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If you get a secret thrill from reading bad reviews, this week has basically been your Christmas. This is when the embargo dropped for Ryan Murphy’s new Kim Kardashian-starring Hulu legal drama All’s Fair, and hoo boy. Lucy Mangan’s zero-star extravaganza was a classic of the form, starting with the line “I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad,” and only getting more despairing from there.
But then something incredible happened. More All’s Fair reviews started popping up, and they were just as scathing. Every last one of them, without exception, absolutely hated it. In his zero-star review, The Times’s Ben Dowell observed that the show felt like it had been written “by a toddler who couldn’t write ‘bum’ on a wall.” USA Today’s Kelly Lawler wrote: “It’s so stilted, artificial and awkward not even a glass of wine and leftover Halloween candy can make it remotely enjoyable to view.” The Wrap said: “One wonders if Murphy is engaged in some sort of social experiment to see if he can get away with making the most transparently terrible show on Disney’s dime.” In his one-star review (comparatively a rave), The Telegraph’s Ed Power called the show a “disaster zone of soapy plotting and reeking dialogue”.
For over 24 hours, All’s Fair had to endure a zero% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That has crept up a little now (almost entirely thanks to a vaguely positive review from Decider, that seems to have been written with a gun to the back of the reviewer’s head) and now stands at a majestic 6%. Do you have any idea how hard that is to achieve? For comparison, even MILF Manor – an actual reality show that really exists and is exactly what you think it is – managed to claw 14% from reviewers. Not for nothing is All’s Fair destined to go down as one of the worst shows in history.
And the thing you need to understand is that reviewers really don’t want to give anything zero stars. This isn’t necessarily because they’re kindhearted folk who like to see the best in everything, but a zero star rating basically represents a warped kind of achievement. Everyone knows that truly bad shows get two stars, because that’s the score you give something if you can’t summon the energy to care about it. But zero stars? Well, that has to be spectacular.
I have to admit that, as much as I trust the judgement of my peers, I did briefly wonder whether there was an agenda at play. Perhaps the reviewers were being snobby about the participation of Kim Kardashian, or maybe they were attempting to clip Ryan Murphy’s wings a little. But then I actually watched All’s Fair and, no, they all basically were spot on.
Everything about All’s Fair, on both a micro and macro level, is terrible. The scripts are terrible. The performances are terrible. The grotesque demonstrations of wealth porn are terrible. Everything is both far bigger and far flatter than it needs to be. All’s Fair is the Kansas of television.
You know about the premise, of course, because you’ve greedily lapped up every stinking review with the same amount of glee that I have. All’s Fair is about a team of divorce lawyers who are all so extremely rich that their faces stopped moving a decade and a half ago and also they have to wear clown outfits for some reason. Their jobs ostensibly involve getting the best settlements for their clients, but in reality revolve around saying things without a trace of subtext in a manner that suggests they are actually reading them from a too-small napkin located 100 feet away in a rainstorm. It’s less a drama and more a malfunctioning proof of concept for a haunted TikTok filter specifically designed to give you nightmares.
There is so much wasted talent here – Naomi Watts is in it, for god’s sake! Glenn Close is in it! – that you’ll find yourself developing theories about why it is so horrible to sit through. My current one is that all the good actors had to make their performances operatically large as a deliberate counterpoint to Kim Kardashian’s central performance, which is so relentlessly listless and monotone that it just sort of sits there like a fart cloud at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.
You will also find yourself wondering if this is supposed to be a joke that we’re meant to be in on. It certainly feels that way sometimes. Kate Berlant is in it, and she’s usually funny. The outfits are genuinely hilarious; at various points during the same episode Sarah Paulson wears a shoulder-width bowtie and Niecy Nash-Betts wears a hat that makes it look like she has a little orange bus on her head. There’s even a wedding scene, where the rings are so comically outsized that the bride and groom basically have to hoopla them on to each other’s fingers. That’s funny, right?
But despite this there’s a weird sense that, no, this is all the result of ineptitude and misplaced aspiration, and none of the show’s 26 credited producers, co-producers and executive producers possess the ability to discern just how bad a thing this actually is. We had it right first time. All’s Fair’s Rotten Tomatoes score is now 6% too many.
