‘Kim Kardashian apologized to her co-stars for ruining their careers. I asked her to explain why.’

The day reviews for her first TV show as a leading lady and executive producer were released, Kim Kardashian felt a sudden urge to call her co-stars and apologise profusely.

The glamorous legal drama All’s Fair was created by legendary TV powerhouse Ryan Murphy, after pitching a reality TV series to Kardashian, which she immediately turned down. Instead, Murphy cast her as the dangerous PR maven Siobhan Corbyn in American Horror Story: Delicate, before creating the All’s Fair series around her, based on Kardashian’s own journey to becoming a lawyer and her opulent lifestyle in Los Angeles.

In All’s Fair, Kardashian plays Allura Grant a divorce attorney who, along with her partners, Liberty Ronson (Naomi Watts) and Emerald Greene (Niecy Nash) left their oppressive male-dominated law firm to start their own business, which specialises in representing women in high-stakes divorce cases. Glenn Close stars as Dina Standish, the firm’s wise adviser, while Teyana Taylor plays legal assistant Milan and Sarah Paulson plays Carrington Lane, the team’s sharp-tongued enemy at a rival law firm.

Despite Ryan Murphy’s TV legacy (which includes everything from Glee and Nip/Tuck to American Horror Story and Love Story) the visually stunning sets and costumes, and a call sheet bearing the names of beloved and critically acclaimed actresses, when All’s Fair premiered in 2025, the reviews, to put it mildly, were catastrophic.

The Times came right out and said the show “may be the worst TV drama ever”, while The Hollywood Reporter called it “an empty and unforgivably dull Hulu drama”; at the same time, The Guardian called it “fascinatingly, existentially terrible”, while USA Today declared All’s Fair the “worst TV show of the year and absolute garbage”.

Speaking to Mamamia’s entertainment podcast The Spill, Kim Kardashian, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash and Naomi Watts shared their reaction to the negative reviews that flooded the internet from the moment the show aired.

To the outside eye, the actresses might have been perceived as licking their wounds in defeat or wringing their hands in worry over the show’s future, but through peels of laughter and the type of in-jokes that only come from making the leap from colleagues to friends, the cast let us in on their thought process.

When it came to who they were really planning to impress, critics didn’t land a spot on their list.

“We made the show for the fans,” Paulson said confidently as her co-stars nodded in agreement. “We made this show for the people, and the people liked what we were delivering. We’re not making the show for the critics, so… in your face, critics!”

“But as a first-timer,” Kardashian then said, turning to her cast mate Paulson. “When I saw all the reviews, I thought you girls would all be so mad at me .”

“No, I called you about that!” Paulson immediately replied. “First of all, there’s a famous book by Diana Rigg called No Turn Unstoned: The Worst Ever Theatrical Reviews, and it’s about how whenever any actor starts out, they are always going to be confronted at some point in their professional life with some bad reviews.”

“It just means welcome to the club of being a real actress,” she said to Kardashian.

“Then the ratings say it all,” Kardashian replied with a smile.

On this point, Kardashian is absolutely correct because the ratings, in fact, did say it all. And it was all incredibly positive.

Following the premiere episode, All’s Fair accumulated more than 3.2 million global views within its first three days of release, making it Hulu’s biggest scripted series debut in three years.

Through the cast’s laughter and celebration, it feels like there is an unfinished thought hanging in the air around the All’s Fair cast as the interview draws to a close, like a shoelace left untied as the starting whistle blows or a sundae served without a cherry on top.

So I asked Kim Kardashian, who clearly has a positive relationship with her co-stars, why she felt the need to apologise to them and feared they would never speak to her again.

Her response was incredibly humble and incredibly human.

“Well, I just meant them taking a chance on working with me,” she replied. “And All’s Fair being my first series project that I’m working on. So I am new to this.”

“I didn’t really know how it works and what they would feel,” she continued, gesturing to her castmates on either side of her. “So I wanted to let everyone know that if they never want to speak to me again, it’s okay.

“And I’m sorry that I ruined their careers. They took a chance making a decision to work with me, probably more so thinking about wanting to work for Ryan, not for me. So I just wanted to say, ‘Hey guys, it’s okay. No hard feelings if you just never want to speak to me again’.

“But then they were like, ‘Girl, no!’ Then Sarah left me the nicest, longest voice note that made me feel so much better about my existence.

“So we moved past it.”

As the interview draws to a close, the cast’s thoughts once again turned to the fans who made the series such a success, despite some of the critical reviews that rolled in, promising them a season two filled with fabulous fashion, more than a few plot twists, and plenty of face slaps exchanged between this dramatic group of unpredictable lawyers.