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The beauty writer Jessica DeFino refers often to the “mirror world” inside our phone, the uncanny, glistening selfieverse that’s also become more real for many of its devotees than the lumpy, blotchy meatspace where the rest of us live. I thought about the mirror world while watching All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new creative product—I can’t call it a television show, because it isn’t one. Rather, it’s Instagram Reels at episode length, 45-minute collections of bedazzled moving images, targeted at the idly scrolling second-screen viewer. Scenes pass quickly, as if to emulate the true feed experience: Here’s a private jet, swaddled in ultra-feminine bouclé; here’s a ring, its diamond as big as a grape, slipped gently onto a finger with a two-inch acrylic talon; here’s lunch, three lavishly adorned bites of salad; here’s the face you know better than your own after two decades of overexposure, poreless and glazed and unmistakably Kim Kardashian, with arachnid eyelashes and lips so pillowy that you could fall asleep on them. If you’re not already on your phone, you may as well be.
All’s Fair is technically a drama on Hulu about divorce lawyers, but only in the sense that someone needed something to tie all of these visuals together. Scenes start, jarringly, without introduction or fanfare, as though we’ve been vaulted into the action; the plot resists all attempts by the viewer to impose any kind of order. But: 10 years ago, infuriated by how sexist and stuffy their law firm was (this was, mark you, a good two years into the Lean In girlboss tote-bag-feminism era), and by how the partners at their firm refused to see the potential of divorce law (I laughed into my hand), three trailblazing legal eagles named Allura Grant (played by Kardashian), Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash-Betts), and Liberty Ronson (Naomi Watts, regretfully) left to start their own firm. Flash forward to the present day, and their dream is fully realized: Allura drives a Bentley to her womb-like office (the curved hallways resemble nothing so much as vaginal canals), every partner meeting comes with champagne, and practicing law apparently consists of walking into a room and declaring, “Ladies!!!!,” as though you’re kicking off an inexhaustible bachelorette group chat. (The New York Times felt obliged to ask this week whether women ruined the workplace; All’s Fair says: “You betcha.”)
[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]
This summary is basically it. There are subplots involving Allura’s marriage to an NFL player 10 years her junior, and the firm’s antagonist, a vicious rival lawyer named Carrington Lane (Sarah Paulson, chewing scenery so aggressively that she must still have splinters in her teeth). Each episode has a few cameos from actors who I can only hope were paid unspeakable amounts to play clients: Grace Gummer as an abused wife; Elizabeth Berkley as a gaslighted wife; Jessica Simpson, covered in facial prosthetics, as a trophy wife coerced into getting botched plastic surgery. The writing suggests that ChatGPT was asked to emulate Fifty Shades’ E. L. James, and however cringeworthy and brand-name-peppered that sounds, I can promise you it’s so much worse. “From cocktails to cock rings in one 24-hour period,” Watts’s Liberty says at the end of the first episode. “God, I love my job.” Now that’s acting.
The reviews of All’s Fair have been so uniformly dire that the show has emerged, paradoxically, as a must-watch. I can only assume that this is exactly what Murphy and his co-creators—including the playwright and two-time Pulitzer finalist Jon Robin Baitz—were going for. You simply can’t make something this bad without intention, even if the intention is just to be widely memed each week via Evan Ross Katz’s Instagram account. The performances are wildly disparate: Paulson’s key is psychotic operatic, Glenn Close’s (she plays the mentor figure Dina Standish) is animated to excess, Nash-Betts’s is sitcom charming, and Kardashian’s is Days of Our Lives perfume ad. I don’t mean to malign Kardashian—whose character seems very sweet on the show—but her particular art form works only in the hyper-specific world of heavily edited images. On Instagram, and even on her reality show, Kardashian comes across as thrillingly impervious, wearing impassivity like body armor and putting her body and face through Olympian ordeals to draw our collective gaze. On scripted television, she’s much more vulnerable to someone else’s camera angles, and to a genre that rewards expression, not provocative blankness.
[Read: Reclaim imperfect faces]
Watching the show, you may have questions. Such as: Does this portend the end of culture as we know it? and Is the scene where the lawyers all talk about vaginal filler made of salmon sperm critiquing the absurdity of late-capitalist beauty culture or endorsing it? My question was: What does Ryan Murphy really think about women? He’s spent much of his career portraying us as grotesques and static archetypes—divas, witches, den mothers, monsters—in shows The New Yorker has described as “cynical hits.” The first five seasons of American Horror Story featured not a single female director; All’s Fair is a drama co-created by three men about a supposed feminist wonderland. Is this show written for women? Or, as seems more likely to me, are we being pandered to in plain sight—patronized, diminished, and fed designer-label eye candy and weak-sauce revenge plots by someone who recently noticed Selling Sunset at the top of Netflix’s most-watched list? It’s easy to absorb endless amounts of branded pap when you’re on your phone. The experience of being bombarded with shoe-closet-makeover reels and deep-plane-facelift infomercials from Miami plastic surgeons is as normal there as breathing. It’s harder to take on television. It seems much more obvious, somehow—all the ways we’re being pacified and manipulated to consume, to desire, to disassociate.
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