In a way, Kim Kardashian might just be the perfect choice to topline All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s glossy new legal drama for Hulu. This is not to say the American Horror Story: Delicate alum is good in it, mind you — she’s not, and surrounding her with powerhouses like Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson and Teyana Taylor only makes her weakness as an actor more apparent.
But Kardashian’s performance, stiff and affectless without a single authentic note, is exactly what the writing, also stiff and affectless without a single authentic note, merits. Her very presence, which succeeds at generating buzz and not much else, feels fitting for a show that seems to want not to be watched so much as mined for viral bits and pieces.
All’s Fair
The Bottom Line
Brain dead.
Airdate: Tuesday, Nov. 4 (Hulu)
Cast: Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, Teyana Taylor, Matthew Noszka
Creators: Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, Joe Baken
It’s the other actresses, trying to sell material unworthy of their efforts, whom you feel sorry for — or whom you would feel sorry for, if the show weren’t also reminding you every five minutes how awesome it is to have lots of money and then make even more money. For their sakes but also for my own ability to believe in a world that occasionally makes sense, I hope that all of them, Kardashian included, collected huge paychecks for whatever they’re doing here.
Reteaming Murphy with Grotesquerie’s Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, All’s Fair arrives under a female-empowerment veneer that grows thinner every time the plot dangles kinky consensual sex or a trans sex worker as a lurid reveal. Fed up with never being taken seriously by the indistinguishably old, white and male colleagues at their white-shoe firm, lawyers Allura Grant (Kardashian), Liberty Ronson (Watts) and investigator Emerald Greene (Nash-Betts) — credit where it’s due; those are incredible names — decide it’s time to strike out on their own.
In no time at all, they’ve formed their own shingle specializing in divorce law and representing all-female clients. A decade later, Grant Ronson Greene & Associates is thriving, as illustrated directly by the victories they recall in exposition-dump office chatter — but more vividly by the fact that when they’re not clacking their designer stilettos down vast marble hallways, they’re swanning around beachside mansions, driving Bentleys around Beverly Hills and chatting about what million-dollar jewels they hope to snag at auction while flying to New York via private jet.
Inspired by executive producer and Kardashian’s real-life divorce attorney Laura Wasser (who is also rumored to have been the model for the Laura Dern character in Marriage Story), All’s Fair ostensibly means to explore how these women’s careers inform their personal lives, and vice versa. Each of the first three hours that premiered Tuesday combine a case of the week — populated by impressively recognizable faces like Judith Light, Elizabeth Berkley Lauren, Jessica Simpson and Rick Springfield — with ongoing concerns about the main characters’ love lives.
Allura’s seen it all but is still blindsided when her own husband, a hot younger football player named Chase (Matthew Noszka), announces he’s leaving her. Liberty is blissfully coupled up with a handsome doctor, Reggie (O-T Fagbenle), but fears commitment because she’s watched too many of them end. The gang’s mentor and mother figure Dina (Close) has kept her romantic spirit despite her work, but struggles with the declining health of her husband, Doug (Ed O’Neill). And so on, and so forth.
But any actual emotional resonance or narrative coherence that All’s Fair manages along the way is purely incidental. Really, the show is here to serve fierce looks, bitchy one-liners and big juicy moments, with severely mixed results.
It finds most success on the first front. Cheerfully unconcerned with any notion of what real lawyers might wear to work, costume designer Paula Bradley creates her own fantasy version of office wear involving jewel-tone hats and gloves, diamonds the size of baseballs and enormous displays of cleavage. The outfits may not always be chic or even very pretty, but as modeled by red-carpet pros like Kardashian, Nash-Betts or Taylor (who plays the firm’s receptionist, Milan) they do exactly what they’re intended to, which is make you stop and stare.
On the flip side, the series completely fails when it comes to minting memorable quotes, because when the dialogue isn’t so bland it borders on inane (“I failed. I hate failing,” Allura pouts), it’s so extravagantly profane as to be exhausting. Not even Paulson, as villainous rival attorney Carrington “Carr” Lane, can wrap her tongue around a line as over-labored as “I wouldn’t do [that] even if I were penniless and starving on a street corner, forced to blow a priest with chlamydia for a bowl of refried beans.”
The drama generally falls flat, too, at delivering the sort of watercooler — or to put it in more 2025 terms, TikTok-friendly — moments it seems reverse-engineered to create. It’s not for a lack of wild overreactions. But even when Carr smashes a model boat to smithereens after a professional rejection or Allura imagines herself going full Lemonade on Chase’s sidepiece, their actions feel divorced from any larger context. These characters are so thin, their storylines so flimsy and their motives so underbaked that there’s no recognizable emotion underlying any of it, and thus no feeling to be provoked by watching it.
You might as well be looking at random GIFs from some show you’ve never seen before. Which, given how dull All’s Fair turns out to be despite how hard it tries to make itself sexy and splashy, might actually be the ideal way to experience it.
