From the moment I saw the trailer for Kim Kardashian‘s new series All’s Fair, I was excited. There she was, the proverbial reality queen turned aspiring lawyer, dressed head to toe in couture playing the very attorney she wished to become. It was compelling.
Kim’s presence wasn’t the only aspect of the Ryan Murphy series that tickled my fancy. She was surrounded by an all-star cast, including Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, Glenn Close and Neicy Nash-Betts. The sets and costuming seemed architectural, beautifully thought out and larger than life.
The plot follows a group of high-powered lawyers who open a women-only law firm and explores the dynamics of these ladies navigating their way through the male-dominated field, and through the prickly world of their own personal lives.
It looked expensive, it looked sassy, it looked — dare I say — good.
But once the show was released worldwide, it was slammed by critics. And when I say slammed, I mean mercilessly torn apart by multiple publications as if they were lions devouring the last piece of available meat on the Serengeti.
According to Lucy Mangan from The Guardian, who ranked the show zero out of five stars, the series is “fascinatingly, existentially terrible”. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Angie Han referred to the show as “brain dead”, Ed Power from the UK’s Daily Telegraph called Ryan Murphy the “the high priest of tacky, tasteless television” and The Times’ Ben Dowell claimed that Kim “must have quite a healthy ego yourself to star in what may well be the worst television drama ever made”.
With such savage reviews, in my eyes there was only one thing to do — watch the damn show.
Was it as bad as the critics say? Yes and no.
Is Kim Kardashian’s new show All’s Fair really as bad as the critics say?
As a Kardashian apologist, I was hoping that the countless reviews would simply be another unfounded example of the battle between high brow and low brow in pop culture fighting. Sadly, this was not the case.
The show is… not as good as you’d expect for a series with such an incredible cast, star power and (presumably) loads of money behind it. The dialogue feels stilted and written as if every line was crafted in the hope it would become a viral TikTok sound.
The music feels intrusive and reminiscent of those bizarre vertical video drama series online.
While Ryan Murphy has had his misses in the past, he’s also certainly had his wins — especially when it comes to eliciting the performance of a lifetime from Sarah Paulson. But even when Paulson is putting her entire soul into playing the rival lawyer Carrington Lane, screaming, “So what if I give myself at home perms? It’s economical!”, even she isn’t enough to make this show feel akin to other sassy, stylised lawyer-based dramas like The Good Wife or Suits.
BUT do I think Mangan’s zero star review is fair? No, not at all. And truthfully, I think the reasons for the excessively savage teardown of All’s Fair falls outside the realm of the TV screen.
We all know that television doesn’t necessarily have to be good quality to be enjoyable.
It’s why we have “guilty pleasure” shows like the Real Housewives, Love Island or Riverdale. Outside of dialogue and plot, there are other aspects of a show that can make it enjoyable, like gorgeous set design, stunning costuming and simply, beautiful people.
I’m more than willing to admit that All’s Fair certainly isn’t the pinnacle of good television or drama but it does have some redeeming qualities. It’s campy, over the top and self-aware, making it an admittedly fun watch — even if it is lacking substance.
But most of all, I feel like Kim Kardashian’s presence as a lead and an executive producer — and Kris Jenner‘s executive producer role, for that matter — was one of the biggest contributing factors for the show’s incredibly vocal public teardown. Would we be so negative about the show if two of the most polarising figures in pop culture weren’t involved?
Truthfully, I don’t think we would.
Maybe this infamy was what Ryan Murphy was going for. After all, it’s not the first time he’s cast a huge eye-grabbing celebrity in a project. In the trailer, the moment we see Kim on screen, a character says exactly what the audience is thinking: “Wow, it’s you”.
Now that the series has received such a fanfare, albeit a negative one, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that more people are tuning in than if it hadn’t copped zero out of five stars by Mangan and the other critics.
Perhaps we’re simply falling for the smartest and most effective move in Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner’s playbook — all publicity is good publicity.
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