If you contributed to the 44 million views that the trailer for All’s Fair has racked up in just three weeks on YouTube, you might go in assuming it is nothing more remarkable than co-creator Ryan Murphy’s soapy, star-packed, high-shine take on a conventional lawyer show. It isn’t, not really. After absorbing the three episodes currently streaming on Hulu (with more to come every Tuesday), I can say that, whether it means to be or not, All’s Fair is both reminiscent of some of the small screen’s biggest female-focused hits and unlike anything I’ve seen on TV before.
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Attempting to do justice to its familiar strangeness is bound to tax my critical faculties to the fullest, but here goes: All’s Fair is a girlboss fever dream in which a nine-figure divorce settlement constitutes the ne plus ultra of female empowerment. All’s Fair is a 2010s Shonda Rhimes procedural on steroid shots and Goop supplements, if everyone in the writers’ room had been freshly lobotomized. All’s Fair is The First Wives Club for psychopaths. All’s Fair is a multigenerational, workplace Sex and the City, if the sex were all talk and the city irrelevant and the humor not necessarily intentional. Then again, All’s Fair might well turn out to be self-aware, lightly surrealistic performance art about the Trump-era collapse of a feel-good pop feminism of which #MeToo proved, in retrospect, to be not a crowning achievement but a last gasp.
Even if that’s the case, All’s Fair functions primarily as a longform commercial for a long list of brands including but not limited to: Ryan Murphy. Kardashian-Jenner (Kim is both a star of the show and, along with Kris, an executive producer). Hermès. Mercedes-Benz. Naomi Watts. Glenn Close. Gucci. Niecy Nash. Le Bernardin. Goyard. Teyana Taylor. Mr. Chow. Sarah Paulson. Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Judith Light. Chanel. The Michelin Guide. More A-list jewelers than you’d find advertising in Vogue’s September issue; in one baffling scene, a fresh, Tiffany-blue gift box contains a diamond ring once owned by Elizabeth Taylor™. The experience of watching All’s Fair is, indeed, like paging through a high-end women’s magazine, taking in the fashion spreads and pithy pull quotes but never pausing for long enough to read a full article.
To the extent that a premise exists, it is this: Around the time Beyoncé performed in front of a giant “FEMINISM” sign at the VMAs, two young, ridiculously named female lawyers, Allura Grant (Kardashian) and Liberty Regina Ronson (Watts), get fed up with the indignities of working at a firm led by sexist men. Right there in the office, they hatch a plan to open an elite divorce shop exclusively for women. (I’m no expert, but… is that legal?) They persuade their colleague, Emerald Greene (Nash), to be their third partner and chief investigator. The women’s mentor, Dina Standish (Close), gives them her blessing. They refuse the pleas of their cutthroat, try-hard, unglamorous peer, Carrington “Carr” Lane (Paulson), to take her with them.
Fast-forward to the present, and Grant, Ronson & Greene is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. The partners are multimillionaires who fly private, own more designer handbags than a Selling Sunset broker, and live and work in glassy, light-flooded luxury. One episode opens with the women comparing expensive, invasive self-care regimens—for so long, the montage could be advertorial. Even the receptionist, Milan (Taylor), is an attorney-in-training who’s generously welcomed into the sorority. Soon, Dina too has reason to reunite with her protégées at the round table in their enormous, cylindrical shared office-slash-library. Carr, meanwhile, has built her own empire but stayed mad at the women who left her behind. She speaks in baroque insults; the fruit she sends for GRG’s big day comes with a note tarring the trio as “fat, treacherous lawn chairs.” Carr is one woman it’s OK to hate because, in reality-TV parlance, she’s not a girls’ girl.
Very little law is practiced within the first three episodes. Don’t expect any great courtroom scenes. The clients we meet, played by such eyebrow-raising guest stars as Light, Elizabeth Berkley, and Jessica Simpson, are vengeful soon-to-be-exes of abusive, cheating, or otherwise monstrous men with $150 million or more in the bank and supposedly ironclad prenups that GRG never fails to pry open after a bit of sleuthing and maybe some casual bribery. None take up much screentime, which might be for the best considering how interchangeable they are.
The show is more interested in the attorneys’ own private lives and professional vendettas. Allura’s hot, younger, football-player husband, Chase (Matthew Noszka) breaks off their marriage shortly after bestowing upon her the aforementioned Elizabeth Taylor ring—an inexplicable twist that sets up a messy in-house divorce to add stakes to GRG’s ass-kicking. The younger man (O-T Fagbenle) playgirl Liberty is dating wants to get serious. Emerald is the proud single mom of three large (nearly) adult sons who handle the technological side of her investigations. And Dina is repressing her sexual appetite while caring for a critically ill husband (Ed O’Neill, sure, why not). This stuff, more than their cases, is what they talk about around a work table that might as well be located inside Carrie Bradshaw’s favorite brunch spot.
In many ways, All’s Fair is simply bad. You don’t have to worry about Kardashian holding her own among Close, Nash-Betts, Watts, and the rest. No one’s performance in this show is what you would conventionally describe as good; they match each other in hysteria and shallowness. All the overacting can’t conceal how underwritten the characters are. Girlboss posturing aside, Carr alone has a discernible personality—and it’s one that is only tolerable in miniscule doses. The dialogue seems to be aiming for biting witticisms in the vein of Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker but is more like an endless stream of Real Housewives taglines: “My flight was turbulent, and so is my mood.” “Ten years, three women, one verdict: Unstoppable.” “Business is how I unwind.” “Heteronormativity is currency.” “I always knew this exact moment would darken my doorstep.” God, do I hate opening my front door to find a moment staring back at me!
From the glossy styling and the wealth porn to the prosperity gospel and the legal flexing, these scripts could be 42-minute distillations of Kardashian-Jenner brain. Kim is, after all, currently awaiting the results of her own bar exam. But she didn’t write them. The episodes that dropped Tuesday were penned almost entirely by creators Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken (who previously collaborated on Grotesquerie and Doctor Odyssey); only one credits a female co-writer, Jamie Pachino. Which casts a show seemingly designed to bypass all judgments with respect to storytelling and taste, gliding straight to the pleasure center of some imaginary horny, enraged, shopaholic feminine id, in a fairly sinister light. This is what three men and the army of big-name female actors who also signed on as executive producers think women want to see? It’s possible to pander so hard to your target audience, you wind up insulting them instead.
There are signs, especially toward the end of the three-part premiere, that Murphy, et al., have a more subversive long game in mind. Carr’s stated disdain for “fake buzzwords like feminism” does suggest some awareness on the creators’ part that GRG’s style of girl power is no longer the cultural monolith it was when the partners started the firm. The eventual emergence of a storyline about infertility, as well as a trans woman character who was once a sex worker, played by Hari Nef, might yet test the boundaries of these Lawyer Barbies’ self-serving feminism—though it’s just as likely that the show will make an offensive mess out of both. I find it even harder to predict where All’s Fair is heading than it has been to grasp what it’s trying to do, let alone why anyone would attempt such a project. The only winner, so far, is the brands.