Ryan Murphy’s Redemption Arc of Kim Kardashian

“When are we gonna do revenge?” asks Naomi Watts’s character, Liberty Ronson, in All’s Fair, the Hulu vehicle Ryan Murphy built for Kim Kardashian that has its two-part season finale tonight, December 9. This is Kardashian’s second foray into TV acting — her first was in Murphy’s American Horror Story: Delicate — this one has her helming an all-female law firm that represents scorned women, often by abusive men. Murphy bestows Kardashian with a critically acclaimed A-list supporting cast — Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Sarah Paulson, Judith Light, and Glenn Close (who is new to the Murphyverse) — that desperately tries to salvage a dismal script and get something resembling human emotion out of a wooden, dead-eyed Kardashian.

Many of the casting choices appear to be deliberate, especially the guest roles, which include Elizabeth Berkley Lauren, Jessica Simpson, and Brooke Shields, each of whom have had past struggles in the public eye: In 1995, the Saved By the Bell co-star Berkley Lauren, was supposed to break out in a star-making turn in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. But at the time, it rendered her a Hollywood pariah — though the erotic thriller has since become a campy cult hit, which Berkley Lauren is sporting enough to revel in. Simpson shot to fame, not for her singing chops but for her real-life role as the ditzy bride to fellow pop star Nick Lachey on the celebrity reality show Newlyweds. Everything from her body to her highly publicized sex life — she was a proud virgin before marrying Lachey — to not knowing the difference between chicken and fish were eviscerated in the tabloids, led to her struggle with substance abuse, all of which she wrote about in her 2020 memoir, Open Book.

Shields has been outspoken about being sexualized as a child star and model in two memoirs, as well as the 2023 documentary Pretty Baby, which takes its title from the 1978 film starring Shields as a young girl forced into sex slavery.

Murphy, who began working with Kardashian in American Horror Story, appears determined not only to make her his latest muse but to legitimize her. It’s not just that he’s trying to elevate her from reality-show star to leading lady — and as she demonstrates in All’s Fair, she is no actress, no matter how much brilliant talent you surround her with (in fact, it just highlights how stilted she is). It’s that there is something perverse about the creator of The People vs. O.J. Simpson building this kind of vanity project for Kardashian considering her father’s associates: Robert Kardashian was not only best friends with O.J. Simpson,  a violent domestic abuser; he was a member of  Simpson’s defense team in the notorious trial for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Goldman’s father was recently awarded $58 million in a civil suit, from the estate of the late O.J. Simpson, who died in 2024.) And Kim has been on a years-long quest to become a lawyer like her dad, who Robert, together with Johnny Cochran, earned the late football legend an acquittal. As Murphy’s series reminded viewers, the case captured the attention of the nation, and engaged us in ongoing conversations and arguments about race relations, misogyny, and intimate partner violence.

Kardashian herself is no stranger to notoriety: While the family name was initially associated with her father, it was Kim who catapulted to fame when she capitalized on the leaking of a sex tape in 2007. She and her family parlayed that into a popular reality show, leading theirs to become one of the most recognized bloodlines in the world. Her profile rose further with her marriage to her third husband, rapper-turned-fascist Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), which ended in 2022. Though Kardashian has remained largely closed-lipped about what went on in their relationship, his treatment of his current wife, Bianca Censori, is concerning and wouldn’t be out of place as an All’s Fair story arc.

So why does this soapy series exist? And why is Murphy so set on redeeming Kardashian in a Dynasty-like show about dumped-on women getting their due? The show had the opportunity to flip the script on these women’s narratives, joining the recent spate of rehabilitations of maligned women of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Framing Britney Spears and the star’s subsequent memoir, The Woman in Me.

After all, it seemed pitched as an exercise in women’s empowerment, replete with Kardashian going full Lemonade, taking a baseball bat to a sports car in a yellow gown à la Beyoncé in her cathartic adultery anthem “Hold Up.” But this is a dream sequence centering on her husband’s mistress (played by a wasted Teyana Taylor after her Oscar-buzzy role in One Battle After Another), rather than an outward expression of anger toward a man.

“We wanted the women to win in the end,” Murphy said about the show on Vogue’s “The Run Through” podcast. But instead of getting mad at the patriarchy, All’s Fair really just wants women to get even — in the superficial, materialistic sense of the word. “The best revenge is a life well lived,” Liberty tells Allura, placating her with this platitude. Everything is a transaction in this show. If one girl bosses close enough to the sun, they will be inculcated against harm from men by the armored shoulders of their power suits and the blinding light reflected from the bling they got in the divorce, as in Judith Light’s storyline.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Kardashian’s own lawsuit involving diamonds. The most recent episode of Kim’s other Hulu show, the eponymous The Kardashians (the seventh season of which functions as spon-con for All’s Fair and all manner of other brands the family shills), deals with the Paris trial of the men who attacked and burgled Kardashian in Paris in 2016, stealing $13 million in diamonds, most of which was never recovered. “I just don’t care about that stuff anymore,” Kim said in the aftermath of the robbery — a far cry from last week’s Kardashians episode which shows her dripping in diamonds, including a 22-carat diamond ring she bought to replace the one stolen from her, in defiance of the Paris court. “They’re not gonna take my power,” she says in the episode.

Kim details the powerlessness she felt during the robbery, which no doubt was a motivating factor in her quest to become a lawyer and her involvement in the justice system. Now that is an All’s Fair storyline I’d like to see which, to the show’s credit, is imbued in Allura’s backstory, one that uncannily echoes a real-life account of Kim’s friend Paris Hilton, who spent her adolescence in abusive residential treatment centers. Try as she might to elicit emotion in that scene, All’s Fair quickly cuts to her post-sob sesh, mascara staining her face. Kim’s robotic stoicism, which The Kardashians positions as calmness in the face of danger and two decades of being under a microscope, might be an asset to her budding law career but it is a detriment to her budding acting career.

Instead, it’s the materialism of the Kardashians’ existence and the world within All’s Fair that wins out again.