All's Fair

The Terminal Decline of the Girlboss

I made it through the first four episodes of Hulu's *All's Fair* and came away feeling like television was actively gaslighting me. Bad TV is one thing. This is something stranger that Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken have put into the world. Calling it a legal drama feels generous. It plays more like an endurance test wearing prestige-TV clothes. The nerve of it is almost admirable. Almost.



Murphy used to have a viciously clear eye for American rot. You can still see it in *The People v. O.J. Simpson*, which dissected spectacle without losing touch with the people caught inside it. Here, he comes off as openly bored by human beings. The show fixates on the flimsiest imaginable version of empowerment—three lawyers, fronted by Kim Kardashian's Allura Grant and Naomi Watts's Liberty Ronson, starting a firm to bleed awful rich men dry—but the writing has the weight of decorative pillow text. The dialogue sounds like someone dumped a decade of #GirlBoss sludge into a broken generator.



What really hurts is watching a cast this strong paw around for something human in material that offers none. Naomi Watts twists herself through every line as if the scene physically pains her, while Niecy Nash-Betts keeps trying to smuggle in an actual pulse through piles of stale sass. Then Sarah Paulson, as rival attorney Carrington Lane, becomes the show's purest expression of manic emptiness. In that already infamous office-destruction scene, she screams, "Are you calling me an ugly duckling? So what if I give myself home perms? It's economical!" and throws herself at the absurdity so completely it stops being funny. Her jaw locks, her eyes go huge, and her whole body seems to revolt in public. Watching a great actor go under like that is genuinely painful.



And then there is Kardashian. While everyone else strains against the melodrama, she seems serenely untouched by it. The performance is pure stillness. She doesn't really react so much as remain in frame, her face set in a glossy, expensive blankness. In a scene meant to register as a devastating breakdown, the camera stays close while immaculate saline drops slide down her cheeks, somehow disconnected from anything happening behind her eyes. I honestly couldn't tell whether I was looking at inexperienced acting or a weird accidental work of avant-garde commentary on the emotional vacancy of the ultra-rich. *TIME*'s Judy Berman got the temperature exactly right when she called the show "a 2010s Shonda Rhimes procedural on steroid shots and Goop supplements, if everyone in the writers' room had been freshly lobotomized."

Maybe that numb, lobotomized feeling is the point. *All's Fair* is luxury real-estate porn and couture dressed up as feminism. It assumes the fantasy is watching rich women collect diamonds and fling insults across mega-mansions while everything beyond the gates burns. Maybe that's a failure of imagination. Maybe it's a brutally honest confession about what the creators think we want. Either way, four hours in, I didn't feel shocked or entertained. I just felt drained. The show leaves behind a dead, cottony numbness.