A pre-#MeToo show about survival has exactly the right spirit for 2020 — and offers some hope, too. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was a show made for dark times.
When it premiered in 2015, its premise — Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) a teenage girl held underground by a John Jamelske-esque kidnapper, escapes and moves to New York City, still with the mindset of a small child — sounded like a mean-spirited rape joke. Laughing at what happened to Kimmy was cruel; laughing at her was worse. Instead, in what feels like a minor miracle, the show did neither: It told a story about class and gender and the difficulties of navigating a world run by predatory, powerful men that also managed to be profoundly fun.
Its newly released special, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend, comes at a time when those questions of power and violence are on everyone’s mind: Both of the men running for president have been accused of sexual assault, the #MeToo movement has been declared “dead” many times over, and the world is falling apart so theatrically that Kimmy’s manic, irrepressible cheer feels unthinkable. As Kimmy would probably insist, that’s a sign we need her now more than ever.
Gimmicks aside, the special is about Kimmy’s drive to make sure that her own trauma isn’t visited on anyone else.
Unbreakable was ahead of its time in several key ways. Its focus on stark class divisions came before the populist turn in modern progressive politics. Its New York was a place where women, queer folks, and people of color were forced into unlivable apartments and humiliating, sub-minimum-wage jobs servicing the craven rich.
Years before #MeToo, it was a show about surviving sexual assault (Kimmy admits to, and was clearly scarred by, “sex stuff” in the bunker) which never flinched from its depiction of the elite as a cadre of profoundly depraved, wealthy men; just about every character on the show, from trophy wife Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski) to aspiring actor Titus (Tituss Burgess), was reduced to a sexual commodity at some point. Kimmy’s demented optimism held the whole thing together: The world is awful, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt told us, and it is run by awful people, and they will break you if they can. That makes it all the more important to strive for joy.
The new interactive special, Kimmy vs. The Reverend, leans hard on the show’s themes of survival and hope. Kimmy finds a Choose Your Own Adventure book that the police mistakenly put in her backpack after she was rescued; it comes from the library of a school she didn’t attend, leading Kimmy to believe that her captor, Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm), may have kidnapped more girls than she knew. From there on, the show spirals into a series of branching choose-your-own-adventure plots, involving a trip to West Virginia, Kimmy’s planned wedding to a British aristocrat (Daniel Radcliffe), and Tituss Burgess’ mean rendition of “Free Bird.” Yet, gimmicks aside, the special is about Kimmy’s drive to make sure that her own trauma isn’t visited on anyone else.
The show has gone a bit soft in the year and a half or so since it went off the air. In the series finale, all of the leads became rich — Jacqueline is a powerful agent, Titus is starring in an action movie, and Kimmy is a famous children’s author — which made for a happy ending. But, when you’re on top of the world, it’s harder to punch up. The show that used to present the 1% as warped, barely functional, sexually disgusting children now has Kimmy marrying “a legit prince,” and though there are hints of Caligulan perversity to his character (he confesses that he’s “12th in line to the throne — 11th, if Great-Uncle Bark is mostly Corgi, as is rumored”) he’s mostly just a nice, weird, sheltered man.
Similarly, taking most of the action out of New York City to the wilds of West Virginia blunts what was once a great New York show. Kimmy and Titus’ landlord Lillian (Carol Kane), the show’s raging id, spent much of the show engaged in a battle against gentrification. With everyone moving on up to deluxe apartments in the sky, she’s given much less to do, and only one joke — in which Kimmy’s royal fiance must be introduced to the suffering of those less fortunate by visiting the worst place on earth, “the Herald Square Foot Locker” — captures the show’s hyper-specific and scabrous take on life in the concrete bunghole.
Yet, at its heart, this weird comedy special starring a talking backpack and Johnny Knoxville as a single-dad-slash-hillbilly (who proudly explains that he’s “trying to have it all — a career, a family, and hepatitis”) is trying to do something much more difficult and serious than you might expect: It’s using the video game format to ask how we can heal from abusive pasts without continuing the cycle of violence.
Kimmy vs. The Reverend understands how people play these interactive show-slash-games, making the obviously “wrong” choice just to see how the disaster will play out, and it, therefore, flirts quite a bit with the bloodier possibilities of female vengeance: We’re given the chance to do several terrible things to deserving men. It also acknowledges that, for some survivors, rage feels like the only safe option; one of the Reverend’s former victims now runs an all-female cult that dons Hillary Clinton masks and robs banks while talking about their feelings. Yet the gameplay hinges on our willingness to share Kimmy’s wildly impractical optimism. When we, the viewers, do something that is in-character for Kimmy, the plot moves along; when we make her do something that runs against her nature, everybody suffers. “Kimmy is a good person,” one end-screen warns us; whether we can make “good choices for her” is an open question.
It’s not that the show ever backs away from the ugliness of misogyny, and its jokes can be shockingly bleak. The Reverend attempts to excuse his history of violently kidnapping and raping women by claiming, “in my defense, it is a scary time for men right now.” When Jacqueline is caught in a trivial lie, the men around her gleefully exclaim that they don’t have to “believe women” anymore — “Time’s Up is over, everybody! Women lie, so we can go back to doing whatever we want!” — in a way that implies their tendency to abuse their power, suppressed though it might be by feminist progress, will never really go away.
Yet the choice that Kimmy always makes, and the choice that defines Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is to believe that we can still be good people, even in a terrible world. The Reverend hurts women, he admits, “because I could,” and because he believes hurting people with less power is “the way of the world.” That’s quite possibly true. But we can only survive, and heal, by refusing to accept that view of life; by choosing to believe that we can escape the roles of victim and victimizer and forge our own paths. If given the choice, Kimmy Schmidt suggests, people can and will walk toward the light. It’s just that we might first take the option that allows us to blow up a rapist with a grenade launcher, and who can blame us? On Netflix, unlike life, you can rewind as often as it takes to figure out how to heal.