dialogue Hall of Shame
Let’s honor a few lines that deserve to be preserved in a museum of televisual failure:
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“Let’s put the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork.’”
→ Somewhere a screenwriting professor just spontaneously combusted. -
“I settled … Did I not love myself enough?”
→ If your therapist said this, you’d demand a refund. -
“Let’s get those Goyard travel cases and start stuffing!”
→ Because nothing says empowerment like luxury-brand looting.
It’s as if Murphy asked ChatGPT to write a “feminist” show based on hashtags and motivational mugs.
6. The Performances: Acting in Crisis
Niecy Nash tries her best, bless her, but the script treats her like comic relief at a funeral. Every other line is delivered at maximum volume, as if decibels equal depth.
Naomi Watts—who once survived The Book of Henry—tries to bring nuance, but her character Liberty feels like she was built entirely from recycled clichés: the jaded lawyer, the glamorous divorcée, the woman who drinks white wine and stares at sunsets like they owe her money.
Sarah Paulson, a Ryan Murphy regular, shows up just long enough to prove that even talented actors can drown in bad writing. Her meltdown scene (“Are you calling me an ugly duckling?”) could be taught in film schools under the lecture When Method Acting Goes Rogue.
7. The Kissing Scenes: Crimes Against Chemistry
Mangan wasn’t exaggerating—the kissing scenes in All’s Fair are a human rights violation. Each one looks like two mannequins colliding in slow motion.
Kim Kardashian’s on-screen kisses are so awkward they could qualify as performance art about emotional detachment. It’s like watching someone try to plug in a USB stick upside down—over and over again—for 47 seconds.
The camera lingers as if to say: Yes, this is intimacy. Behold. But all we behold is the slow, painful death of passion, broadcast in 4K.
8. Feminism, Sponsored by Gucci
The show’s concept of female empowerment would’ve been dated in 1997. Every “lesson” about self-love is wrapped in designer packaging: if you can’t fix your marriage, fix your wardrobe.
At one point, Kim’s character literally says, “I may have lost a husband, but I gained a Hermès Birkin.” Which is a sentence that should automatically trigger a national power outage.
Murphy clearly wants to make a point about women reclaiming power in a male-dominated world—but the show’s idea of empowerment is “get a better lawyer, wear a tighter dress.” It’s girlboss feminism written by someone whose only exposure to women’s rights came from a Vogue spread.
9. Production Design: Where Money Goes to Die
You can see the budget. There’s no shortage of glass offices, infinity pools, and aerial drone shots of Malibu. But all that gloss can’t hide the emptiness underneath. It’s like pouring truffle oil on a wet sandwich.
Every scene looks like an Instagram ad for a skincare line that doesn’t exist. The cinematography screams prestige, but the content whispers community theater.
It’s glossy nihilism: rich people being sad, sexy, and stupid in mansions that could buy small countries.
10. Glenn Close Deserved Better
Let’s pause for a moment of silence for Glenn Close, who appears briefly as the trio’s mentor. Watching her deliver this dialogue is like watching a Shakespearean actor forced to perform Love Island: The Trial Edition.
Her presence doesn’t elevate the show—it just reminds us what real acting looks like. You can see her professionalism fighting against the material like a hostage blinking Morse code.
11. The Kardashian Factor
Kim Kardashian’s involvement as star and executive producer is fascinating in a meta way. She’s both the product and the producer of the cultural soup we’re drowning in.
The show is less about storytelling and more about brand maintenance. It’s a 10-episode commercial for the Kardashian ethos: emotional detachment disguised as empowerment, luxury as therapy, and pain filtered through good lighting.
And the irony? The show’s about women finding strength through divorce, yet it feels emotionally divorced from reality.
12. The Existential Horror of Watching
You start All’s Fair thinking it’ll be so bad it’s good. By episode two, you realize it’s so bad it’s profound. The show forces you to question what television even is.
Is it possible for a series to be this bad by accident? Or has Murphy secretly created a satire so deep we can’t tell? Maybe All’s Fair isn’t incompetence—it’s an experiment in aesthetic despair.
Watching it feels like scrolling Instagram at 2 a.m. after a breakup: everything looks pretty, but you feel spiritually hollow.
13. The Audience: Us, the Guilty Witnesses
Despite everything, you keep watching. Maybe out of disbelief. Maybe to see if Glenn Close ever escapes. Maybe because watching rich people emotionally implode in couture is our new national pastime.
We, the audience, are complicit. We clicked “play.” We gave it views. We gave it power. In doing so, we validated the algorithm’s darkest desire: to turn spectacle into content and content into currency.
In a sense, All’s Fair is the perfect mirror for our culture—vacuous, overproduced, and convinced that gloss equals meaning.
14. Lessons Learned (Or Not)
If All’s Fair teaches us anything, it’s that you can’t buy soul with streaming money. You can stack a cast with A-listers, pour champagne on the script, and call it empowerment—but if it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just couture karaoke.
Hollywood keeps confusing luxury with depth, and All’s Fair is its gaudiest example yet.
Still, there’s something almost poetic about its failure. It’s proof that even in 2025, when algorithms decide what’s “good,” there’s still room for glorious, baffling disaster.
15. Final Verdict
All’s Fair is what happens when feminism gets filtered through Instagram and written by committee. It’s beautiful garbage, gleaming nonsense, an existential crisis wrapped in designer paper.
Not even Glenn Close can save it. Not even irony can justify it.
It’s not so bad it’s good. It’s so bad it’s you-question-your-mortality.
But here’s the real kicker: you’ll probably still watch it. Because in the end, All’s Fair isn’t about divorce, law, or empowerment—it’s about the strange, hypnotic power of cultural decay.
And in that sense, Ryan Murphy may have accidentally created a masterpiece—of failure.