By Nick Bond
Seems like Kim Kardashian won’t be getting an Emmy anytime soon.
The reality star makes another big leap into the world of acting with a starring role in Hollywood superproducer Ryan Murphy’s campy new legal drama All’s Fair, which debuted locally on Disney+ this week.
But the reviews are out, and critics have absolutely savaged the new 10-part series, which also stars actual award-winning actors like Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson and Judith Light.
Kardashian, who acts as an executive producer of the series alongside her mother Kris Jenner, has the central role as a successful divorce lawyer and the owner of an all-female law firm.
Murphy is the show’s creator, writer, director and executive producer. One of Hollywood’s most prolific TV makers (Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Scream Queens and Feud to name a few), he’s no stranger to bad reviews, but these might be the most scathing critical reactions of his career so far.
Here’s what the critics are saying:
The Times said that All’s Fair “may be the worst TV drama ever,” with deputy TV editor Ben Dowell writing: “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 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.”
The Guardian declared the show “fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible” in a rare zero-star review, with critic Lucy Mangan writing that she “did not know it was still possible to make television this bad. I assumed that there was some sort of baseline, some inescapable bedrock knowledge of how to do it that now prevents any entry into the art form from falling below a certain standard. But I was wrong.”
USA Today dubbed All’s Fair the “worst TV show of the year,” with critic Kelly Lawler writing that the show is “absolute garbage” and awarding it one star out of four.
“It’s so stilted, artificial and awkward not even a glass of wine and leftover Halloween candy can make it remotely enjoyable to view,” they write.
And Kardashian was singled out in many reviews for her performance, with Hollywood Reporter critic Angie Han describing her as “stiff and affectless without a single authentic note.”
Consequence called All’s Fair “genuinely one of the worst shows of the year”: “There’s camp, and then there’s whatever the hell this Kim Kardashian legal drama is,” wrote critic Liz Shannon Miller. She said the show “feels like a fever dream, a peek into an alternate universe occupied by creatures who might look vaguely human but do not speak or act as you and I do.”
The reaction on social media is at least a little less savage, with many viewers who’ve dived in to the first few episodes insisting that, while the show may be terrible, it’s also a lot of fun.
“Critics don’t know how to have fun anymore! All’s Fair is for the fashion and the camp!!! Nobody was expecting the next Law & Order,” one viewer tweeted.eal Housewives. I’m addicted,” another wrote.
Another called it “my type of nonsense camp show. Sorry I LOVE this type of ridiculousness. Diamonds, fashion, bad bitches and it’s sexy.”
The first three episodes of All’s Fair are now streaming on Disney+, with the rest of the season to drop weekly.
