Ryan Murphy Is Playing Barbies with Kim Kardashian: All's Fair and the Collapse of Camp Into Content

How All's Fair became prestige TV's first full-on content farm—beautiful surfaces engineered for TikTok clips, not character or story

When I was a child, I played with Barbies in a very particular way. I would spend hours setting up the furniture and wardrobes, arranging every detail of their world with meticulous care. I’d design the concept—who they were, what they did—then obsess over the cars, the tiny hangers in the closet, the miniature kitchen appliances, the way a particular dress caught the light.

But once everything was perfectly staged, I’d lose interest in the actual playing. The narrative I’d sketched out while arranging things would evaporate the moment I was supposed to enact it. I loved the world-making construction and aesthetics. The dolls themselves bored me.

I thought about this childhood pattern while watching All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new legal drama starring Kim Kardashian that critics are universally panning.¹ The show delivers extraordinary fashion—Kim and her stylist clearly had full control over her character Allura’s wardrobe. The interiors belong in architectural magazines. The women have agency and win, wielding power in ways that feel almost defiant at a moment when actual women report intense scarcity across every dimension of wellbeing. It gives me Dallas/Dynasty vibes: wealth and beauty porn served up during an economic contraction.

And yet the writing is appalling. Storylines rush past so quickly you don’t have time to care. In traditional legal dramas, you invest deeply in the guest-star’s case, you root for them to win. Here, I kept wondering if three-quarters of each episode ended up on the cutting room floor. The pacing is so compressed that emotional beats have no room to land.

That’s when it hit me: Ryan Murphy is playing Barbies. He’s so invested in the aesthetics—the fashion, the power poses, the visual grammar of female authority—that he’s lost interest in the actual world-making, which is the story, the emotional resonance, the interior lives that make characters feel real.

The Camp Problem

Ryan Murphy has built a career on camp. His entire aesthetic universe—from the theatrical excess of American Horror Story to the knowing wink of Scream Queens to the melodramatic heightening of Pose—operates in the register of camp sensibility. Critics have called him “camp’s enfant terrible” and credited him with taking “camp sensibility out of the closet” and bending it “toward an era of outness.”²

Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” defines camp as “a certain mode of aestheticism” that privileges artifice and stylization over beauty, that sees everything in quotation marks.³ Camp, she wrote, is about “the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”⁴ It’s inherently theatrical, fundamentally unserious, and crucially—it works best when it’s unintentional. “Pure Camp is always naive,” Sontag insists. “Camp which knows itself to be Camp (’camping’) is usually less satisfying.”⁵

Camp also has a moral dimension, or rather, an amoral one. Sontag argues that camp is “wholly aesthetic” and “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.”⁶Camp “refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.”⁷ The camp sensibility “is basically moralistic” only in its rejection of moralism. As Sontag puts it: “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.”⁸

This is where All’s Fair becomes genuinely confusing. I cannot tell if this show is trying to be earnest or trying to be camp.

The show is definitely not moral. Allura breaks all kinds of moral codes—she’s ruthless, calculating, willing to destroy lives for professional advancement. The lawyers threaten to blackmail opposing counsel to get the settlement they want. There’s a scene involving revenge described in terms of chopped-up and force-fed ram scrotums. The show presents these transgressions without judgment, without the moral framework that typically anchors legal dramas.

But is that camp? Or is it just bad writing that hasn’t thought through its own moral universe?

Camp undermines the ridiculousness of social codes by taking them so seriously they reveal their own absurdity. It operates through excess and exaggeration to expose the artificial nature of convention itself. But All’s Fair doesn’t feel like it’s exposing anything. It doesn’t have the winking distance that camp requires. The characters don’t seem to be playing roles that comment on the idea of powerful women—they just seem to be badly written versions of what powerful women are supposed to be.

The show serves pure girlboss feminism—that Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand aesthetic I’ve written about extensively⁹—at a moment when we’re well past the girlboss reckoning. Lean-in, have-it-all, female CEO as feminist victory: all of that collapsed under its own contradictions years ago.

I don’t think the show knows it’s dated. I don’t think it’s commenting on girlboss feminism. I think it’s just doing it, straight, without irony. Which means it can’t be camp, because camp requires that distance, that awareness. And yet it’s so excessive, so over-the-top, so drenched in aesthetic performance that it constantly flirts with camp without ever committing to the bit.

Murphy’s usual brand of camp is “discomfiting,” as one critic put it¹⁰—he has a way of straddling earnestness and excess that makes you uncertain where you stand. But in his best work, that uncertainty is productive. Here, it just feels like confusion.

The show can’t decide if it wants to be a serious legal drama about powerful women or a campy romp through wealth porn and fashion fantasy. So it splits the difference and becomes neither—just a collection of beautiful surfaces with nothing underneath.

Men Playing Barbies

The writing team is overwhelmingly male. Created by Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken, with additional writers Richard Levine, Lyn Greene, and Jamie Pachino—that’s four men and two women writing a show supposedly about female power.

Despite the star wattage of incredible actresses—Kim Kardashian, Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash, Teyana Taylor, and do not even get me started on the women icons appearing as guest stars—none of these women feel like real women with interior landscapes and whole lives behind them. They feel like how men imagine powerful women should look and sound. They’re fashion Barbies with feminist slogans, dolls posed in tableaux of female power without any understanding of what that power actually feels like from the inside.

Glenn Close’s character comes closest to feeling like a whole person, maybe because she brings decades of experience inhabiting complex women on screen and can conjure an interior life through sheer force of craft. But even she’s trapped in a script that doesn’t give her anywhere to go.

The whole writing team is men playing Barbies. They think they’re creating real women. Or maybe they don’t even care if these women are real—because the point of Barbies is that they’re stylized drag dolls. Exaggerated, artificial, performative. The male gaze crystallized into plastic and posed in power suits.

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that: the writers think this IS what female empowerment looks like. Power suits, winning at all costs, ruthless ambition performed without moral complexity. Girl boss as revolutionary act. They’ve mistaken the aesthetics of female power for the reality of it.

Or—and this might be closest to the truth—they just don’t actually care to produce believable women characters. They’re aiming for memes and tropes, for moments that clip well, for aesthetics that photograph beautifully. The women don’t need interiority because interiority doesn’t trend on TikTok. They’re so entranced by the visual fantasy of female power that they never bothered to write actual characters. They just arranged the dolls in striking poses and called it a show.

Engineered for Extraction

The show isn’t engineered to work as sustained television narrative. It’s engineered to be turned into social media clips and memes. This is how things become iconic now—not through collective viewing and discussion of full episodes, but through moments that get extracted, remixed, and woven into how we communicate online.

A show doesn’t need to work as prestige TV anymore if it can succeed as cultural currency. The narrative connective tissue, the character development, the plot coherence—all of that is optional if you can generate enough clip-able moments. A killer outfit reveal, a devastating one-liner, a dramatic confrontation that works perfectly in fifteen seconds. The show can “fail” by traditional metrics but “succeed” if it produces enough content for reaction gifs, fashion breakdown threads, and “she ate” compilations.

This is prestige TV as content farm. Peak Ryan Murphy meets peak social media economy. The dolls don’t need depth or complexity. They just need iconic looks and quotable lines.

The Murphy Pattern

Ryan Murphy is extremely successful and savvy, so I started wondering if there’s a long game I’m not seeing. His track record reveals a consistent pattern that’s actually quite instructive.

Glee started with massive critical acclaim—the first season won Emmys and Golden Globes. By Season 3-4, it had lost nearly a quarter of its audience and critics complained about shaky writing and storylines that felt improvised.¹¹ Yet it became a cultural phenomenon anyway, not because of sustained narrative quality but because it charted 156 songs on Billboard Hot 100¹² and created meaningful LGBTQ representation.

American Horror Story launched to wildly divided reviews—everything from praise for its “captivating style” to one critic giving it a D- and calling it “one of the worst TV shows of 2011.”¹³ Critics complained it was “so far over the top” and “collapses into camp.”¹⁴ It became one of his most successful franchises.

Nip/Tuck was denounced by advocacy groups as “garbage” while simultaneously becoming the highest-rated show on FX.¹⁵

The pattern is: initial critical division, declining quality in later seasons, massive cultural impact anyway. Murphy understands several things that traditional TV criticism tends to miss:

Controversy and excess generate buzz. The Parents Television Council denouncing your show is free marketing.

Extractable moments matter more than coherent narrative. Glee’s songs and AHS’s visual style carried those shows far beyond what the writing could support.

Representation creates dedicated fanbases who will champion the show despite quality issues because of what it means to see themselves reflected.

Camp and excess age into cult status. What feels like a hot mess in real time often becomes iconic in retrospect.

The Long Game (Or Lack Thereof)

So what’s the long game with All’s Fair? I see three possibilities.

First: the long game IS the fashion clips, the memes, the “playing Barbies” aesthetic that works perfectly for social media atomization. Maybe Murphy knows the show doesn’t need to be good television to be culturally successful. The dated FLEB feminism might even be strategic—so obviously retrograde it becomes a conversation starter, meme fuel, or eventually develops the patina of period camp.

Second: Murphy is genuinely playing Barbies—so obsessed with surfaces that he’s forgotten how to build the foundation. Multiple critics have noted that he “gets bored with his own ideas very quickly.”¹⁶ Season after season of American Horror Story demonstrates this tendency to set up compelling premises and then lose interest halfway through. Maybe All’s Fair is Murphy being Murphy, hoping the aesthetic carries it through like it always has before.

Third: Murphy is conducting an experiment in what television can be when you fully optimize for social media distribution rather than traditional narrative satisfaction. He’s testing whether you can skip the expensive middle part—the writing, the character development, the narrative coherence—and go straight to producing iconic moments.

If it’s the third option, All’s Fair isn’t failing. It’s succeeding at something different than what we expect prestige TV to do.

Wealth Porn in Economic Contraction

We’re watching extreme wealth and beauty porn in the middle of an economic contraction. The show serves up powerful women winning, having leisure, wielding financial power—all at a moment when real women report feeling intense scarcity across every dimension of wellbeing.

This could be read as escape. It could be read as tone-deaf. It’s probably both simultaneously, which might explain the strange way the show lands. The disconnect isn’t a bug. In some ways, it’s the entire point.

The fantasy isn’t aspirational in any achievable sense. It’s pure aesthetic fantasy—the fashion, the interiors, the postures of power divorced from any actual mechanism of power. It’s Barbies all the way down. And maybe in 2025, when we all understand the girlboss was a lie and “having it all” was always impossible, the only honest way to serve this fantasy is through pure, unabashed surface.

What This Means for Television

All’s Fair might be a preview of where prestige TV is headed: shows engineered primarily for social media extraction, where narrative coherence is secondary to producing clipable moments, where representation becomes aesthetic performance divorced from interior life, where the writers are playing with expensive dolls rather than creating characters.

This isn’t necessarily cynical. Or rather, it’s only as cynical as the media ecosystem it’s optimized for. If culture is increasingly built from extracted moments, remixed and recirculated, then maybe coherent three-act structures across an hour of television are beside the point. Maybe the show that acknowledges this and leans fully into it is being more honest than the ones still pretending traditional narrative satisfaction matters.

Murphy has always understood something fundamental: television doesn’t have to be good to be culturally successful. It has to be excessive, extractable, and generative of conversation. All’s Fair might be the apotheosis of this understanding—so fully optimized for the meme economy that it stops pretending to be anything else.

The show is what happens when a very successful man who understands media decides to play Barbies on a $100 million budget and then package the play session for TikTok. Whether that’s genius or deeply cynical probably depends on what you think television is supposed to be for in 2025.

I’ll be honest: I’m going to keep watching. Not for the story—there barely is one. But for the fashion. For the interiors. For the audacity of serving pure girlboss fantasy at a moment when we all know better. For the strange honesty of men playing Barbies in such an obvious way that the dolls’ lack of interior life becomes the point rather than an oversight.

Sometimes the most revealing cultural artifacts are the ones that don’t quite work. All’s Fair doesn’t work as television. But as a document of what prestige TV becomes when fully optimized for social media extraction and stripped of any pretense to coherent storytelling—it’s fascinating.

And the fashion really is outstanding.

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I’m Kelly Diels, and I teach entrepreneurs how to get their ideas out of their heads and into the world while building the business infrastructure around them that transforms expertise into income—without replicating the exact cultural narratives you’re trying to change.

This kind of analysis—decoding how cultural engineers like Ryan Murphy and Kim Kardashian cultivate cultural influence so brilliantly (even when what the Kardashian-engine is pure FLEB) is part of the work we do in 1 to 10K. Not so you can copy the girlboss playbook, but so you understand how cultural frameworks actually work and can build alternatives that generate revenue and cultural influence.

Because you can’t disrupt narratives you don’t understand. And you can’t build a sustainable business while you’re still locked in your head overthinking every decision.

Learn more at 1 to 10K.

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Footnotes

1. “How Ryan Murphy Brought Campy Queerness to the Mainstream,” Esquire, May 23, 2016, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a45037/ryan-murphys-camp-gay-american-horror-story-feud/

2. “How Ryan Murphy Brought Campy Queerness to the Mainstream,” Esquire, May 23, 2016, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a45037/ryan-murphys-camp-gay-american-horror-story-feud/; Emily Nussbaum is quoted in this article.

3. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Partisan Review, Fall 1964.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. I coined the term “Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand” (FLEB) in 2016 to describe a marketing narrative that co-opts feminist language while reinforcing oppressive beauty standards and social hierarchies. FLEB is “both an archetype women must comply with in order to be deserving of rights and resources AND a marketing strategy that leverages social status and white privilege to create authority over other women.” See Kelly Diels, “The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand: An Introduction,” kellydiels.com, January 2016, https://kellydiels.com/female-lifestyle-empowerment-brand-introduction/; and Kelly Diels, “The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand: A Definition,” kellydiels.com, https://kellydiels.com/female-lifestyle-empowerment-brand-definition/

10. “Twelve Moral Axioms on Ryan Murphy’s Oeuvre,” Public Books, August 11, 2021, https://www.publicbooks.org/twelve-moral-axioms-on-ryan-murphys-oeuvre/

11. “The Real Reason Glee Ended After Season 6,” Looper, October 10, 2023, https://www.looper.com/225370/the-real-reason-glee-ended-after-season-6/; and “Glee (TV series),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glee_(TV_series)

12. “Glee (TV series),” Wikipedia.

13. “American Horror Story,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Horror_Story. Ken Tucker from Entertainment Weekly awarded the pilot episode a B+. Alan Sepinwall of HitFix gave the series a D-, calling it one of the worst TV shows of 2011.

14. Mary McNamara, The Los Angeles Times, quoted in “American Horror Story,” Wikipedia.

15. “Ryan Murphy (producer),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Murphy_(producer)

16. “The Strange and Cringe-Heavy Legacy of ‘Glee’,” Pajiba, June 11, 2020, https://www.pajiba.com/tv_reviews/the-strange-and-cringeheavy-legacy-of-glee.php; and “Review: Ryan Murphy Once Again Goes for Style Over Substance with Netflix’s ‘Halston’,” Pajiba, May 14, 2021, https://www.pajiba.com/tv_reviews/review-ryan-murphy-once-again-goes-for-style-over-substance-with-netflixs-halston.php