Whatever else can be said about Kim Kardashian, the original of the influencer species could never be accused of doing the obvious thing. In 2014, she and her then husband Kanye West flew straight from their wedding at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence to Cork Airport for a honeymoon that reportedly included a stay in Castlemartyr and a trip to Portlaoise, where they attended a 3pm screening of X-Men: Days of Future Past at the local Storm Cinema. The road less travelled had led her to the Midlands on a random weekday in May.
Kardashian, long since divorced from Kanye, continues to play by her own rules – and seems entirely indifferent as to how she will be judged. This is probably for the best as her new legal drama, All’s Fair, is a proper atrocity exhibition and one of the worst things Disney+ has ever foisted upon its subscribers, which is saying a lot if you’ve watched all of She-Hulk.
Yet such is Kardashian’s cachet, she has attracted a cast so starry they could commandeer their own corner of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They include the great Naomi Watts, who hasn’t looked so confused since she had to pretend she was in love with a gorilla in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. There is also a visibly baffled Glenn Close. You can almost see her mouth the lyrics to Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime as she plays a senior mentor to Kardashian’s go-getter divorce lawyer. How did she get here? We have no idea, Glenn.
All’s Fair is produced by Ryan Murphy, Hollywood’s laureate of bad taste and poet of the puerile. He’s made some thoroughly solid TV – singalong dramedy Glee, for example, or the OJ Simpson-themed first season of American Crime Story. But when he is bad, he is horrible. See, for instance, his dreadful origin story of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched, which he produced for Netflix, or appalling slasher drama Grotesquerie.
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It’s hard to say whether he has designed All’s Fair to be atrocious on purpose, but it certainly isn’t unthinkable that such was his plan all along. Either way, he has a perfect foil in Kardashian, who does not act so much as open her mouth and allow words to issue forth.
She plays Allura Grant, a hotshot marriage lawyer who finds the tables turned when her unfaithful husband initiates divorce proceedings. A decade ago, Allura quit a fancy-pants LA law firm to strike out with a duo of female colleagues, Liberty Ronson (the hapless Watts) and Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash) – encouraged all the way by their boss Dina Standish (Close).
Fast forward to the present day, and they’re making a difference by assisting rich women to escape toxic marriages. In one early intervention, Liberty tracks down a dotcom bro to his favourite torture dungeon – and with his degeneracy established, helps his soon-to-be-ex wife wriggle out of a seemingly ironclad prenup. But even as the team strike up win after win, they are haunted by their sworn enemy, Carrington Lane (Sarah Paulson) – a former colleague whom they threw overboard to build their own practice.
Murphy has a history of stunt-casting. His early horror romp Scream Queens featured Ariana Grande, and he has worked with Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift’s fiance, Travis Kelce, who had a small part in Grotesquerie. With that background, turning Kardashian into a dramatic actor should be relatively straightforward.
But instead of giving her a fair shot, Murphy has built a show in the tacky image of the reality universe to which she owes her celebrity. Holding a mirror up to the gauche world of 21st-century celebrity and fame-for-fame’s sake, All’s Fair is stilted, nasty and preposterous – the television equivalent of a Botox jab straight to the cerebral cortex.
