“Glee” co-creator Ryan Murphy is “the high priest of tacky, tasteless television”, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. Yet with this latest series for Disney, he has really outdone himself, turning in “a show of mind-bending horror sure to trigger nightmares in the unsuspecting viewer”.
It stars Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts as high-flying divorce lawyers, and Niecy Nash as their investigator, who have left a smart firm to set up an all-female practice in California. And it’s an “abomination”.
‘A long-form commercial’
The series could be seen as a post-#MeToo “Sex and the City”, said Judy Berman in Time Magazine, if “the sex were all talk, the city irrelevant” and the humour unintentional. Or perhaps it’s “The First Wives Club for psychopaths”. Either way, it “functions primarily as a long-form commercial for a long list of brands”. Strangely for a legal drama, we don’t see much law being practised; instead, much time is devoted to the partners’ personal lives and vendettas.
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An ‘embarrassment’ of a script
The script is an “embarrassment” and the performances are no better, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Kardashian, while predictably “expressionless”, is at least “inoffensively useless”. The Oscar-nominee Watts, by contrast, ”preens and pouts” and delivers her lines “so archly that you can almost hear her joints cracking”. And you wonder what Glenn Close, who appears in cameo, was thinking. Camp, lurid drama played with gusto can be fun, but with its dismal plots and characters, this really is not that. Truly, “I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad”.