The limitations of trash TV, as seen in "All’s Fair"

By Aisha Harris

It's been said before: TV titan Ryan Murphy is the white, openly gay analogue of Tyler Perry. There's certainly evidence to back this up; both ostensibly never sleep seeing as they churn out multiple projects every year, and love giving A-list actresses of a certain age big, bold showcases in work that's rarely, if ever, worthy of their talents. They're also the primary culprits to blame for Kim Kardashian's mortifying but mercifully rare forays into "acting." The omnipresent influencer is currently starring in Murphy's much-talked about new show All's Fair (their second collaboration after American Horror Story: Delicate) and it's clear her skills have hardly improved in the years since Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor in 2013.

If you've heard about All's Fair but haven't witnessed the lavishly gauche spectacle for yourself, I'm here to tell you: It's as terrible as everyone says it is. The show is about an all-female law firm that specializes in helping wealthy women procure the best divorce settlements from their dirtbag one-percenter husbands — think a far less high-stakes and much goofier spin on Scandal's Olivia Pope & Associates. Kardashian — who has famously long been studying to become a lawyer but has yet to pass the bar — plays one of the high-powered partners at the law firm, and woodenly leads a cast of actual actresses that includes Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Niecy Nash-Betts and Sarah Paulson, none of whom can overcome the bland script. In nonsensical and over-the-top execution, All's Fair is just as hard to watch as anything Perry's ever put his stamp on.

Zoom out a bit, though, and the similarities between the two are less pronounced. There's a winking campiness in much of Murphy's work that doesn't surface within the earnestly bad, Christian-soaked oeuvre of Perry. The former's also demonstrated a discernible talent for balancing high and low art in messy but effective ways, going all the way back to the cheeky high school dramedy Popular to the tabloid anthologies American Crime Story and Feud and the subversive melodrama Pose (the brainchild of Afro-Latino co-creator and showrunner Steven Canals).

In this manner, I'd align Murphy more closely with the far less prolific Lee Daniels, their tastes always steeped in explicitly queer sensibilities, with frequencies running the gamut from uber-schlock to populist kitsch to soapy melodrama, or some other amalgamation of the bunch. Season 1 of Daniels' Empire, which gave Taraji P. Henson a role for the ages as fierce matriarch Cookie Lyon, is a provocative blast — Douglas Sirk-ian gloss by way of the Chitlin' Circuit.

Unfortunately, as Daniels and Murphy's more recent output insists, intending to produce camp or something like it doesn't always yield "so bad it's good" — or even merely interesting — results. There's a direct line to be drawn from Glenn Close's bonkers turn as a Jesus-loving, recovering addict grandma in Daniels' supernatural monstrosity The Deliverance (I'm still recovering from her deliverance of a certain crass line that went viral) to her wading into the high-end muck of All's Fair; I have to wonder if her willingness to do the former inspired her casting in the latter.

Whether it did or not, both projects function as expressions of tedium deceivingly gussied up to look like a fun time; their provocations come off so purposefully silly as to seem embarrassingly strained. All's Fair's fumbling attempt to position itself as a rah-rah sisterhood story only exaggerates how unpleasant the viewing experience is, especially in these times. It's much more difficult to look past a subpar script and meme-forward performances when the overall vibe is stale and hallow: these characters, sashaying in luxury fits across decadent mansions and corporate spaces and spouting vapid girlboss-era platitudes, speak of themselves as though they're the posterchildren for modern feminism, just because they help socialite clients in bad marriages stay wealthy post-divorce. (To this, I quote Kourtney, Kardashian's IRL sister: "There's people that are dying.")

A scenery-ingesting Paulson, meanwhile, is the show's evil Ethel Merman, playing all the way past the back of the house, through the lobby, and out into the parking lot as the proudly anti-feminist rival attorney, sneering such colorful prose as "Beef curtains. Black Mae West," when nastily addressing Kardashian and Nash-Betts' characters. She's committed to the bit, because she's a professional and one of our greats, but even she can't save this dreck. At least you could argue, as I have before, that something like Murphy's supremely ridiculous series Hollywood — which imagined, among other things, an alternate universe wherein a pre-fame Rock Hudson was able to come out as gay alongside a Black partner and suffer no real consequences to his career — showed a bit of transgression. All's Fair is so mind-bogglingly stupid it could make even the most ardent defender of Murphy's particular brand of prestige-y trash throw their hands up in agony.

Is it hate-watchable nevertheless? I guess this is where All's Fair shares another thing in common with the works of Tyler Perry: no one should hate themselves this much. You can skip it.