TV critics hate ‘All’s Fair,’ but what do LA divorce lawyers make of the new Hulu show?

If you’ve heard about the new Hulu show All’s Fair , chances are that you know it stars Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts and Glenn Close as high-powered divorce lawyers in Los Angeles. And chances are that you’ve also heard: the reviews are not good .

In fact they're so bad some people are checking out the show just for that reason . And here at LAist, we're some of those people.

But as journalists, we also were interested in the facts. Or “Just the facts, ma’am,” to misquote another law-related TV show set in L.A.: Dragnet, created by and starring Jack Webb (the Kim Kardashian of his day).

To get the facts, we turned to women who really are divorce lawyers in L.A. Attorneys Demetria Graves and Emily Rubenstein had heard of All’s Fair.

“ People are bringing it up a lot, including clients and potential clients," Rubenstein said.

However, they hadn’t yet checked it out for themselves before being contacted by LAist.

Both said they do enjoy a good legal drama, though Rubenstein said she much prefers true crime documentaries to scripted shows. Graves cited Law & Order and the TV One true crime show Fatal Attraction as some of her favorites.

“I love the shows,” Graves said, because she gets to watch someone else handle a case that she’s not actually involved in. “It’s not my case, so it’s a good time for me.”

She and Rubenstein generously agreed to watch the first three episodes of All’s Fair and share their professional assessments of what the show gets wrong and what it gets right (cue the Law and Order gavel sound ).

The L.A. of "All’s Fair"

The series is set in L.A. and there are some scenes set in recognizable local landmarks in the first episodes, including the historic Bradbury Building , the Venice Boardwalk and the Petersen Automotive Museum. So, points for accuracy there.

But Rubenstein said the office spaces — some of them dark and library-like — didn't look like L.A. to her: “No one's law offices in L.A. look like that. No matter what level [of] attorney you are [...] I've not been in many East Coast law offices, but it gives more of that vibe.”

Kim Kardashian in a scene from "All's Fair" on Hulu.

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 “Most L.A. law offices are more airy, and looking out into the hills instead of being such a mahogany cave,” Rubenstein added.

The fashion: Gloves, gloves, and more gloves (plus visible thongs)

As for the show’s over-the-top fashions, which have garnered a lot of attention, Graves said she gets why a TV show set in L.A. would lean into that.

“The clothing is beautiful, the aesthetics are beautiful," she said. "However, I don't know how realistic it is for most attorneys.”

The attention-grabbing, or unconventional, fashion choices the characters make — like wearing gloves — didn’t ring true for Rubenstein, either.

 ”For people who are constantly typing and using pens, gloves are not really that convenient of an accessory,” she said.

As for Kardashian’s character Allura Grant wearing a skirt suit with a cutout to expose a thong, Rubenstein said, “ I've never seen a lawyer ass out in a thong in the office the way that Kim Kardashian was in that scene in the conference room.”

But the inaccuracy also didn’t really bother her: “It’s one of those things that made me kind of giggle, which I think is just part of the show. I think it's supposed to be sort of campy. The fashion is a huge element of that. And yeah, I mean, aside from that one example, it did give me some inspo for my own courtroom fashion, so I'll thank them for that.”

The drama and personal life element? Lawyers say: Somewhat accurate

“What I did like is it did shed light on women having their own practices, women having their own firms,” Graves said. “What happens sometimes when you become very successful, what that can potentially do to your own personal relationships. So some of those things I am very happy people do get to see, because I think that is very realistic.”

The hard work involved, the complicated natures of the cases, the “sisterhood” and support among colleagues or mentors (like Glenn Close’s character) and mentees, all rang true to Graves.

 ”The emotion of the clients, true to that extreme? I don't know,” Graves said. “But the emotion, absolutely all of that is true.”

The storyline where Watts’ character is reluctant to marry her boyfriend, partially because of how many marriages she’s seen end badly in her work, also seemed pretty true to life, Graves said.

“You know how bad it can go, you don’t want to be in that,” but she added, “you try not to let it lead your personal life.”

O-T Fagbenle and Naomi Watts in a scene from "All's Fair."

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The sexism

The premise of the show is that the leading women were not being respected at their male-dominated firm, so they decided to strike out on their own, start a women-led firm and only represent woman clients.

Graves currently works independently and Rubenstein heads up an all-women family law practice, but both represent clients of all genders.

As for the idea that women lawyers may not be taken as seriously, Graves said, “ I will say some of the ‘good old boy’ club [or] network or however you wanna call it, that still exists today. And just in the climate that we're in, it gets really nasty in the world of family law because there's so many emotions, so much going on.”

Both said the reasons that people would seek out a woman lawyer (or not) can also lean on stereotypes.

When people want a lawyer who will really “ fight and throw the book, some people equate that with men attorneys,” Graves said. Women, meanwhile, can be viewed as “softer” and operating with “more compassion.”

Rubenstein said sometimes a sense of female empowerment is important to a woman client, and it is meaningful to them to have a woman represent them. But “on the flip side, men and women can both be sexist, right? And so there are women who are going to seek male attorneys [...] And then men also seek out women attorneys, I think for good reasons and bad reasons.”

“I think some men perceive that if they are represented by a woman attorney, let's say in a domestic violence dispute, that that's going to give them some kind of credibility, or leg up,” Rubenstein said.

“Personally, I think rather than looking at the gender of the attorney, the most important thing is to choose someone that you feel the most comfortable with because it is intimate and vulnerable,” Rubenstein said. “So it's really about being aligned on that more than any of the superficial things, whether it's gender or religion or sexuality. Everyone's an individual, right? So you could end up with a woman attorney who's fabulous or not. Someone being a woman or not is not gonna make the difference. But there are a lot of preconceived notions about that.”

The law, best practices and "emotional justice"

As for the accuracy of how the show presents the law or lawyer terminology, neither attorney we talked to had major accuracy complaints, though to be fair, the show tended to keep things fairly general, at least in the first three episodes, and focused a lot on the characters’ personal lives.

But both pointed to something a client of Watts' cahracter said about needing a California lawyer because that’s where she was married.

“ That's not true,” Rubenstein said. “It's about where you live at the time of the divorce. Even if you got married in California, if you have not lived here for six months, you can't get divorced here.”

Though, if people have second homes and there’s a dispute about where someone lives, that can complicate things.

As for Watts’ decision to fly across the country after getting a distressing call from an emotional potential client in New York, Graves said she would never recommend it.

“It's probably best to let things kind of calm down first before you insert yourself,” Graves said. “And to that client as well, it's probably best to calm down first before you contact your divorce lawyer.”

Graves said she always recommends clients have someone to go to for emotional support who is not their lawyer.

“ I tell my clients all the time, I think it is imperative to have a support system outside of your divorce lawyer while going through this process,” because leaning on your lawyer for that “can get very expensive and we are here to handle the business of all of what's going on,” she said.

Somewhat related to that, Rubenstein said her advice to clients is that  they're “not going to get emotional justice through the legal process,” in part because California is what’s called a “no-fault” state, “ meaning that you don't have to prove that someone did something wrong to get divorced.”

In the show, though, “they do focus on that. I get it. It's better TV. It's so much juicier if you get this emotional vindication and win.”

But she said her fear in watching that as an attorney is “that I do spend a lot of time explaining to people that I understand how painful certain things are that have happened, and that those things are not going to impact the final result. And that's very difficult news to deliver because people are expecting justice. They're expecting there to be some kind of punishment for bad behavior [...] So I think it can give people kind of a false hope of what to expect will actually happen.”

The final verdict!

Asked to rate All’s Fair on a scale of 1 to 5 for both accuracy and enjoyability, Graves said she’d  give her “lawyer answer”: “In terms of accuracy for the average divorce lawyer, I would say about a 2. But for those that represent the 1% of the 1%, it might be actually very accurate. That's just not my experience.”

In terms of enjoyability, just as a TV watcher, she said she’d give the show a 3.

“I love the look, I love the fashion. I love the glitz and glamour of it all. So for those reasons, a 3,” she said.

Rubenstein declined to give an enjoyability score (“It’s just not my genre”), but in terms of accuracy she said she’d say 3, because while there were some legal facts that weren’t exactly right, and she could see some people being “self righteous about the details” and giving it a 0, “the accuracy that at least was most meaningful to me was that lawyers do have lives, and that we're all human.”