When I was 14 and sad, I would write my own soap operas. They would be inspired by Desperate Housewives and YouTube compilation clips of Joan Collins slapping people on Dynasty, and feature characters with names like Providence Glass and Brick Moreau. One character was kidnapped from her own wedding by a disgraced district attorney with both a sex dungeon and an army of pet alligators in her basement. It was that sort of thing. I never think about it. Until, that is, I watched the first three episodes of All’s Fair, a lurid, self-consciously ker-aaazy soap opera legal drama starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close, which arrived this week to risible reviews.
All’s Fair is the kind of show I would have loved – and probably could have written – at the age of 14. But I’m no longer 14, and television is largely in the rubbish chute, so All’s Fair feels like an elaborate joke being played on us. Is it the worst TV show in history, as some critics have claimed? I’m not convinced. I’m pretty sure it’s pure evil, though.
All’s Fair stems from Ryan Murphy, shock merchant creator of Glee and American Horror Story and a man who’s never been told “no”, and revolves around the key figures of an all-women law firm. Kardashian, Watts and Niecy Nash-Betts are our heroes, who swan about in cleavage-baring ensembles and bedazzled turbans, seem to have daily gab sessions in a private jet, and work in a building that resembles a gynaecologist’s office if it were designed by Gwyneth Paltrow.
The main thrust of the show’s first three episodes – released all at once on Hulu and Disney+ – is the demise of the marriage between Kardashian’s character, Allura Grant, and her football player husband. He is now being represented in their divorce by the firm’s arch nemesis, Carrington Lane, a vulgar, volatile lawyer played by Sarah Paulson as a cross between Patsy Stone and the Incredible Hulk. Watts, Nash-Betts and Close orbit around them – Watts has brought back her prim English accent from the Princess Diana movie she did a decade ago; Nash-Betts, wearing a top hat, says things like, “I found nothing, which means something, and something with a capital ‘S’”; Close is… there? She has a dying husband and gets called variations of “old crone” a lot by Carrington, which I suppose is one way to get a pay cheque.
There’s a numbing quality to All’s Fair that does, perhaps, make it quite seductive. It seems mind-bogglingly expensive, with outrageous costume design and the kind of blown-out lighting that makes all the women look like department store mannequins and the men different shades of embalmed. Jessica Simpson, playing a trophy wife disfigured by bad plastic surgery, throws a cup of acid in a man’s face. Showgirls legend Elizabeth Berkley tosses herself off a roof. Kardashian’s physical appearance, all Botox-smooth flesh and Gordon Gekko power suits, is oddly beguiling. She’s not that bad, really. I see her as being to acting what Tom Daley is to presenting knitting competitions on Channel 4 – a little stiff, probably shouldn’t be there, but oh well, we’ll all be dead soon, so pfft.
All’s Fair’s greatest sin is actually what has crippled much of TV of late. Everybody in this show is super-super-rich, living in Jeffrey Epstein-style mansions and gasping at million-dollar jewellery. One scene sees our heroes fawning over experimental age-defying treatments and luxury dildos; cars are the size of tanks and a burgundy thong is office wear; Allura is proposed to with Elizabeth Taylor’s actual engagement ring. Much like the doomed Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That, All’s Fair worships at the altar of bling and nonsense. It is property porn for the age of Skims and Selling Sunset; sleek, post-Keeping Up with the Kardashians fantasy-land aspiration, starring literally Kim Kardashian.
It’s all deathly dull. These are characters existing in a world where money is no object – having cash to burn is feminist, actually, this show specifically seems to be saying – much as in The White Lotus, or Big Little Lies, or this year’s woe-is-me hedge fund manager slop Your Friends and Neighbors with Jon Hamm, or any of the many, many recent limited series about immaculately coiffed wealthy white people with murderous secrets. American television has always lent comfortably upper-middle-class at the very least – how did Rachel and Monica afford that apartment, your most boring friend has asked at least twice – but historically we’d be presented with at least an occasional subplot gesturing towards struggle. Carrie Bradshaw couldn’t get a bank loan. Buffy Summers worked in fast food. Lisa Simpson needed braces. All’s Fair is all money, all the time, normalising a kind of luxury that absolutely no one can realistically obtain, and at a time when almost everyone is broke.
Ryan Murphy has, in fairness, always operated in this space. All’s Fair’s closest spiritual cousin is probably his Noughties plastic surgery drama Nip/Tuck, which was another unholy science experiment about unhinged wealthy professionals co-mingling with murderers, porn stars and weird sex on the regular. But it also had a method to its madness, with strong character complexity and committed acting underpinning its gnarliest of plot twists. Today, though, and now comfortably the most lucrative power player in soapy ensemble television who isn’t Shonda Rhimes, Murphy seems to have forsaken grit and specifics for slapdash and bitch-offs. Money is an irrelevance to him, and his characters follow suit. His shows have become both screamingly overwritten and chronically lazy. I miss when he seemed to care a little. To quote Kim Kardashian herself, it seems like nobody wants to work these days.
‘All’s Fair’ is streaming on Hulu and Disney+
