Review Roundup: Kim Kardashian's All's Fair Is One of the Worst Reviewed Shows Ever

Ryan Murphy's latest show, All's Fair, is drawing tons of buzz since its three-episode premiere on Hulu on Tuesday, Nov. 4 — and unfortunately for Murphy and pals, not a single word of it is positive. A legal drama about an all-female divorce firm, All's Fair has major star power with Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Niecy Nash-Betts, and Sarah Paulson leading the cast. But despite the big names, critics have deemed All's Fair to be pretty much unwatchable. 

The series follows a pair of female lawyers, Allura Grant (Kardashian) and Liberty Ronson (Watts), who decide they've had enough with the men at their firm and want to start their own all-female law firm. Their boss (Close) encourages the plan and allows them to poach one other employee of the firm on their way out the door. They grab their favorite investigator (Nash-Betts) and head out, while leaving behind one very jealous former co-worker (Paulson). 

The story then jumps ahead 10 years to the present, with All's Fair shifting into a sort of procedural format, where they handle various cases that come up in creative ways, like blackmailing a guy in front of his lawyers using an explicit fetish tape and flying across the country at a moment's notice just to tell a woman she gets to keep all the ultra-expensive jewelry her husband gave her while they were married. All while playing as though this is an entirely altruistic enterprise that our heroes aren't getting rich from.

On Metacritic, All's Fair has earned a score of 19 out of 100 from 12 reviews (and that was after it jumped to a score of  19 from an 11 after a late positive review with a score of 70 from Decider was added). That's the lowest score of any series that premiered this decade, beating out the 27 earned by HBO's The Idol. Only nine TV shows have ever earned a 19 or lower. Among All's Fair's peers are the sitcom Cavemen, based on the Geico Cavemen, ABC's cross-dressing bomb Work It, and The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox News' attempt to make a conservative version of The Daily Show, which was the worst reviewed show ever. Out of 3,296 TV series that have ever received Metacritic scores, only four have gotten a worse score than the one All's Fair received: The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox's 2013 comedy Dads, CBS's 2014 drama Stalker, and CBS's 2005 miniseries Category 7: The End of the World.

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The situation isn't any better on Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 5% rating — it received one positive review out of the 20 that have been posted.

Let's take a gander at some of the choicer review snippets.

"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." -Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter

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

"Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible." -Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

"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-sh-- commiseration." -Alison Herman, Variety

"This is what three men and the army of big-name female actors who also signed on as executive producers think women want to see? It's possible to pander so hard to your target audience, you wind up insulting them instead." -Judy Berman, TIME Magazine

"A show that might look expensive — but is cheap in all the ways that actually matter." -Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence

All's Fair has earned such aggressively negative notices that it will be difficult for any other series to ever match these reviews. It's been over a decade, after all, since critics disliked a new show this much. While all the hate has probably been a big boon to the show's viewer numbers so far, you have to wonder whether a show that drops episodes weekly can maintain its numbers over the next seven weeks when its main draw is how terrible it is.

New episodes of All's Fair drop on Hulu on Tuesdays. The final three episodes will drop all at once on Dec. 9, making it perfect for a binge watch over the holidays.