Kim Kardashian is, I think, fast asleep with eyeballs painted on her eyelids. It’s her best scene by far

Kim Kardashian and the way she might look at you, that cold, dead stare projecting the inherent emptiness of the vast, infinite, uncaring universe. It’s quite something.

She is, thanks to Disney’s All’s Fair, an actor now. She reminds me of many other theatrical luminaries: the AI actor Tilly Norwood, Mr Ed, Herbie from the Herbie films, the moving statues in Munster in the 1980s, the baby dinosaur from the show Dinosaurs.

See her there holding her own alongside thespian greats like Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash-Betts and Naomi Watts, all barely able to walk with the amount of money that Ryan Murphy, television’s Eye of Sauron, has stuffed into the linings of their supersleek trouser suits.

In this day and age, in fairness, many actors do their best work against a tennis ball on a stick. And I’m pretty sure Kardashian herself would like that comparison, for what is a tennis ball but a smooth, rounded icon propelled frictionlessly through time and space?

The premise, as established in series one, is simple. The aforementioned actors play divorce lawyers for the billionaire wives of billionaire businessfolk. This is what passes for Dickensian social justice in Hollywood these days.

The lawyers all have nominatively deterministic names: Allura Grant, Liberty Ronson, Emerald J Greene-Ball, Sextronica Megabucks. (I’ve made one of these up. The first person to text me which one I will prize with their own All’s Fair name.) They all live lives of sexy luxury because of feminism and the United States and the judicious exploitation of God’s green earth.

The non-Kardashian actors have to do everything Kim does backwards and in heels. They manoeuvre around her chilling blankness like gymnasts on a vaulting horse or the protagonists of Weekend at Bernie’s with the corpse of Bernie or Tom Hanks with Wilson on Castaway. While Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson and the others are peerless mirrors of the human condition, Kim Kardashian has apparently been directed to express her feelings by moving her head from side to side.

[ In All’s Fair, I genuinely worry that Kim Kardashian might be flammableOpens in new window ]

In the second episode of the new series there’s a scene in which they are all on their private plane, quaffing goblets of champagne, when a misogynistic saboteur destroys the engines and they all start emoting wildly. Sarah Paulson is hilariously histrionic. Glenn Close is movingly sanguine. Niecy Nash-Betts is quietly devastated. And Kim Kardashian is, I think, fast asleep with eyeballs painted on her eyelids. It’s her best scene by far.

There’s a scene in the second episode where the genuinely hilarious Sarah Paulson and the genuinely skilled Naomi Watts show what they’re capable of without the have-a-go billionaire in their midst. For a moment there’s a glimmer of a cleverer legal show, like The Good Fight, but that had far fewer viewers than All’s Fair, so I guess the joke’s on them.

Ryan Murphy’s oeuvre is very different from that of Michelle and Robert King, who made The Good Fight. It exists in a state of postpostpostmodern irony where everything is in quotation marks but none of us can quite remember why.

This means Ryan Murphy can have his cake and eat it – as can the audience, who can wallow in opulent luxury; hate- or love-watch, depending on their wont; and imagine they can see some lingering subversion in the ghost of early-21st-century camp.

The characters live wealthily, represent rich divorcees in nonsense cases that are resolved with ease and spit filthy barbs at one another like gruff pirates lost at fashion week.

Their clothes are, indeed, vaguely piratical. Niecy Nash-Betts’s character wears hats and suits redolent of the Ant Hill Mob, and at one point Kim Kardashian woos a hunk while festooned in feathers, like an erotic ostrich.

They are also surrounded on all sides by silent servants providing them with champagne and sushi while no doubt figuring out the floor plans of their homes for the Democratic Socialists of America. And there are hunks: hunks as far as the eye can see, hunks galore, an abundance of hunks. It’s a hunktopia.

Sarah Paulson’s character has, by now, stolen Kim Kardashian’s former hunksband, Glenn Close is being wooed by a rich twenty-something hunkster and Kim Kardashian herself has hired a new security hunk to keep the hunks of the wild at bay.

She has, you see, spotted a looming hunk at her window and has demonstrated her terror by parting her lips slightly and widening her eyes almost imperceptibly.

The security hunk convinces her at his job interview of the urgency of the situation, then wastes no time taking his shirt off when it gets stained by a smoothie. (Full disclosure: this is also how I got my job at The Irish Times, though I am more unc than hunk.)

Then, of course, the divas all joke about how Kim Kardashian should have sex with her security hunksman, which I guess is fine nowadays, for what even are workers’ rights at this, the arse end of American civilisation? If their company even has a HR department, HR surely stands for hunk riding.

There is a lot of prosperity-gospel self-help logic on this show (the gist: the rich deserve all they have because they have it), a lot of conspicuous consumption (of food, of hunks, of scenery in the case of Sarah Paulson) and very little actual story.

At the end of the first episode Allura Grant/Kim Kardashian is poisoned by a scorpion, but she has recovered by the first scene of the second episode.

Like all of Ryan Murphy’s work these days, All’s Fair has the forward momentum and dramatic tension of a colourdy screensaver or somebody jingling keys at eye level. I’m not judging you. In this time of agitation and dread I find both phenomena quite compelling.

The HBO show The Gilded Age, back for a fourth season over on Now, is aimed at a different constituency, one for which someone explaining the correct way to use silver cutlery at dinner is erotica of the highest order.

This happens in the first episode of the new series after an upwardly mobile former footman feels out of his depth at a business meeting with some toffs.

[ The Gilded Age review: Pretty but dour show about snobbish New YorkersOpens in new window ]

The Gilded Age is also a show with mere trace levels of tension, given that it’s about how social change occurs because of the inherent niceness of the rich. Like all of Julian Fellowes’ historical TV dramas, it moves at the glacial pace of history itself – and the thing his fans seem to love above all else is people in corsets repressing their emotions for the sake of social propriety.

I get how you might like such things too after watching several episodes of the more histrionic All’s Fair, wherein the actors gnaw the set dressings like beavers. That said, Kim Kardashian would fit right into The Gilded Age, for she looks like she’s feeling nothing at all.