ROME, Italy—The show that made Kim Kardashian a Hollywood laughingstock is back for more.
Boasting an ultra-glamorous powerhouse ensemble led by Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash-Betts, Glenn Close, and Teyana Taylor, Season 2 of Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair (Nov. 4 on Hulu and Disney+) premiered at the Rome Film Festival inside the Auditorium Parco della Musica’s Sala Sinopoli.
A varied crowd, young and old, shuffled into the foyer dressed in everything from floor-length evening gowns to jeans and T-shirts, clutching signed photos after the cast’s remarkably friendly red-carpet appearance an hour earlier.
But if you arrived at Sala Sinopoli expecting courtroom gravitas, Ryan Murphy himself would probably have politely pointed you toward the exit.
The series returning for a second outing feels like a minor miracle, considering Season 1 was met with a brutal wave of evisceration targeting everything from its paper-thin plotting to Kardashian’s less-than-impressive acting chops. The lead had an inkling her show might flop, and Rotten Tomatoes gave it a zero percent rating. Yet fans tuned in in droves—a point Nash-Betts highlighted while brushing off critics who hated it.
Murphy seems to have looked at the online pile-on and decided to double down, leaning even harder into soapy melodrama in round two.
Opening to Fergie’s 2000s hit “Glamorous,” the episode introduces Allura (Kardashian) with a signature piece of Murphy irony: high-end luxury colliding with horror within the first few frames.
As a co-founder and leader of the women’s law firm Grant, Ronson & Greene, Allura might be expected to spend her days navigating legal battles. Instead, after a sleek entrance into her Los Angeles mansion, she glimpses a hooded presence in the mirror, an early signal that, despite its legal framing, the show is more interested in theatrics and visual grandeur than procedural realism.
Enter the heavy-hitting cast. Glenn Close delivers her lines with crisp gravity, draped in Shakespearean collars as she argues with her co-stars about betrayals, technology, and the firm’s shifting loyalties. Opposite her, Sarah Paulson, clad in brooding black while calmly feeding fish, instantly steals every scene she enters.
Spouting sharp one-liners while casually chopping vegetables, Carrington “Carr” Lane (Paulson) is emphatically not a woman to cross. In the Season 1 finale, she framed Dina Standish (Close) for murder, leaving their already volatile relationship poised to combust. When confrontations flare up between Dina and Carrington, they unfold with uncanny soap-opera precision: Not a single streak of mascara rolls down a cheek, and lipstick remains unsmudged.
Indeed, visual precision seems to take precedence over genuine human emotion in Season 2. Kardashian’s facial expressions rarely stray beyond a rigid composure, save for her eyes, which she uses to execute a razor-sharp dagger glare at anyone who dares step out of line.
The writing leans into her real-life persona with self-deprecating humor, dropping jokes about her legal ambitions and dressing her in dramatic garments that pay homage to real-life Kardashian-Jenner red-carpet lore. It’s a touch that will delight pop-culture obsessives even as it breaks any illusion of narrative realism.
The rest of the leading cast attempts to anchor the chaos. Emerald J. Greene-Ball (Nash-Betts) appears in bold leopard prints reminiscent of Kardashian’s own premiere attire, bringing vibrant energy to domestic scenes filled with family comedy and an inexplicably massive indoor tree looming in her foyer. Emerald operates out of a closet whose entrance looks plucked straight from The Incredibles, requiring security clearance just to get inside. There, amongst her wigs, she dishes out parenting advice and star-sign interrogations in equal measure.
Meanwhile, Teyana Taylor’s Milan brings sharp flair on her arrival, while Liberty Ronson (Watts) glides through scenes donning more subdued hues, reflecting her comparatively down-to-earth personality.
When Emerald and Liberty team up like a modern-day Poirot and Miss Marple to outsmart an elusive client, the show briefly finds a fun investigative rhythm that actually has something to do with the law. The fun lasts three minutes tops, highlighting that much of the dialogue surrounding this supposed sisterhood feels distinctly forced.
Relationships turn on a dime, scene transitions feel jumbled and patchworked, and the editing relies on bizarrely abrupt blackout fades that kill the show’s momentum. By the midpoint of the premiere screening in Rome, the uneven pacing had already tested the patience of a few audience members who quietly slipped out of the hall.
The episode eventually climaxes at an outrageous Scorpio ball (a direct homage to Grace Kelly’s iconic event) where Elizabeth Taylor’s Swarovski gown makes an appearance. Carrington, an astrology obsessive who harbors deep-seated beef with virtually everyone in her orbit, arrives to find her authority challenged and her style directly rivaled. What begins as a tense clash of egos quickly devolves into absolute physical chaos after Carrington hurls homophobic insults.
A full-blown, high-glam spectacle erupts around a swimming pool, leaving several key players soaked and horrified in a sequence so dramatic and ridiculous that it feels designed to trend on social media.
Ultimately, All’s Fair offers far more cheese than a four-formaggi pizza. In a 45-minute episode ostensibly centered around a high-powered law firm, approximately a blink of an eye is actually dedicated to the practice of law. Suits’ Jessica Pearson ran so that these heavily stylized characters played by Kardashian, Watts, Paulson, Nash-Betts, Taylor, and Close could crawl.
Is it a masterpiece? Absolutely not. But with its sheer camp, outrageous wardrobe budget, and unhinged ensemble dynamics, All’s Fair might just prove that television can be both unwatchable and utterly entertaining at the same time.
All’s Fair Season 2 premieres on Hulu and Disney+ on Nov. 4.
