All's Fair (2025)

A show that might look expensive — but is cheap in all the ways that actually matter.

All’s Fair is cotton-candy TV: sticky, airy, and, once it’s all gone, both satisfying and nausea inducing.

All’s Fair is the most frustrating kind of show in that it has resources most creatives could only ever dream of acquiring and somehow manages to waste every single one (save for maybe its costuming budget, which is by far the best part about it — in the words of Aretha Franklin, “Beautiful gowns”).

It's so stilted, artificial and awkward not even a glass of wine and leftover Halloween candy can make it remotely enjoyable to view.

It takes a special talent to make something so fascinatingly dull, especially with a cast this strong. No words yet invented can fully convey just how much you need to avoid this disastrous show.

The only reason to keep on watching is the steady clip of guest stars. .... Bring back Ed Gein – a drama about a man who wears his victims’ skin for underwear cannot be half as terrifying as this smorgasbord of schlock.

In many ways, All’s Fair is simply bad. You don’t have to worry about Kardashian holding her own among Close, Nash-Betts, Watts, and the rest. No one’s performance in this show is what you would conventionally describe as good; they match each other in hysteria and shallowness. All the overacting can’t conceal how underwritten the characters are. .... I find it even harder to predict where All’s Fair is heading than it has been to grasp what it’s trying to do, let alone why anyone would attempt such a project. The only winner, so far, is the brands.

Everyone in “All’s Fair” is a stock caricature from a man’s idea of a woman’s drama. It’s a cavalcade of wigs and screeching in search of truth, but Murphy seems to have lost the magic touch that made his work so appealing for so long. His snark has rotted into contempt, for audience and art alike.

“All’s Fair” is a clumsy, condescending take on rah-rah girlboss feminism, half-baked even by the standards of an overextended Murphy, who co-created the show with Joe Baken and Jon Robin Baitz. .... “All’s Fair” demonstrates such a low opinion of its own viewers, assuming we’ll bark like seals when fed disconnected scraps of sassy one-liners, flashy outfits and men-ain’t-shit commiseration.

These characters are so thin, their storylines so flimsy and their motives so underbaked that there’s no recognizable emotion underlying any of it, and thus no feeling to be provoked by watching it. You might as well be looking at random GIFs from some show you’ve never seen before.

A lazy, ludicrous series with no pretense that it contains anything of value beyond its wardrobe budget and the sky-high salaries it surely paid its stars .... Something you want to escape from. Having finally made it free, I now genuinely want to sue someone.

Scenes start, jarringly, without introduction or fanfare, as though we’ve been vaulted into the action; the plot resists all attempts by the viewer to impose any kind of order. .... The writing suggests that ChatGPT was asked to emulate Fifty Shades’ E. L. James, and however cringeworthy and brand-name-peppered that sounds, I can promise you it’s so much worse.

Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible.