Kim Kardashian's New Show Debuts With Rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes
All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new series starring Kim Kardashian as a high-powered California attorney, has debuted to an extremely rare zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Critics Have Been Savage
Critics had nothing nice to say about the series, the first three episodes of which are now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. Kardashian stars alongside more seasoned thespians Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, and Niecy Nash-Betts (acting under a hideous array of hats) as one quarter of a girl-powered law firm which specializes in getting justice for jilted women. They’re ostensibly divorce attorneys, but in the second episode, they mount a campaign against the IRS. So, who knows? Murphy regular Sarah Paulson and One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor (who may soon become an Oscar winner) play the bad guys.
All was indeed fair to critics scrutinizing the show, who wasted no time lambasting its myriad flaws and indulgences. “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,” wrote Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”
Kardashian's Performance Not the Only Issue
And while it would be tempting to foist the show’s failure entirely on Kardashian’s shoulders, many allowed that her astonishing lack of charisma is a relatively minor problem. “It’s all just painfully hard to watch,” Dustin Rowles wrote. “It’s beneath everyone involved, even Kardashian, who mostly seems bored. She’s not alone. The absurdity occasionally earns a guffaw, but it’s not enough to offset the tedium.”
Disney
Meanwhile, Ben Dowle raged in The Times U.K. that All’s Fair “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's Fair Really Is That Bad
All’s Fair is a rare miss for Murphy, who, even with his most outrageous projects, can usually eke out some errant praise. (Netflix’s highly controversial Monster, for example, has a 22 percent critical consensus on RT.) But All’s Fair really is as bad as the hype(?) suggests—a boring, literally incomprehensible show which is so deviantly obsessed with the presentation of wealth that, if allowed to continue, it could single-handedly bring the fall of capitalism.