All you need is glove

It may seem like a soft target, I know, to go after a show that has received no positive reviews at all.

- RAJA SEN

You might well accuse me of piling on, of kicking a well-coiffed corpse that’s already bleeding out. Yet I chose to write about All's Fair out of morbid curiosity, the impulse that makes you crane your neck at a particularly catastrophic car crash. Also, what is the benchmark for labelling a serious “worst drama ever”? Most US and UK critics, after all, don’t have to endure the amateurish dreck that Indian critics suffer through, and so, as a seasoned veteran reporting from the trenches of mediocrity, I approached Ryan Murphy's latest travesty with a simple question: Is it really that bad?

Answer: It is.

All's Fair (streaming on JioHotstar) presents itself as a drama about an all-woman divorce law firm in Los Angeles, run by Kim Kardashian and staffed by actresses who deserve far, far better. The premise sounds vaguely promising, on paper: women wielding power in the legal arena, dismantling the patriarchy one divorce settlement at a time. Yet what Murphy and his co-creators Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken deliver is unwatchable right from the start. The show unfolds not in scenes but in snippets, each one structured like a “previously on” highlight reel, all breathless exposition and zero substance. Nothing flows. Nothing connects.

The legal work performed by these couture-clad crusaders is less jurisprudence and more extortion. Their primary strategy appears to be blackmailing male clients; who needs nuance when you can have broad-stroke villainy dressed up as girl-power feminism? The show treats this as empowerment, as if threatening wealthy men into submission is the height of female achievement.