Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Feelgood Comedy with a Serious Heart

I think some of my favourite types of story are the ones where you take a character who is fundamentally good, then you throw a cynical, uncaring and frankly horrible world at them, and watch how they react. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is this idea down to a tee. One of Netflix’s newest Original Series, it’s the brainchild of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock and the 30 Rock influences are very much noticeable in the writing and comedic style.
The programme follows the titular Kimmy Schmidt, played by Ellie Kemper, as she tries to bring her small town sensibilities and earnest nature to New York City so she can survive and thrive. It’s a lovely, conventional and heartwarming story.

Except that the title is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. And it’s named such because when Kimmy was 15, she was kidnapped by an Apocalyptic Preacher and forced to spend the next 15 years underground in a bunker with four other women before being rescued.
Which understandably, could be pretty dark as a plot line. Repressed trauma, flashbacks, deep rooted issues and all that.

Kimmy’s story is all about coping with that trauma. She moves to New York to escape her past and try and start life again. She doesn’t want to live as one of the escaped “Mole Women” and have that event define her. She’s unbreakable, because she never gave up hope of escaping. She never accepted her fate, and remained optimistic. And this wonderful, charming attitude clashes incredibly with the new life she tries to lead in New York. It would be really easy to have the programme focus on showing how wrong Kimmy is, that the big city isn’t for her, and that her past will always ruin everything.

The reason the show works though, is because while Kimmy is trying to deal with her own past, and figure out her life, the rest of the cast is too. Kimmy is a foil to almost everyone. They all have their own metaphorical bunkers they need to get out of, and through interacting with Kimmy, this starts to happen.

The cast is excellent by the way, Titus Burgess playing Kimmy’s roomate. A gay, failed actor with a penchant for melodrama, his performance is superb. His world weariness and cynicism is the new york resident stereotype played hard, but his chemistry with Kemper gives his interactions with Kimmy a very touching quality. He’s a big brother, who doesn’t want Kimmy to make the same mistakes he did through hoping for a better life in New York.

On the other side of the coin, you’ve got Jane Krakowski, who by this point really knows what to do with Fey’s material and portrays the wealthy socialite Jaqueline Voorhees. She’s a victim of her own success, unable to be happy in the world of servants and ridiculous privilege that she inhabits. Her life is absurd and oxymoronic, in spite of all of her success, she’s more trapped than Kimmy was at any point in the bunker.

Plaudits also have to go to Carol Kane as Kimmy’s Landlady, half cat lady and half wise sage, as well as Dylan Gelula for her completely believable turn as Jaqueline’s bratty, spoilt step daughter. In addition, the reveal of the actor for the apocalyptic preacher had me pausing my stream, I physically could not believe who they had gotten for the role. It just fit the part so spectacularly.

The show works on a comedic level because of it’s charm. It almost feels like post season 2 Parks and Rec, the optimism and good naturedness of it all. Kemper is essential to this. Her Kimmy is a girl out of her time, her dress sense shaped by her own teenager aged up wants, with Light up Sketchers and bright primary colours on an eclectic mix of clothes reflecting her childlike wonder and amusement. Kemper is bouncy, filled with life and endlessly showing off a huge toothy grin. She’s constantly making horrifically dated references from the nineties and accidentally revealing her complete lack of understanding of how the modern world works. To be fair, sometimes it does get a little grating, the script occasionally throwing a clunker or two that don’t quite land the way they were meant to. What makes up for it though is the sheer variety and speed of jokes on offer. The series is only thirteen episodes long, at around twenty five minutes an episode. The series bounces around tropes like a pinball machine, one minute a workplace sitcom, the next dealing with misunderstandings and miscommunication and rifling it’s way through school based plotlines and even a law comedy. It’s trying so hard to hit as many targets as possible that it is incredibly easy to forgive missteps.

In terms of heart though, I don’t think I could fault this show. It’s dealing with an honestly horrible topic. It’d be very easy to draw analogues between Kimmy’s kidnapping and any other sort of repressed trauma that might exist in the audience. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is the comedy of dealing with that. Finding the release valve for all that pressure and using that to understand how to cope and move on from a traumatic event.

It’s important. This is a programme about someone who literally loses a chunk of their life, they go through something that no one can understand fully and have to move on from there. It could have been a gritty drama telling that story, with long mournful shots of support groups, and constantly empathetic weather drizzling the skies. Instead, this has been one of the most feel good comedies I’ve watched in a while. It makes you look at this terrible thing, from Kimmy’s perspective, and laugh alongside her as she copes. Unbreakable indeed.

As a side note, I have to mention the theme song. It’s based off those autotune remixes of news stories, think “hide yo kids, hide yo wife”, and works contextually within the show as a real reaction to the rescue of the women in the bunker. It’s also incredibly catchy and fun. I’ve had “UNbreakable/They alive Dammit!” rattling around in my head for the last few days. It captures the mood of the show perfectly.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV9xF8CjhJk&w=560&h=315]