I am legitimately considering casting a ballot in supporting actress for Sarah Paulson for All’s Fair. Then I realized, I never formally reviewed the series, and that taken totally out of context makes no sense if you’ve seen the show. Watching All’s Fair is like watching a kid eat play-doh, or your neighbor doing yoga naked in their front yard. It is one of those baffling experiences that you never truly thought would cross your path. You’d heard of such things, imagined them, but to truly see a show in all its glory be this bad, is something truly wonderful to behold.

Every episode is wwritten like a drunken monkey prompted an AI to make a script out of ideas, thought bubbles it had, and just vomit it all together in some incoherent mess that truly serves no purpose. By all stretches of the imagination, All’s Fair is one of the worst TV shows ever, and yet, part of me dabbled with the idea of floating it fresh. Why? Because All’s Fair reaches the level of “so bad it’s good” trash. It isn’t Kim Kardashian’s fault either, though the internet would love to blame her. Naomi Watts is delivering a career worst performance, Glenn Close is uncharacteristically terrible, and while Niecy Nash survives her idiotic name and has a few decent moments, even she struggles with Ryan Murphy’s insipid dialogue and incoherent plot structure.

But you know who owned this shit? Sarah Paulson. Much like how Paul Giamatti actually nailed Starfleet Academy, Paulson seems to continue to be a Ryan Murphy whisperer, and no matter how utterly stupid what she has to say is, she makes it rain like Shakespeare. She has some of the most absurd monologues, that often go into graphic detail, and she understands how to bring her Emmy Winning prowess perfectly in with a dash of camp, so that her rebuttals about stealing someone’s man, and how good the sex was, and how often it was, and what explicitly they did, feels so natural. For a show all about the ladies, it surely has no problem debasing them for our entertainment.

All’s Fiar feels like a practical joke you’d play on someone you didn’t like. It feels like a show written by some no talent kid on his first gig, not by some legendary television showrunner. If we actually had pilot seasons, I don’t know how anyone watches the first episode of this and banks on it. That’s a huge gamble on the talent, and Alls Fair is more than willing to prove that it will wear down even Glenn Close.

Insane, idiotic, and incomprehensible, Alls Fair has this strange charm about it, like your brain just gave up. It feels like what would be considered high brow for the future detailed in Idiocracy, not really something that actually exists. But yet, by God, I watched the whole damn first season. I couldn’t even get to the second episode of The Copenhagen Test, which has gone under the radar in its awfulness, but the campy nature of Alls Fair, the shockingly destructive direction, childish acting choices, and mind boggling and overtly sexual speeches made this a keeper on my watchlist.

I still refuse to say it is good, or fresh, I can’t go that far. Sarah Paulson deserves whatever Hollywood’s equivalent is for the Medal Of Honor, for somehow making it out of this thing alive, but everyone else, not just the Kardashian, is crushed by one of the worst TV shows ever, and another notch in Ryan Murphy’s slump. It wouldn’t sting so much if Murphy hadn’t been behind so many strong shows before, to see him lose his talent by stretching himself thin, is deeply disappointing.

It is as bad as you’ve heard, though it ain’t Kim’s fault. The only person who comes out looking even halfway alive is Sarah Paulson, who takes the craziest dialogue and makes it sound sane. Campy, but sane.

Rotten: 3.2/10