A Ryan Murphy legal drama starring Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, and Niecy Nash-Betts should be a masterclass in complex female characters. Instead, All’s Fair is a glossy prison of perfection, where even tears are afraid to make a mess.
The show promises a story about powerful women fighting for other women — an all-female law firm taking on Los Angeles divorce cases with wit, grit, and solidarity. With a cast this stacked, it should work. But three episodes in, it’s clear the show’s fatal flaw isn’t its premise. It’s what happens when you cast someone who’s never willing to crack the perfect facade, and when a director known for pushing boundaries decides to protect that image instead of challenging it.
The Problem with Perfection
The problem isn’t just that Kim Kardashian can’t act, though let’s be honest, she can’t. It’s that every frame of this show feels like we’re still watching Kim Kardashian, not Allura Grant. Every hair strand is in place. The skin looks like porcelain. The Birkin bags are immaculate. Even when she cries, her face doesn’t move. The tears fall, but nothing creases. It’s like she’s afraid to spoil the makeup, to wrinkle the face, to mess up the image, so she cries with a straight face.
This is a perpetuation of a brand, and it stands in direct opposition to what great acting requires.
The Art of Deconstruction: What Kim Refuses to Do
Great acting is an act of deconstruction. It requires an actor to risk their public image to find a character’s emotional truth.
Remember when Charlize Theron gained thirty pounds, shaved her eyebrows, and wore prosthetic teeth to play serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster? She won an Oscar not because she was beautiful, but because she was willing to be ugly. Financiers literally told her she looked too ugly and tried to stop the film. She did it anyway.
That’s range.
That’s risk.
That’s acting.
We see it in Halle Berry, stripped down emotionally and physically for Monster’s Ball; in Mariah Carey, subdued and unrecognizable in Precious; in Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie Lyon, all rough edges and survival instinct. These women understood a fundamental truth: to be taken seriously as an actress, you have to be willing to let go of the image. You have to be willing to ugly cry—face contorted, makeup running, snot and all.
Kim Kardashian wants to be taken seriously, but she won’t crack. She is trapped in the conflict between Kim Kardashian, the brand—which is untouchable, flawless, and aspirational—and Kim Kardashian, the actress—who needs to be vulnerable, undone, and human. The brand is winning, and the performance is losing. As one critic noted, “Her very presence…feels fitting for a show that seems to want not to be watched so much as mined for viral bits and pieces.”
But the responsibility for this failure cannot rest on Kim alone. The director who cast her is complicit.
Ryan Murphy’s Betrayal of His Own Legacy
This is why I’m not just mad at Kim; I’m disappointed in Ryan Murphy. This is the man who built his career on shows that weren’t afraid to get messy.
He gave us Pose, which centered Black and Latino trans women with full humanity—their struggles with HIV and homelessness, but also their joy and dreams. He gave us Feud: Bette and Joan, which explicitly examined Hollywood’s cruel ageism and sexism. He turned American Horror Story into a showcase for actresses like Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson to do fearless, transformative work.
So why does All’s Fair feel so shallow? Why does it treat these incredible actresses like mannequins in a luxury showroom?
The show is about divorce lawyers, a profession inherently mired in messy, emotional, intimate battles. But Murphy’s direction gives us a fantasy of success completely detached from reality. There’s no 2 a.m. panic attacks, no courtroom defeats that shake their confidence. Just perfection.
When Murphy created Pose, he didn’t ask, “How can we make trans women aspirational?” He asked, “How can we make them human?” All’s Fair doesn’t feel human. It feels like an ad for a lifestyle that 99% of women will never have, or may not even want.
This cult of perfection sells a dangerous and narrow fantasy of female success.
The “Empowerment” Lie: When Success is Another Cage
Here’s what frustrates me most: Yes, successful women can have nice things. But is that the only version of success we’re selling?
I think about the average woman watching this show. She’s juggling work, kids, and bills. She’s fighting for promotions while dealing with imposter syndrome. She’s making partner while wondering if she’s a good enough mother. She deserves to see that woman on screen.
Real success for women includes disruption, uncertainty, and rebuilding. It means showing up even when you’re falling apart. It means the ugly cry because that’s what real emotion looks like. It means arriving at court with a wrinkled shirt because you were up all night preparing.
By contrast, All’s Fair’s aesthetic is wrapped in preservation. Don’t wrinkle. Don’t disturb the makeup. For many women watching, the visual message is exhausting: You must succeed and look perfect while doing it. That’s not inspiration; that’s an impossible standard. It’s the same patriarchal bullshit we’ve been fighting against, just wrapped in a feminist bow.
When we make female success synonymous only with Birkin bags and flawless skin, we narrow rather than widen possibilities. We tell women: you can have power, but only if you maintain the aesthetic. You can cry, but don’t let it mess up your makeup.
That’s just another cage.
The Verdict
Ryan Murphy, you can do better. You have done better. This cast, Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash-Betts, are powerhouses who could’ve given us something real if the show had asked them to. And the women watching, trying to see themselves reflected in stories about success and power, they deserve better, too.
Kim Kardashian will never be a great actress until she’s willing to be something other than Kim Kardashian. She needs to risk the brand to find the artist. And All’s Fair will never be a great show until it’s willing to show us that success doesn’t require perfection, that sometimes the most powerful thing a woman can do is let her face move when she cries.
All’s Fair could’ve been a show about women reclaiming their power. Instead, it’s a show about women who already have so much power that the rest of us can’t relate. It’s aspiration porn masquerading as empowerment, and it’s exhausting.
We don’t need another show telling us what we should want to be. We need one that shows us who we actually are.
We need shows that reflect who we actually are: flawed, fighting, and still fucking powerful.
Written by : Nyarde
