Ryan Murphy Outdid Himself

All’s Fair is girlboss nonsense. It overflows with thinly empowering dialogue, like “Weak men just can’t handle strong women,” lifted straight from the mass-produced catch-all tray you gifted your sister-in-law last Christmas. These platitudes are peppered with vulgar outbursts in which every fifth word is “bitch” or “cum” or “extort.” A mind-numbingly deadpan Kim Kardashian and her fellow lawyers are surrounded by the stuff of powerful females: couture and diamonds and drawers full of sex toys. The legal drama is pulp feminism from top to bottom — oh yes, add “anal” to that list of overused words — yet I kept pressing play, my brain submitting to the might of another Ryan Murphy trash-TV spectacle.

There are several distinct categories of Murphy shows. There’s campy Murphy, like Glee and Scream Queens and Doctor Odyssey. There’s soapy Murphy, like Nip/Tuck and 9-1-1. There’s genre-freak Murphy of American Horror Story and Grotesquerie. More recently, there’s Murphy as high-minded commenter on American identity, attempting to discuss the nature of our collective true-crime obsession through the increasingly gruesome and disrespectful serial-killer anthology franchise Monster, which he co-created with Ian Brennan. At his best, Murphy is a connoisseur of low culture, a maestro of story lines that play out at a buzzsaw pace, a sculptor of characters who spit out corrosive one-liners and gnaw through scenery, an architect of goofy sex scenes, and a mastermind at presenting exploitation as empowerment. All’s Fair is cotton-candy TV: sticky, airy, and, once it’s all gone, both satisfying and nausea inducing.

All’s Fair begins with an introduction to beleaguered lawyers Allura Grant (Kardashian) and Liberty Ronson (Naomi Watts), who’ve suffered for years at a patriarchal, misogynist firm that treats them like second-class citizens. Their one ally is the firm’s only female partner, Dina Standish (Glenn Close), who encourages them to leave and create their own women-only divorce-law firm. Allura and Liberty do exactly that, poaching investigator Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash-Betts) and pissing off the firm’s only other female associate, Carrington Lane (Sarah Paulson), who feels abandoned when they don’t invite her along. The character names are straight out of ’80s nighttime soaps, but the script is packed with streaming-era vulgarity; ten years later, when the series properly begins, Carr — who has kept tabs on her rival firm’s rise to infamy — sends the women at Grant, Ronson, Greene & Associates an Edible Arrangement laced with feces and a note calling them “backstabbing bitches,” “fat, treacherous lawn chairs,” and “fucking fucks.” Murphy, who co-wrote and directed the pilot, shows Paulson dictating the message, her screaming face framed in close-up over and over again as the camera lingers on her popped eyes, pursed lips, and bulging neck veins.

The enmity between Carr and Allura’s team explodes when Allura’s football-player husband, Chase (Matthew Noszka), tells her he wants a divorce and she learns Carr is representing him. Chase is a scumbag, just like the many men Allura has defended her clients against, but Carr’s demands on his behalf are ruinous: She wants $1 million a month in spousal support and half of Grant, Ronson, Greene & Associates, too. This story line is where the series plants it most tasteless moments: Allura makes a show of getting tested for STIs after she learns Chase is having an affair with a trans sex worker, one of Chase’s girlfriends implies he’s not really that masculine since he likes her to use a strap-on, and one character’s arc lines up with the recent New York Times story about a woman faking her husband’s signature to get embryos implanted.

The structure of the series has its obvious advantages. All’s Fair revolves around Allura’s divorce (which is admittedly hard to invest in, given how little interiority Kardashian brings to her performance), but each episode focuses on one or more of her clients. Like Doctor Odyssey before it, part of the draw of All’s Fair is the guest stars, including Judith Light as a client who locks herself in a gigantic walk-in closet to protect herself from her husband (i.e., marriage is a trap) and Jessica Simpson as a Pamela Anderson–like rock star’s wife whose husband forces her to give him oral sex because he doesn’t want to see her slightly wrinkled face (theme: Aging women are disposable). These are subplots that work for no longer than a 20-minute B-plot given that they all boil down to “rich men bad.”

There’s no subtlety to All’s Fair’s interest in the problems of the wealthy. You’re not getting the layered, gendered, class-based commentary of recent series like Sirens, The Better Sister, or The Hunting Wives. In fact, it’s hard to tell whether Murphy adores or loathes these women. They’re paper dolls dressed up in the ugliest, most expensive outfits you’ve ever seen, adorned with all manner of little hats, veils, scarves, and rings while parroting paper-thin statements about what women deserve. Murphy is obsessed with their maximalism: the richest of the rich, the most snatched of all waists, the plucked and primped and plumped and pressed. How much can women’s bodies endure? How many stem cells can they pump into their vaginas to make them feel young again? Divorce court for the obscenely moneyed is the ideal venue for observing this particular kind of specimen.

All’s Fair involves very little actual litigation. It’s a diorama of a legal drama more than it actually is a legal drama, a show about contested divorces that doesn’t spend any time in front of a judge in its first three episodes. (Maybe Murphy was waiting for Kim Kardashian to pass the bar.) But that just means there’s plenty of space for go-for-broke acting: Paulson screaming, “See you in court, cunt burger”; Close evoking her Damages glory days by glaring at her opponent from the end of a long conference-room table; and Nash-Betts deploying her Reno 911!–perfected comedic timing with smirking lines like “Girl, you know why they call me the Big Dick.” Only time will tell how All’s Fair’s other quirks will develop, including its insidious vein of Islamophobia. (The series resurrects the stereotype of the sheikh who wants to behead his wife; meanwhile, Dina’s a fan of Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister who said there’s no such thing as Palestinians.) But at its best, All’s Fair brings to mind the delirious Murphy heights of Nip/Tuck, 9-1-1, and Doctor Odyssey, then shoots past them like Icarus making his way toward the sun and an eventual, inevitable fall.