Tina Fey's sit-com on Netflix, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is reasonably amusing, funny, and. until it loses nerve, disquieting. The 13 show series is also a return to a kind of situation comedy that was ubiquitous throughout the sixties and seventies -- in short, the kind of TV show that provided a moral anchor to my childhood. Sit-coms in the decade of Andy Griffith, That Girl, and Mary Tyler Moore were didactic. The shows were written to present clear ethical and moral dilemmas that would be solved by the end of the episode. Each show presented a moral proposition, appealing to its bourgeoisie viewers -- pride, greed, and vanity were predictably rebuked, honesty was always awarded, legitimate authority was applauded and prevailed in the end. These shows, even proto-feminist series like Mary Tyler Moore and That Girl, endorsed conventional gender roles. By characterizing these programs in this light, I don't mean to denigrate them -- in fact, many of these shows were works of consummate artistry that remain fresh and vibrant even as reruns. Furthermore, these moralizing comedies were ingenious and difficult to produce -- each was a short story complete with a didactic message, delivered efficiently and with as much humor as possible. By contrast, the cruelty and casual nihilism of today's sit-coms, things like Two-and-a-Half Men or Family Guy, seems easy to achieve. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fits strongly into the pattern of the conventionally didactic sit-com of the sixties and seventies -- indeed, the show has something of a retro-feeling and is a perverse update of the girl-in-the-city sit-com, the formula that Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore made famous. Kimmy Schmidt has changed her name to "Kimmy Smith" and moved to New York City to make her fortune. Like the heroines of previous girl-in-the-big-city sit-coms, she is equipped with a supporting cast of zany characters. Her roommate is a flamboyant gay man named Titus Adromanon and the role of the comical landlady, played by Cloris Leachman in the Mary Tyler Moore show, is updated: Carol Kane appears as a besotted, nymphomaniacal landlady in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Kimmy is employed by a vicious and fantastically narcissistic Park Avenue housewife, a part played by Jane Krakowski. Krakowski is always excellent and she delicately portrays the very slight panic and loneliness of the character, a woman clinging to a husband who is unfaithful to her. (Tina Fey's shows specialize in providing back stories to her characters -- the blonde Krakowski is a full-blooded Lakotah Indian from South Dakota who has dyed her hair and fled, like Kimmy, to the big city. The scenes showing Krakowski's character with her family of origin are carefully written -- they are funny, poignant, walking a fine line between satire and condescension.) All of this is very standard and predictable. What is different is that Fey provides Kimmy Schmidt with an astounding and profoundly disturbing reason for fleeing her former identity and moving to New York. Kimmy Schmidt is one of "the Indiana mole-women" -- that is, she was kidnapped when she was fifteen by a psychotic religious fanatic and imprisoned for another fifteen years in a secret underground bunker. Although the show is discrete on this point, it's apparent that Kimmy was repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted during her imprisonment. Accordingly, the show has as its premise an atrocity -- the sexual slavery of a young woman for half of her life in an underground prison. (The sit-com is clearly based on the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Salt Lake City and the rescue of the three Cleveland women imprisoned for many years by Ariel Castro.) Against this dark background, Kimmy Schmidt's little victories, her tentative romances and ability to form friendships and function in the big city, are moving and inspiring -- the moral of this program is invigorating: Kimmy is not a victim; she is claiming her life for herself; she is both empowered and empowering.
For the first six or so episodes, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is very strong, disturbing, and powerful -- it is also very funny. The first half of the series probably climaxes with an episode in which Kimmy goes to see a nightmarish plastic surgeon played grotesquely by Martin Short. (Her employer has gone to see the doctor to get Botox shots). Short's face is locked into a sardonic grimace and, because his skin is so excessively taut, he can barely speak. He offers to show Kimmy "the Lifetime network or a little porno" on the TV poised over his treatment couch, remarking that Kimmy's skin is remarkably clear, "completely undamaged by the sun" but that she has "very strong scream lines." After this exceptionally strong first half-dozen episodes, the show reverts to standard sit-com tropes -- the characters wear wacky costumes, there are elaborate parodies, and the stories become increasingly absurd; more supporting actors are introduced, and, some of them -- for instance a feckless local sheriff (Tim Blake Nelson) from Indiana -- are not very funny. For about four episodes, the show is funny but its undertone of menace and atrocity are muted -- it's a bit like Thirty Rock or Community. Apparently sensing that the show's inventiveness was flagging, Fey's screenwriters ratchet up the conflict by staging a trial of the monstrous kidnaper who abducted the four women. The eleventh episode introduces the trial in Indiana and is brilliant, the highlight of the series. Tina Fey plays an incompetent prosecutor like Marcia Clark, the hapless prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson trial and Jon Hamm appears as the noxious, but relentlessly charming, kidnaper. The show is hilarious but also contains the seeds of the program's ultimate failure. First, the episode equates a cult-like fitness instructor in New York City to the Indiana kidnaper -- although this is funny and effective, it is emotionally a miscue. The kidnaper viciously deprived a young girl of her childhood and half of her life; the fitness instructor is preying on some wealthy socialites in New York by taking their money in exchange for "spinning" (that is, fixed bicycle training). The equation works for awhile, but it is disingenuous. Second, Jon Hamm plays the kidnaper as a likeable if dishonest fellow -- this falsifies entirely the dire implications of the series first six episodes. Indeed, the trial of the kidnaper occupies entirely episodes 12 and 13 and here it is evident that Tina Fey and her writers have entirely lost their nerve. The show minimizes the women's mistreatment. The problem is that by approaching too closely the nightmarish back-story on which the show is premised, the writers find themselves in the situation of making jokes about something that they can't bring themselves to make funny. And, so, the script downplays the kidnaper's viciousness, undercuts the earlier hints about his savagery, and allows Jon Hamm to play the man as loveable rogue. This doesn't work and its more than a little icky. This approach, in effect, destroys the show and it ends on a sour note. (Netflix ordered another season of the show and we will have to see how Ms. Fey solves the problems afflicting the first series' last two episodes).
I recommend that you watch the first five or six episodes -- they are all on Netflix streaming and only 27 minutes each. I also recommend the first episode involving the trial (Tina Fey's presence re-invigorates the show) -- I think it is the 11th episode in the 13 show sequence. And failing that, make sure you watch, at least, the superb title sequence: we see a hatch opening in darkness, a SWAT team lifting women up into the light. The women are wearing Amish style dresses and the camera swoops across the green field where the bunker was hidden to show Kimmy grinning stupidly at the sun and open sky. This is all intercut with shots of a next-door neighbor, the ubiquitous guy in the trailer next to the monster's house of horrors who always appears on the evening news to declare that the bad guy was completely normal, a regular dude who kept to himself, and gave no sign of his wickedness. In the case of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the neighbor is clearly modeled on the wonderful Charles Ramsey, one of the rescuers of the girls kidnaped by Ariel Castro in Cleveland. Ramsey is so wonderful in the local news coverage as to his involvement in the rescue that he deserves a sit-com of his own. Before watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidit, you should watch the You-Tube footage of Ramsey's two-minute interview on the afternoon of the Cleveland rescue -- "I was just sittin' on my porch eatin' my McDonald's and, then...."
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