Summary
All’s Fair tries to bite off more than it can chew in “This Is Me Trying”, making the mistake of trying to needlessly humanize its most effectively uncomplicated villain.
Until now, Sarah Paulson’s Carrington Lane has been by far the best part of All’s Fair. This is largely because she has been an overblown cartoon villain without a trace of redeemability, which puts Episode 5, “This Is Me Trying”, in an awkward position. In an effort to humanize Carr, it risks compromising the only character ridiculous enough to feel at home in this ridiculous show.
Carr’s having a tough week. She’s spending her daughter Amabel’s birthday being patronised by a client in an arbitration meeting while her iPhone memories remind her of how her relationship with Amabel’s father failed. It probably speaks to how All’s Fair has done a good job of making her deplorable that I’d genuinely never considered the idea of her having a home life, let alone a broken one.
But, predictably, the characterisation isn’t consistent. The show has already put most of its eggs in the basket of Carr being deplorable, so that depiction has to keep drifting to the surface even when she’s trying to be vulnerable and human. You can see it in the arbitration when she bursts into tears, but then has to storm out while flinging insults. You can see it when Chase tries to seduce her, and she settles for dramatically washing his hair in slow-motion instead of giving in because she doesn’t want to risk her daughter growing up and writing a tell-all book about her improprieties. You can see it when she’s caught driving under the influence and has to bail herself out by forming an impromptu alliance with another legal eagle who showed her some sympathy earlier and would quite like to help her ruin Allura.
Who is Carrington Lane? This seems like an obvious question, but All’s Fair Episode 5 repeatedly proves that it doesn’t have a satisfying answer to it. There’s nothing wrong with being an exaggerated parody to obscure deeper insecurities, but the writing never supports that reading; it always manifests as her shifting between complete personas erratically. And whenever “This Is Me Trying” tries to get serious about it all, which it does, especially through Carr’s relationship with Amabel, it’s utterly out of its depth. The idea is that Carr’s lacklustre parenting has essentially created a mini version of herself, and they bond over the idea of securing Amabel’s entry into an exclusive private high school by collaborating on an essay about how Carr’s history of self-harm has changed her life. The tone here is completely off. Amabel has the general demeanour of a serial killer, and there’s absolutely no acknowledgement of how complex and serious a subject this is.
A bit like how Glen Close elevated previous episodes, it’s only through the might of Paulson’s performance that this storyline gets any traction at all. When Carr admits she’s struggling with everything and goes to Amabel’s biological father, Sebastien, for support, there’s a hint of sincerity to it that manages to peek out from beyond the reams of comedy insults. If you squint a little, you can see the outline of a real character, a complex and three-dimensional human being, or something at least approximating one. But it feels far too much like the show attempting to both have its cake and force-feed it to us, and the idea of Carr as a rounded figure is less effective than the idea of her being an arch, irredeemable monster.
Elsewhere, there are tokenistic acknowledgements of other ongoing subplots. Liberty spends the episode debating whether she should sign a prenup with Dr. Reggie, which is deeply uninteresting and barely worth mentioning, but the police do begin sniffing around Allura on account of that whole debacle with Emerald in the previous episode. Again, little is made of it, but it’s there, and it’s developing into something that might matter, especially with Carr having formed an alliance to take Allura down. Oh, and Milan tells Chase that she’s pregnant.
But All’s Fair Episode 5 ends in a curious place — with Douglas finally telling Dina what we learned a couple of episodes ago. He’s dying, and it’s time he got his affairs in order. Glen Close is extremely fine in this sequence, showing real earnest emotion in an hour characterised by a complete lack of it almost everywhere. But choosing to end here is an odd choice, almost a deliberate reminder of how any efforts to humanise Carr fall flat compared to this. Maybe All’s Fair should have stuck to the few things it was good at. Not everyone needs a backstory.
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