Legal ‘show’ courts weighty contempt

All’s Fair, a so-called legal comedy-drama starring Kim Kardashian, Niecy Nash-Betts and Naomi Watts, has been savaged by critics, with some calling it possibly the worst TV show ever made.

This isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good series. It’s not a high-camp romp. It’s not a guilty pleasure. It’s not even an effective hate-watch.

In fact, as several commentators have pointed out, it’s just possible that All’s Fair (now streaming on Disney+) is not a TV show at all but instead some completely new product that could be classified as post-television, maybe even post-human.

From recklessly prolific creator Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Monster), this nine-episode season seems to herald a new mode of viewing, with content that seems specifically engineered to be consumed on a second screen while you’re doing something else, like playing online solitaire or shopping for cute shoes on eBay.

With the merest nod to plot, character or really any kind of recognizable human-being-type stuff, the show’s viewing experience is more akin to scrolling through Instagram, watching TikTok videos or aimlessly checking out AI-generated memes.

Ostensibly, All’s Fair is about a trio of high-profile, haute-couture-clad divorce lawyers, Allura Grant (Kardashian), Emerald Greene (Nash-Betts) and Liberty Ronson (Watts), who quit a male-dominated law firm to set up their own shop. They leave behind fellow lawyer Carrington Lane (Murphy regular Sarah Paulson), possibly because she uses home perms and wears skirts below the knee, and she immediately becomes their implacable enemy.

The partners handle only female clients, generally women divorcing hideous — and hideously wealthy — men, a practice that mostly involves busting prenups to win eye-popping nine-figure settlements.

That’s just a pretext, though, a jumping-off point for the show’s real interest, which is shiny, surface-skimming, rapidly-moving images. Expect a nonstop barrage of closet porn, food porn and occasionally just porn-porn.

According to All’s Fair, lawyering mostly involves conspicuous consumption. Really, it’s just a nonstop round of champagne, caviar and blinis against a photo-ready backdrop of cream bouclé chairs and marble tables. Our legal trio strides down hallways wearing colour-co-ordinated runway outfits and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry. There are capes, hats, feathers, bustiers, Birkin bags and an inexplicable number of indoor gloves. (And if you’ve ever wondered what an office-wear thong might look like, Kim K. has you covered.)

There are perfunctory declarations of solidarity and sisterhood in All’s Fair, and a girl-boss version of female empowerment. But for most of the show’s Birkin-bagless viewers, this is not a super-relatable form of feminism.

The jokes are mean and mostly unfunny, and the pretend poignance is even worse. Abrupt attempts to treat such serious issues as sexual assault, child abuse, terminal illness and suicide come off as grotesque. The dialogue is atrocious, the plotting barely recognizes the elementary laws of cause and effect, and the characters are tissue-thin. It all adds up to an odd, empty, inhuman kind of badness.

Still, this badness just got green-lit for a second season. We’ll have to see whether this is a small, Murphy-boosted blip or a bigger paradigmatic shift in the ways people like to watch.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca