'All's Fair' review: this may be the worst TV drama ever

Kim Kardashian and the rest of the starry cast think they’re in a feminist fable about divorce lawyers but Ryan Murphy’s latest feels more like a series of Insta boasts

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/alls-fair-review-this-may-be-the-worst-tv-drama-ever-xt6qbksmf

https://archive.ph/LvfAu



☆☆☆☆☆ - Zero Stars

“Didn’t this belong to Elizabeth Taylor?” simpers Kim Kardashian’s ass-kicking lawyer Allura Grant as her younger husband, Chase Munroe (Matthew Noszka), a beefcake American football player, hands her a piece of anniversary present bling. He had pretended to have forgotten the date and Allura excused the jape because, she says, she has a “healthy ego”.

Well done, Kim. You must have quite a healthy ego yourself to star in what may well be the worst television drama ever made. Because All’s Fair (Disney+) is so bad, it’s not even enjoyably so. It thinks it’s a feminist fable about spirited lawyers getting their own back on cruel rich men but is in fact a tacky and revolting monument to the same greed, vanity and avarice it supposedly targets. All scripted, it feels, by a toddler who couldn’t write “bum” on a wall.

Actually the culprits here are the creator Ryan Murphy and his team, who have strung together preening Insta boasts into a clumsy, haphazard whole. And what is Glenn Close doing in this as the senior lawyer Dina Standish, who assembles the team, all of whom have faintly porn starry names (Allura’s ball-busting girl gang includes Naomi Watts’s Liberty Ronson and Niecy Nash’s Emerald Greene)?

We don’t see a great deal of Close after the cack-handed expository opening flashback. Wise move. But it does mean that she leaves the floor (or rather walk-in wardrobe) to the grim ensemble who are simply determined to get billions for (often already pampered) clients apparently wronged in various ways by the patriarchy. There is one young tech bro among a sea of thoughtless aged gits (though Allura does not judge the dominatrix he visits, of course) but their targets are caricatures I hesitate to call cardboard because I am reluctant to insult a very useful packaging material. Papier-mâché would be better.


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