The first five minutes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are perfect.
Kimmy, which premiered on Netflix on Friday, is the rare comedy to feel fully-formed upon arrival. The tumultuous path this Tina Fey and Robert Carlock-helmed project traveled to our screens — it was developed by NBC only to be given away when the network, once home to Must See TV, had no comedy block in which to put a new sitcom — does not seem to have left this show any worse for wear. Like its protagonist, Kimmy is not letting a traumatic past stand in the way of a bright, brilliant future.
What’s remarkable about Kimmy, though, is not that it is so funny or so weird (30 Rock was even funnier and sometimes weirder) but that it is a show about all the people who never get shows about them.
Kimmy Schmidt is one of four women who is saved from an underground bunker where she’d been held for 15 years by a Reverend who told his hostages that the world had come to a nuclear end. Potentially problematic territory all, but Kimmy handles it deftly, targeting the right subjects with its jokes. Kimmy doesn’t make fun of victims; it sends up the way our society obsesses over famous victims. We aren’t mocking people who fall prey to cults so much as the way we are all vulnerable to the same kind of religious-sounding doctrines (Kimmy makes a pointed comparison between doomsday believers and SoulCycle enthusiasts).
About those first five minutes: we start with a ring of four women holding hands around a Christmas tree in a bunker, singing, to the tune of “O, Christmas Tree” “Apocalypse, apocalypse, we caused you with our dumbness.” Federal agents breaking in and setting the women free, and we jump to the headlines and news broadcasts announcing their rescue — “WHITE WOMEN FOUND; Hispanic woman also found” — to the spot-on Today show appearance where “The Indiana Mole Women” are interviewed by a very game, deadpan Matt Lauer and then tossed out of the studio, gift bags shoved their way by handlers who say, “Thank you, victims!” This segues seamlessly into a fantastic theme song/credits sequence by Jeff Richmond (who also did the music for 30 Rock) and the Gregory Brothers, of Songify The News fame.
Kimmy (Ellie Kemper, human sunshine), the most resilient of the survivors, decides not to go back to Indiana, where everyone “is just going to look at me like I’m a victim.” She’s staying in New York City, where she can at least be assured to know that, around every corner, she’ll find someone with an even weirder backstory than her own. She quickly lands a roommate, Titus Andromedon (D’fwan from 30 Rock’s show-within-a-show, Queen of Jordan), and a job, assisting and looking after the children of an Upper East Side nutjob, Jacqueline Vorhees (Jane Krakowski, 30 Rock MVP). Jacqueline, like Jenna Maroney before her, gets all the best one-liners: “You’ll need to make a cake that’s cute but also paleo.” “You don’t know what you look like? How do you know your self-worth?”
The joke density is astounding: every joke is a joke inside a joke referencing another joke, like Russian nesting dolls of hilarity. Jokes go by at warp speed: in a scene that lasts all of 15 seconds, one character explains, while talking on his iPhone, that the new iPhone is coming out today “so all our old ones are going to break”; as he says the word “break,” the phone falls apart in his hand. There are non sequiturs so out there I can’t even imagine them on 30 Rock, which is really saying something.
Kimmy is haunted by the memories of her time in the bunker, where she spent hours on end turning a “mystery crank” and practicing kissing on Can Man, a man made of cans. (“The only rule was, don’t fall in love with Can Man.”) But the glimpses of Kimmy’s PTSD — her nightmares, her rage, her refusal to talk about what happened to her — don’t weigh down the relentlessly upbeat tone. Social commentary on all the pressing issues of the day has its place here, like in the aforementioned “white woman found” headline, but it never pops up in a Very Special Episode manner. One of the best bits is when Titus, a large, black man, lands a gig at a Dracula-theme restaurant and discovers he gets better treatment on the streets of New York when he’s in full werewolf makeup than he does when he looks like himself.
On Kimmy, the typical leading men types are few and far between, and they are either ordinary and dispensed with rather quickly, as in Kimmy’s first, brief love interest, or they’re ridiculous in their own way, like Logan, a Connecticut native so wealthy his parents raised him to speak with a British accent, and the Reverend, who, well, ran a doomsday cult and kept four women hostage in a bunker for 15 years. And that is maybe the most striking thing about Kimmy, aside from how fun and thoughtful it is: that it is all about the people who are always seen as the “other.”
There is, literally, not a single white man in the top billed cast. Our heroine is a damaged-but-determined girl, the true love interest is an Asian immigrant, the best friend is a gay, black man, the landlord is an older, eccentric lady, the boss is a woman with her own traumatic past (though Jacqueline’s backstory is the one risky joke that doesn’t land). All the characters in the Kimmy Schmidt spotlight are the people who usually wind up playing the sidekick. Kimmy features 30 Rock’s wackadoo supporting cast without a Jack Donaghy as a counterweight. Kimmy is the ultimate outsider; she finds solidarity with other outsiders. And without making a big splashy thing of it — without calling attention to how this is a show that has, as its springboard, a horrible thing that happened to four women — this is show focused entirely on the lives, insecurities and dreams of people who aren’t straight, white men.
Kimmy repurposes a lot of familiar tropes in that offbeat, absurdist, Tina-Fey-way. It’s a little bit fish out of water (Indiana girl in the big city!), a little bit time travel (all of Kimmy’s references are 15 years out of date), a little bit body swap comedy (Kimmy is, in many ways, still a preteen girl inside). Kimmy is asking all those universal questions: do you have to be defined by your past? How do you figure out your identity when you can’t control how other people perceive you? What does it mean to live your life on your own terms? But she’s doing it in this great, bizarre framework, surrounded by misfits on a show that treats misfits like heroes.