All's Fair season two is still bonkers, but somehow it's working

Ryan Murphy's legal drama is back, and honestly? It's gotten slightly less terrible. That's not a compliment. That's just where we are.

If you somehow erased season one from your brain, here's the deal: All's Fair follows an all-female divorce law firm in California staffed with names like Allura, Emerald, and Liberty. Glenn Close plays Dina (she got the lucky draw, apparently). Kim Kardashian's there. Naomi Watts. Niecy Nash-Betts. Sarah Paulson shows up as their rival lawyer, Carrington Lane, and basically steals every scene by being magnificently unhinged.

The first season was, to put it kindly, rough. Zero stars rough. The kind of show where you'd catch Glenn Close in pleather and just... sit with that image. But season two has somehow inched toward watchable territory. The plots are still absolutely ridiculous—there's gossip about Bruno Mars floating around, cases that make no legal sense, drama that escalates for the sake of escalating. Nothing here would pass a fact-check or satisfy anyone who's actually seen a courtroom.

And yet there's something oddly compelling about watching this thing lean into its own absurdity. Murphy's recent projects have been streaming pablum, but this one's at least entertaining in its sheer commitment to being over-the-top. The cast knows what they're doing. They're not trying to make high art. They're making a guilty pleasure, and they're doing it with a wink.

Is it good television? No. Is it competently made ridiculous television? Weirdly, yeah. The writing's sharper. The performances are tighter. Close especially seems to have figured out how to navigate the material without completely phoning it in.

Season two won't win over the skeptics who bounced off the premiere. If you hated it before, this won't change your mind. But if you're the type who likes your legal dramas bonkers and your ensemble casts stacked with A-listers, there's actually something here now. It's still ridiculous. But it's ridiculousness with a bit of craft behind it, and that's more than we could say last time around.