So, audiences are still watching All’s Fair. Despite being lampooned by critics and initially earning an impressively harsh 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, the show has turned out to be a major success for Hulu ratings-wise. This week, the streaming network announced that it would be renewing the show, which everybody said couldn’t (or shouldn’t) exist, for a second season.
With its two-episode season finale set to release on December 9, the question remains: Why? Why did this show come into existence? Why are we being made to watch Allura (Kim Kardashian) bounce unrhythmically atop her cheating ex-husband? Why does Milan (Teyana Taylor), a law firm receptionist (or an assistant? There is a major difference), drive a BMW and live alone in what appears to be a multimillion-dollar Los Angeles home? Why are these women served Michelin-starred quality lunches by in-office butlers? But, most importantly, why can’t audiences seem to look away from a show that critics labeled “an atrocity,” “nonsense,” and “the worst TV show of the year”?
What if the reason—co-creator Ryan Murphy and Kardashian’s “why”—is that they did it all for feminism?
Stay with me.
The same week that All’s Fair debuted, The New York Times published an unhinged editorial conversation, first titled, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” then renamed, “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” Debates ensued, think pieces were written, and our smartest and brightest locked in to argue the virtues of “liberal feminism” and the existence of “conservative feminism.” Then, in the midst of the chaos, came more chaos in the form of All's Fair: a workplace drama, where an all-women’s Avengers-esque clique of divorce attorneys opts out of working with men in the office altogether. Just less than 10 minutes into the pilot, All’s Fair threw its hat (and there are so many hats) into the feminist-debate ring, declaring loudly and clumsily that the show is some form of utopia realized.
“We stepped away from the patriarchy and toward something of our own,” says Emerald Greene, played by Niecy Nash, as a disembodied arm serves her espresso. (Only the rich are allowed to speak or be seen in this feminist utopia.) What follows is a glorious 120 minutes of Birkin bags posed indiscreetly in the background of almost every scene, the hull of a private jet as the stand-in for an ensemble cast’s “casual meeting place,” and the shameless pursuit of wealth via direct transfer from man to soon-to-be ex-wife. In these initial images, All’s Fair proposes an oversaturated alternative to feminist theories born out of academic discourse, a canon on feminist thought that has also been lampooned—reduced to pop culture memes about cat ladies and crocheted pussy hats. All’s Fair’s feminism is the richer and much prettier cousin to the sort of feminism so many people love to hate.
What kind of feminism, you ask?
I don’t know. Let’s go with capitalist feminism.
Is “capitalist feminism” really a thing? No. No, it is not. (But I’m going to make it happen.)
As long as we’re throwing an entire history of intellectual discourse out the window and putting random words in front of the word feminist, let’s lean in. Because for all the critique of All's Fair—for all that is perhaps intentionally absurd—what the women of Grant, Ronson & Greene seem to care about more than anything else, what seems to define almost every interaction and celebrated triumph, is wealth—the accumulation of it and its display.
All’s Fair is capitalist feminism in all its glory—or honor? “Girl boss” on steroids. In this world, female divorce attorneys are solely concerned with the war over assets and wholly uninterested in negotiating all the other ways that families must bend to survive the end of a marriage. Here, money is the answer for all wrongs, and capitalism is the answer to an otherwise patriarchal society.
But okay, fine, let’s pretend for a second that we still live in a world where I can’t just put two words together and declare myself the first person to come up with a new and sexy way to define feminism. Let’s imagine that words have set meanings, that facts are factual, and that, if we are to offer new theories on existing ones, we cannot simply ignore the centuries of scholarship and discourse that have sought to propose what gender equality looks like or that ask whether such equality can or should exist. If we were actually to reference the original or popular meanings of words, we probably could not get away with simply putting the “capitalist” cart before the “feminist” horse, and declaring a new form of transportation. We might have to do some research (hate it!)—go to libraries (boring), read books (no!), or really just Google the term “capitalist feminism” for two seconds and find that feminism in the context of capitalism isn’t new and has actually been discussed under the banner of “conservatism” since the late 1980s.
(It gets really boring from here, because I’m about to quote a judge and scholar.) In 1989, American legal scholar and retired federal circuit court judge Richard Posner published a journal article plainly titled, “Conservative Feminism,” arguing that capitalism—the free-market, deregulated kind—might set women free. This was not a new idea, but Posner gave a common name to a known idea, pointing out that “libertarian-conservatives” did not believe that the government should prescribe particular roles for women or “discourage them from exercising free choice regarding occupation, marriage, and style of life.” This brand of conservative feminism relies on libertarian ideas of freedom from government intervention, where the state, through affirmative action or other policies, could never do more for gender equality than a gender neutral capitalist society.
What if we take Posner’s thinking, put it on the screen, then tell the TikTok culture algorithm to turn the volume up to absurdity? We might get Murphy’s All’s Fair. Or we might get some other “existentially terrible” show that people can not look away from because it offers up an aesthetically rich answer to a question at the core of the present American psyche: What are we to do with “feminism”?
It is a question that repeats itself.
All’s Fair’s three-episode premiere easily racked up over 2.5 million hours of watch time during its first week, earning it headlines that declared it “Hulu’s biggest original scripted series premiere in the last three years.” But it was just four years ago that season four of Hulu’s other runaway hit, The Handmaid’s Tale, also debuted as Hulu’s “most-watched” Hulu original series since Nielsen started tracking streaming ratings in 2021. The two shows could not be more different, but feminism—the question of it, the distortion of it, and the destruction of it—seems to drive audiences. Where Offred and Margaret Atwood’s other handmaids live through the dangers of a society that fully embraces an extreme form of feminist-devouring social conservatism, All’s Fair offers the first chapter in an alternative dystopian tale, one about what it looks like when a society fully embraces capitalism as the great equalizer.
The first three episodes of All’s Fair clearly present the theory, in such a heavy-handed and provocative way that audiences can’t help but want to see how and why this utopia might succeed or fail. Unfortunately, the episodes that follow highlight the limits of a post-liberal feminist, purely capitalist, lady-boss utopia. When Murphy turns down the volume to make room for serious topics such as sexual assault, self-harm, loneliness, and death, capitalism cannot save his characters, keep them safe, or make them whole. Nor is it all that entertaining.
My vapid hope is that as the season closes, we see more diamonds, more hats, and more half-camp, half-delusion. I much prefer the high-volume absurdity of a loud feminist thesis that fully believes in itself. I like my capitalism unserious and offered up in bright, bite-sized, tagline-laced 30-second scenes. I want to play spot-the-Birkin bingo—red, brown, green, and beige across—because capitalist feminism (have I made it a thing yet?) is so much more fun when it doesn’t present itself as a serious proposal or the answer to a very serious question.
