All’s Fair: A gross celebration of American aspiration that Kim Kardashian has remade in her image

We are well past the era in which you could dismiss Kim Kardashian as someone who’s just famous for being famous.

Whether you like it or not, she is an icon, to the point that her influence stretched so far as to define what it is to be a 21st century icon. For better or worse, Kardashian and her enterprising family have shaped today’s celebrity culture, social media fame and even beauty standards.

She’s so recognisable that when she turned up to the 2021 Met Gala covered, literally, head to toe in black, there was no mistaking who was sheathed beneath the full body suit. Yes, her exaggerated hourglass silhouette is discernible a mile off, but there were also few people who would – and could – pull off that stunt.

So, when you hire Kardashian as the lead of your TV show, you’re not casting Kardashian the thespian, you’re banking on Kardashian the superstar who has 354 million Instagram followers.

Her fame is the point, and there’s no running from it. All you can do is lean into and play with it, which All’s Fair is more than happy to leverage.

The legal drama, as it’s billed, comes from prolific producer Ryan Murphy’s stable of heightened, over-the-top shows. It’s about an all-female law firm that specialises in divorce cases, and only represents women.

It is, simply put, dreadful. It is one of the worst scripted dramas put to air this year, certainly the most high profile, big budgeted one. It’s not a hate-watch, this is unwatchable.

All’s Fair is melodramatic, poorly written, crass, and a gross celebration of 2010s-era glossy girlboss feminism as well as conspicuous consumption and hyper capitalism. You’ll want to take a shower afterwards to rid yourself of its soulless aspiration.

All’s Fair is, technically, an ensemble piece with a cast of impressive names and proper artists, including Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Niecy Betts-Nash, Sarah Paulson and up-and-comer and potential Oscar nominee for One Battle After Another, Teyana Taylor.

But the attention-grabbing headliner is Kardashian.

The studio and the producers know what a marketing asset she is, so she is front and centre in all of the promotional materials, and her character also has the “juiciest” storyline.

While no stranger to cameras, Kardashian has had few turns in scripted productions, most notably in another Murphy show, American Horror Story: Delicate, but All’s Fair is the first time she was number one on the call sheet. She is also an executive producer, as is her mother, Kris Jenner.

There’s almost no point in criticising her acting because she’s not an actor. She has screen presence, but no affect for drama, delivering every line with the same pitch, whether she’s talking about dinner or facing her husband’s mistress.

A scene that requires her character to cry is obviously using glycerine tears — the words being spoken doesn’t match what she’s emoting, or not emoting as it were.

That’s all by the by, because no one expects Kardashian to reveal a heretofore undiscovered talent for performance.

What’s more interesting about All’s Fair is how its fictional universe intersects with Kardashian’s real-life image.

In the show, she is Allura Grant, a lawyer who leaves a male-dominated firm with her friends and colleague Liberty Ronson (Watts), another attorney, and Emerald Green (Nash-Betts), an investigator, to start their own business.

They vow to be ra-ra Feminists, standing up for women by making their scummy estranged husbands pay in monetary terms.

In the first three episodes released (Disney did not provide review screeners), those antagonists have included a tech titan who didn’t allow his wife to leave the house but happily stepped out himself to indulge in a BDSM kink involving a very large butt plug, which All’s Fair will flash and then linger on screen.

Allura seems to have it all. An enormous glass mansion in the Hollywood Hills, with the most ridiculous walk-in wardrobe full of designer outfits and Birkin bags, a private chef, the respect of her industry and a reputation as a fearsome, crusading lawyer.

She also has a hot husband in the form of a former NFL star with three Super Bowl rings, who gifts her on their fifth anniversary an insane diamond ring that once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor.

Watching Kardashian slip that rock onto her finger instantly evokes memories of her wearing Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr President” dress to the 2022 Met Gala.

There is no escaping the real-world Kardashian parallels. Kardashian has dated NFL players Miles Austin and Odell Beckham Jr, and was married to NBA star Kris Humphries but, of course, her most famous paramour was Kanye West.

You cannot watch Kardashian act out a scene with her onscreen husband asking for a divorce because he feels small next to her overpowering fame, without wondering if she and West had a similar exchange.

When Allura talks about getting filler with salmon sperm and vaginal platelet-rich plasma treatment (which uses the same method as the “vampire facial” the Kardashians made famous), all you see is Kardashian talking.

When the character fantasises about taking a baseball bat to her husband’s mistress’s car, in slow motion and wearing a flowy yellow dress, a la Lemonade, you’ll not only think of Beyoncé, but that Queen Bey and Jay-Z, a good friend of West at that time, declined to attend his wedding to Kardashian.

You can never make the distinction between the fictional character in All’s Fair and the real world’s most famous woman.

Allura also changes her hair every scene with wigs, just like Kardashian, and her outfits are elaborate and high-end, just like Kardashian.

The problem isn’t that being so well known means you can never disappear into an acting role, because that is really only a concern to Kardashian and her artistic collaborators. The problem is that All’s Fair represents a version of aspirational wealth and culture that the Kardashians have been selling.

On screen, a character says to Allura, “everybody wants to be you”, and the show presents it without any interrogation.

It may have this storyline where Allura is betrayed by her husband, but it has no emotional nuance. It’s not a “perfection is not all it’s cracked up to be” because apparently, it is.

In the imagining of All’s Fair, money is everything, and their clients can only be “made whole” by enriching their bank accounts.

It’s promising Emerald that she will be a multimillionaire within two years if she joins their new firm, and then delivering on that.

It’s hopping on a private jet to attend a jewellery auction in New York City, and then flying home with your best girlfriends, all swathed in matching silk pyjamas and clinking champagne glasses.

It’s mourning the end of your marriage while wearing a fur coat in your designer mansion, still not a single strand of hair out of place.

It’s driving Bentleys and sports cars and throwing off lines like, “business is how I unwind”.

That All’s Fair cloaks itself as feminist is offensive, because this is a very, very, very specific slice of feminism that is unrecognisable to 99.9 per cent of women. Its female collective is only for the uber wealthy. If you want to get really, really sloshed, a dangerous drinking game would involve taking a shot every time someone on screen says “women”, an oft-repeated watchword for the show’s self-congratulatory smugness that it was somehow lifting an entire gender up if you just say those two syllables enough.

Its feminism is so shallow and outdated, you will not be surprised to discover the pilot and episode three were written by a team of men. One woman is credited as a screenwriter on the second episode.

There is something to be acknowledged about how the Kardashian clan, through shameless hustling, endless commercial deals, and, let’s be honest, financial nous, have emerged as some of the most influential figures of this century.

They’ve been experts at playing the game and bending the rules to fit their ends.

Kardashian may have taken an interest in social justice causes, including prison reform and recognition of the Armenian genocide, but those are footnotes in her story.

All’s Fair is a terrible, terrible, terrible show but it is so quintessentially a story of the worst of American materialism and aspiration – an America, and by extension, western culture, that has been remade in the Kardashians’ image.