“All’s Fair” and the problem with Kim Kardashian

If you haven’t yet subjected yourself to the three-episode premiere of “All’s Fair,” I have a challenge for you: Break out a stopwatch, start the timer the moment the action begins, and see how long it takes for your jaw to detach from the rest of your face.

No cheating! Holding your mandible in place with your hands, or one of Kim Kardashian’s Skims Seamless Sculpt Face Wraps™, is prohibited. You absolutely must allow your lower face to slacken naturally, which may be right around the moment Kardashian parts her artificially plumped lips to make a heroic attempt at acting.

My chin sank southward when it hit me that Naomi Watts, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash-Betts and Glenn Close, award-winning and highly acclaimed actors all, agreed to be backups to the socialite-turned-starlet-turned-almost-but-not-quite-lawyer in this super-group, not the other way around. Mind you, they could have mistaken this project, which casts Watts, Paulson and Close as high-powered attorneys, as a serious endeavor. Before Kardashian emerged as a moon landing denier, she spent six years completing a legal apprenticeship program in California, as she shared on Instagram. Laudable. But she also recently revealed in a Vanity Fair lie detector test that she failed a few exams along the way, blaming ChatGPT for being an unreliable study buddy. Oopsie!

While she isn’t an attorney yet — reportedly, she took the bar exam over the summer and is awaiting her results — “All’s Fair” allows Kardashian to play an unrealistically successful one on TV. She’s surrounded by partners and associates whose magnificently inane names sound like they were pulled from an Aaron Spelling character generator. Meanwhile, the first name of Kardashian’s Allura Grant could be a probiotic treatment for candidiasis. Don’t be surprised if that very product turns up someplace soon.

Anyway, the fun begins with Allura and Watts’ Liberty Ronson stalking away from the misogynistic law firm holding them back to open a boutique shop of their own. The firm’s sole female partner, Close’s Dina Standish, blesses their exit, encouraging them to take Nash-Betts’ lead investigator, Emerald Greene, with them. But abandoning the last female junior attorney standing, Paulson’s Carrington Lane (and ostensibly because she perms her hair at home), comes back to haunt them later. Ten years down the line, to be precise.

By then, Grant, Ronson, Greene & Associates has grown successful enough to afford a dutiful assistant named Milan (played by “One Battle After Another” star Teyana Taylor), their own private jet to use for girl talk seshes and daily lunches in what looks like a Bond villain’s library.

But they’re the good guys, while dear Carrington, who brags about out-billing them on the regular, has held onto her bitterness. When Carrington isn’t calling them “fat, treacherous lawn chairs” in a note accompanying an Edible Arrangement slicked in feces, she howls her desire to destroy them in court.

In a bit of late-hit revenge, Paulson’s banshee agrees to represent Allura’s pro football player husband, Chase (Matthew Noszka), when this Temu Travis Kelce springs his desire for a divorce on her shortly after their anniversary. If the thought of watching Kardashian face off with the Emmy-winning actor who played Marcia Clark in “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” makes you drool a little, dry those gums. Nobody comes within a shoe’s pitch of a judge in the first three episodes of “All’s Fair.” That’s probably for the best.

With each passing episode, it grows clearer that their profession was chosen to lend a touch of realism to the rancidly malicious, aggressively dimwitted dialogue screamed across long tables. Few people deliver more creative off-the-cuff insults than lawyers. And every scene reminds us that these women aren’t real lawyers.

The writing quality ranges from the level of softcore porn, as when Liberty says, “My flight was turbulent and so is my mood,” to Paulson’s Carrington Lane threatening Allura by dangling access to her frozen embryos over, I am not making this up, a figurative dinner plate. “You don’t give us what we want? Everything we want? Those eggs will never see the inside of Allura’s hoo-ha, because I will personally slather them in A1 steak sauce and eat them with a side of fries.”

(Disney) Matthew Noszka, Sarah Paulson, Kim Kardashian and Niecy Nash-Betts in “All’s Fair”

This is about as much of a review of “All’s Fair” worth venturing at this point, since pretty much every critic has brutalized the show. It’s challenging to refrain from lustily joining that boot party, but that would be a misuse of energy and attention.

Besides, there are other aspects to Murphy’s monstrosity, which he co-created with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken of the narratively abortive “Grotesquerie,” worth pondering.

Baken and Baitz’s previous effort coagulated into some sorta cultural critique about the nation going to Hell, while “All’s Fair” celebrates some of the people sending us there in a shameless parade of gaudy excess. Logos, opera gloves and bespoke headpieces abound. Costume designer Paula Bradley drapes Kardashian and her co-stars in a range of expensive fabrics, occasionally burying them in a dead animal or Muppet skin to add pizzazz. Paulson gets to wear a pussy bow that would be visible from a Blue Origin space flight.

Augmenting this Kardashian shopaganda is a parade of “Love Boat”-style cameos that includes Jessica Simpson, Rick Springfield and, briefly and brightly, “Showgirls” star Elizabeth Berkley. Seeing each stride into frame is a hoot. But when Berkley’s character makes a tragic exit from her story, I found myself mourning for the gleaming Valentino purse that she orphans. Its golden emblem is positioned just so, making it easier to hunt on 1st Dibs.

Of course, the main product “All’s Fair” sells is Kardashian herself. Allura is based on Laura Wasser, this generation’s “Divorce Lawyer to the Stars.” Kardashian employed Wasser, who costs at least $1000 an hour, according to a 2022 New Yorker profile, to legally extricate herself from her marriage to Kanye West. Wasser also represented Johnny Depp in his divorce from Amber Heard. Just leaving that there.

Regardless, Wasser’s association with this fable is merely implied by association. Other names and products are plunked before us with the subtlety of a manhole cover dropped from a great height. A full third episode sequence involves Allura listing, in extreme detail, the onslaught of treatments she undertakes to forget her marital tribulations.

(Disney/Ser Baffo) Kim Kardashian as Allura Grant in “All’s Fair”

“I did this new miracle laser that makes the tiniest microscopic holes in the skin that stimulate collagen,” she says before describing a Czech machine that stimulates thousands of crunches and a filler using salmon sperm — which, funny enough, Kardashian also swears by. “But the best thing I did? Are you ready for this? I did vaginal PRP.”

Kim Kardashian is a billionaire who built her fortune on being Kim Kardashian, one of a family of moguls a generation was raised to keep up with. That continues with “All’s Fair,” on which she and her mother, Kris Jenner, are listed as executive producers along with its main stars and a significant slice of greater Los Angeles. But this gig is less of a money-driver than, say, her recently shuttered mobile app game “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,” which enticed players to touch fire hydrants to make stacks of dollar bills pop out that their avatars could harvest from its digital sidewalk.

“If we’re talking about the corruptive influences of gaming on young minds today, ‘Kim Kardashian: Hollywood’ is likely far worse than any game where you can chainsaw an alien’s head off,” raved Forbes in its 2014 review of the game. “The central lesson is that your entire life should be dedicated to yourself, increasing your public profile, and buying clothes, cars and houses to get people to like you more.”

Yes, that’s about right. Two years later, it had earned her an estimated $45 million, generating many millions more before it shut down in 2024. One need not list Kardashian’s many other profitable enterprises save for the purpose of confession: Heeding a friend’s sheepish “I hate myself for saying this, but” recommendation, I obtained a pair of her brand’s pajamas, and they are indeed fashionable and comfortable. Yes, I am part of the problem.

But it’s one thing to purchase a billionaire’s (breathable and comfortable, hand to God!) product and another to buy into the skewed version of reality they’re promoting. We can laugh at the conspiracy-minded lunacy Kardashian touted on a recent episode of “The Kardashians,” but the fact that NASA had to publicly and officially refute what she said tells us plenty about the times in which we’re living. NASA does a lot more than plant flags on lunar surfaces. It undertakes vital scientific research that is at risk of being defunded under an administration more devoted to bathroom renovations than functional progress.

Dermatologists also poo-poohed Kardashian’s face wrap as a gimmick, but it’s probably less dangerous to one’s health than the level of organ-crushing corseting she and her sisters showcase on red carpets, declaring that they know it’s working if they can’t quite breathe. Most people dismiss this spectacle, but many others are trying it out and, we’re guessing, passing out. The family’s impact on fashion consumption and body perception has been amply established.

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“All’s Fair” is a paean to the classic Hollywood movies Murphy adores, with its most direct spiritual influence being the 1939 adaptation of “The Women.” The new show and old movie are about marriage, divorce, and the power women have, or don’t, when they or their husbands decide to part ways. But the real attraction is the fantasy of how the other half lives. George Cukor’s black-and-white vision traipses its heroines through dress fittings, manicures and facials, day drinking and backstabbing all the way, save for an interruption by a Technicolor fashion show.

The Kardashian vehicle keeps that consumerist energy, updating the sentiment with a thick slathering of capitalist feminism that equates a woman’s power to her billable rate. (There’s a name for the divorce lawyers leading this trash, you’ll be tempted to quip, but it isn’t used in high society outside of a kennel.)

(Disney/Ser Baffo) Niecy Nash-Betts as Emerald Greene, Glenn Close as Dina Standish and Kim Kardashian as Allura Grant in “All’s Fair”

This comports with the star’s understanding of how the world works based on the wealth she’s spun out of industrialized fame. She’s not wrong; indeed, the show’s flaunting of consumerist excess is downright timely. The president threw a “Great Gatsby” themed Halloween party for his richest friends hours before allowing SNAP benefits to lapse, needlessly abandoning the most impoverished Americans to hunger. In the wake of that immense crime, this distraction rates as a tone-deaf misdemeanor.

Leveler heads, though, should caution against viewing Allura or Kardashian as aspirational examples, even if the latter legitimately followed her highly publicized flirtation with justice reform by seriously studying the law. Clients of Grant, Ronson, Greene & Associates escape their marriage shackles with a hoard of treasure — there’s an entire subplot pinned to bidding on a brooch in a Christie’s auction, in fact. But that is not the reality for most women. Many studies find that they tend to emerge from divorces financially worse off than their exes.

Murphy’s fans are going to watch regardless of what I or anyone else says, as will Kardashian’s. Both have plenty of experience with savage reviews, and both know they provide some of the best free promotion available. “All’s Fair” wins either way.

So do we, the Poors, after a fashion. The stars get paychecks and attention, and we get to eat color-soaked hate-watch cake that channels old Hollywood glamour into an era defined by tacky maximalism and shallow thought. I look forward to my favorite local drag cabaret’s adaptation for its brunch performances, if anybody I know can afford to dine out whenever that comes together and manage to chew with mouths closed.

New episodes of “All’s Fair” stream Tuesdays on Hulu.