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The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n The beauty writer Jessica DeFino refers often to the \u201cmirror world\u201d<\/a> inside our phone, the uncanny, glistening selfieverse that\u2019s 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\u2019s Fair<\/i>, Ryan Murphy\u2019s new creative product\u2014I can\u2019t call it a television show, because it isn\u2019t one. Rather, it\u2019s 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\u2019s a private jet, swaddled in ultra-feminine boucl\u00e9; here\u2019s a ring, its diamond as big as a grape, slipped gently onto a finger with a two-inch acrylic talon; here\u2019s lunch, three lavishly adorned bites of salad; here\u2019s 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\u2019re not already on your phone, you may as well be.<\/p>\n All\u2019s Fair<\/i> 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\u2019ve 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<\/i> girlboss tote-bag-feminism era), and by how the partners at their firm refused to see the potential of divorce law<\/i> (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, \u201cLadies!!!!,\u201d as though you\u2019re kicking off an inexhaustible bachelorette group chat. (The New York Times <\/i>felt obliged to ask this week<\/a> whether women ruined the workplace; All\u2019s Fair<\/i> says: \u201cYou betcha.\u201d)<\/p>\n [Read: No, women aren\u2019t the problem<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n This summary is basically it. There are subplots involving Allura\u2019s marriage to an NFL player 10 years her junior, and the firm\u2019s 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<\/i>\u2019 E. L. James<\/a>, and however cringeworthy and brand-name-peppered that sounds, I can promise you it\u2019s so much worse. \u201cFrom cocktails to cock rings in one 24-hour period,\u201d Watts\u2019s Liberty says at the end of the first episode. \u201cGod, I love my job.\u201d Now that\u2019s<\/i> acting.<\/p>\n The reviews of All\u2019s Fair<\/i> 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\u2014including the playwright and two-time Pulitzer finalist <\/i>Jon Robin Baitz\u2014were going for. You simply can\u2019t make something this bad without intention, even if the intention is just to be widely memed each week via Evan Ross Katz\u2019s Instagram account. The performances are wildly disparate: Paulson\u2019s key is psychotic operatic, Glenn Close\u2019s (she plays the mentor figure Dina Standish) is animated to excess, Nash-Betts\u2019s is sitcom charming, and Kardashian\u2019s is Days of Our Lives<\/i> perfume ad. I don\u2019t mean to malign Kardashian\u2014whose character seems very sweet on the show\u2014but 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\u2019s much more vulnerable to someone else\u2019s camera angles, and to a genre that rewards expression, not provocative blankness.<\/p>\n [Read: Reclaim imperfect faces<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n Watching the show, you may have questions. Such as: Does this portend the end of culture as we know it?<\/i> 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?<\/i> My question was: What does Ryan Murphy really think about women?<\/i> He\u2019s spent much of his career portraying us as grotesques and static archetypes\u2014divas, witches, den mothers, monsters\u2014in shows The New Yorker<\/i> has described as \u201ccynical hits.\u201d The first five seasons of American Horror Story<\/i> featured not a single female director; All\u2019s Fair<\/i> is a drama co-created by three men about a supposed feminist wonderland. Is this show written for<\/i> women? Or, as seems more likely to me, are we being pandered to in plain sight\u2014patronized, diminished, and fed designer-label eye candy and weak-sauce revenge plots by someone who recently noticed Selling Sunset<\/i> at the top of Netflix\u2019s most-watched list? It\u2019s easy to absorb endless amounts of branded pap when you\u2019re 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\u2019s harder to take on television. It seems much more obvious, somehow\u2014all the ways we\u2019re being pacified and manipulated to consume, to desire, to disassociate.<\/p>\n Article originally published at The Atlantic<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n