Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: 21st century screwball comedy

The Binge
By Jessica Zafra

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Kimmy is abducted in front of her house by a cult leader. She spends the next 15 years in an underground bunker with the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne and three other women, believing that the world has ended and they’re the only survivors. One day the “Mole Women” are rescued, and Kimmy has to start her life over in a world where “phones look like cameras and even policemen have tattoos.”

It’s a good premise for a drama about how much America has changed in the last decade and a half, about shifting social norms, sexual mores and racial identity. Its protagonist could be a woman who must confront her emotional trauma, make up for lost time, and come to terms with a society that views her as a victim and a freak. Writers could really do something with that material. Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, creators of the now-classic 30 Rock, have covered all these themes, but gone even farther. They have written and produced what may be the funniest sitcom of the year.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is so densely packed with jokes, pop culture references and sheer absurdity, that you have to view each episode in the first season thrice in order to catch everything. The traditional sitcom pauses after each joke to let it sink in, and even provides canned laughter so no one in the audience will feel left out. With Kimmy, the comic moments come flying at you so fast that if you laugh too loud, you’ll miss the next one.

The show was scheduled to air on NBC, which, in a decision highlighting how the networks have surrendered to cable and online streaming services, sold the series to Netflix. Then again, would it have survived on mainstream TV? It has thrived on Netflix, where all 13 episodes of the first season are available at once. Its format certainly benefits from binge-watching.

The screwball comedy is a great American art form which reached its peak in the 1940s with The Lady Eve by Preston Sturges and His Girl Friday by Howard Hawks. It lives on in 30 Rock and now Kimmy. You’ve got the comic zingers, the sharp social critique masquerading as silliness, and the dizzy dame in the person of Ellie Kemper. As Kimmy, she is irrepressibly optimistic, yet solid and grounded. She’s more Renee Zellwegger than Renee Zellwegger, a friend pointed out. But Renee, herself a fantastic comedienne given the right material, always suggested something acidic beneath the humor. Kemper is all sunshine, with occasional rainshowers and thunderstorms, and yet she manages to come across as a real person and not a cartoon. “Unbreakable” is dead on.

The premiere episode is bumpy, weighed down by exposition and seemingly stock characters: the flamboyant gay roommate and aspiring Broadway star, the eccentric landlady with a criminal past, Kimmy’s employer the flight attendant who married up. And yet we know we’re in for a treat when the caption of the live news report of the rescue from the bunker reads “White women found,” and under that, in smaller letters, “Hispanic woman also found.”

Race is a frequent object of hilarity, not the sensitive hot button topic it is in America. (Jerry Seinfeld remarked that Seinfeld could not survive the political correctness police today.) Kimmy’s black roommate Titus Andromedon (Titus Burgess) gets a job as “Frankenwolf” at a theme restaurant, and discovers that he gets better treatment when he’s dressed as a monster than when he appears as a black man. “It’s Samuel Jackson!!” cry white people fleeing in terror. “Black, gay, and old?” Titus cries. “I’m not even gonna know which box to check on the hate-crime form.” The unhappy socialite Jacqueline Voorhees (the always wonderful Jane Krakowski) has an unexpected ethnic background. And Kimmy’s friend and love interest Dong (Ki Hong Lee) is an overstaying Vietnamese immigrant.

Of course the hottest button topic in a show about a woman enslaved by a cult is sex. Kimmy admits that “weird sex stuff” went on, but will not talk about the years in the bunker. She refuses to be defined by that horror, and this takes some doing. As the rescued women exit a TV studio after an interview with Matt Lauer, a PA hands them gift bags and says, “Thank you, victims.” The flashbacks to the bunker are hilarious. No doubt critics decry the show’s refusal to show the horror of captivity (Well, sometimes Kimmy wakes up in the shower holding a knife), and the decision to make light of the trauma. But it’s not that kind of show.

Instead, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt goes into the ways people cope with trauma. Kimmy treats life as an adventure, even when she gets mugged, fired, or insulted by Jacqueline’s stepdaughter Xanthippe (Dylan Gelula). Her fellow cult prisoner Donna Maria (Sol Miranda) pretends not to know English and uses her “mole woman” notoriety to market molé sauce. Cyndy (Sara Chase), her best friend in the bunker, uses the public’s pity to get free stuff. “It’s the Durnsville Board of Education,” Cyndy says, taking a call. “This year I get to pick the chapter that gets taken out of the science textbook.”

There are depths to the relentless daffiness. “You don’t know what you look like?” Jacqueline asks Kimmy. “How do you know your self-worth?” Later she gives Kimmy some dating advice. “You have maybe four years of that youthful glow left. After that you’ll be stuck marrying a primary care physician or one of those off-brand Kennedys.”

As with 30 Rock, Fey and Carlock pepper the show with New York jokes. Jacqueline is obsessed with spinning at a Soul Cycle-like gym. Kimmy and Dong find the fountain in Central Park that appears in the opening credits of Friends, and reenact the intro, complete with erroneous subtitles (“You keep a monkey as a pet despite disease!”). They are interrupted by a policeman, who informs them that Friends was shot in a studio. Walking to Kimmy’s basement apartment, Xanthippe’s mother (Christine Ebersole) says, “If I get murdered, drag my body below 96th Street.”

Kimmy tries to enroll in middle school and is told that someone her age can’t. “But Billy Madison did,” Kimmy points out. “Yes, but the Madison family was very wealthy,” the registrar replies, deadpan. “They owned Madison Hotels, a Fortune 500 company.”

There are hysterical musical numbers — Titus auditions for the musical Spider-Man Too, directed by the third Affleck brother, Myron. There’s a fairly elaborate black-and-white musical called Daddy’s Boy. There are guest stars aplenty. Dean Norris turns up as a consultant who teaches Titus how to pass for a heterosexual. Tina Fey herself appears as the prosecutor in the cult leader’s trial — she’s oddly unfunny. There’s so much going on in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, I almost forgot to mention that Jon Hamm plays the cult leader, Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne.

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com. Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.