The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

[Mara]

I could watch this title sequence all day.

Also, I am actually going to watch this show all day because of snow.

[Mara]

Kiernan Shipka. I REPEAT, KIERNAN SHIPKA.

[dreamdead]

We're looking forward to diving into this series. Andy Greenwald over at Grantland said it fires on all cylinders around episode four, but I expect that we'll burn through them so fast that any early slowness is quickly forgotten.

[Mara]

So... many... talented... guest stars.

[Spun Lepton]

No interest.
Research.
"Tina Fey?"
Queued.

[Mara]

UNBREAKABLE! THEY ALIVE, DAMMIT!

This was really enjoyable.

[dreamdead]

UNBREAKABLE! THEY ALIVE, DAMMIT!

This was really enjoyable.

Past tense? Like, marathoned the show and done now?

We've finished the first two episodes. Kemper has an infectious energy, and a lot of the early material is aided by her natural charisma in these moments.

[Mara]

Yes, I was feeling sickly and had a snow day so I watched the whole thing.

The show is very well cast, but I can't imagine anyone but Kemper pulling oss the lead. She has that manic energy, and slightly crazy eyes, and manages to convey emotional damage without souring her sunny diaposition. One of my favorite recurring callbacks is thay she gets angry and physically violent every time she is grabbed from behind. They don't dwell on it but it conveys a lot about what a mess she is.

[Spun Lepton]

I watched the first episode last night. Several laugh-out-loud moments. I'll probably have the entire run finished in a week or two.

[Spun Lepton]

This is only semi-spoilerish, but the show is so new, I don't want to spoil a thing.

One of my favorite moments from the pilot was the Hispanic woman's response to the TV-psychologist's question, "You were with them for 15 years and you didn't learn English?" "These bitches didn't learn Spanish! So ..."

[Henry Gale]

Six episodes in, so by tonight I'll be halfway done.

Show is so much fun. In a lot of ways my favourite employment of the Netflix model in the sense that it's the type of show if NBC had kept it, would've struggled in the ratings, I'd have taken a couple of weeks to be confident enough to recommend it, and then maybe then eventually others would get on board before it was too late. But as it is here, we have Season 1 in full, Season 2 officially ordered, and a delightful, wacky little gem of a show to enjoy all at whatever pace for anyone to similarly have access to.

It really does hit the same beautiful nerve 30 Rock did, to the point that Carlock & Fey's brilliant-but-often-too-quick dialogue and her husband's musical cues have often tricked me into feeling like I'm watching one long tangential subplot from their previous show that somehow surreally spiralled out of control and never ended. And I hope it never does.

[number8]

Finished last night. I wonder how far into it they were before they found out it was going to be on Netflix instead of NBC.

Some completely expected cameos ((Jon Hamm again!), but one made me burst out laughing just from his entrance (Dean Norris).

[Mara]

One piece of trivia I had forgotten until yesterday: (spoilers for last few episodes):

That Hamm was Kemper's 8th grade drama teacher in real life. It is both funny and uncomfortable!

[number8]

I honestly got a little uncomfortable about Dong, though. Seems like the ratio of "jokes based on the fact that he's asian" vs "jokes based on him as a character" is hugely lopsided toward the former. Some of it were cringe-inducing for me to watch, and I don't think intentionally so.

[Mara]

I was a little uncomfy with Jacqueline's backstory, too.

[number8]

I mean, 30 Rock had a lot of that skirting-around-stereotypes-and-falling-in kind of stuff, too. I think Tina Fey (and her writers) like to think that they're savvier about racial humor than they actually are.

[Mara]

RE: Dong, I kind of appreciated that they introduced an Asian man as a viable romantic lead, but they didn't make him either masculine or sexy. He was all stammery and emotional and good at math. Some day we will have an Asian man on American television with swagger and abs. Some day.

[number8]

I remember being really torn during LOST between believing that Jin and Sun should be together no matter what and nothing shall come between them or they shall die and wanting to see Jin get with or be seen as sexy by maybe one or two of the 300 white ladies on that island.

[Mara]

Jin was soooo attractive.

I have been inspired to find this article from last year. Semi NSFW.

http://m.mic.com/articles/104332/16-stunning-images-shatter-stereotypes-about-asian-men?utm_source=FBTraffic&utm_medium=fijifrost&utm_campaign=CMfacebook&ts_pid=2

[Irish]

I like the show but agree with 8 & Mara -- the humor is all over the place.

The "Indian" humor was awkward but the "Dong" jokes were racist in a way only New York liberals can be. (8's line about Fey thinking she's savvier than she really is was right on the mark).

There's also a lot of "Midwestern rube" humor that feels really dated to me.

The other thing: the central premise of this show is fucked up.

It's obvious the basic plot elements were inspired (?) by events in Ohio. From the story, the heroine was 14 when she was abducted. There have been multiple references to her fucked up sexuality due to her captivity.

It feels weird to turn brutal reality into a class base farce (what's next? BTK: The Musical?). Or co-opt the identity (and memes) around participants like the neighbor. And the I feel weird for laughing at some of it.

I dunno. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it seems fucked to make a lot of jokes about the sexual victimization of young women... And then put a some "empowerment" spin on it.

Seems strange coming from Fey.

[number8]

The best jokes are definitely the ones about Kimmy's indomitable will, though. At first I thought it was meant to be a joke about the fact that she can be so sunny after such an ordeal, but I was won over by how aggressive she is about it, which made it funnier to me than just the irony of it.

Personal favorite:

"Kimmy, you bitch!"
"A female dog? A thing that makes puppies? Nice compliment!"

The defiant look Kemper shot when she said it just slayed me.

[Irish]

Agreed. A lot of the writing around her, particularly in the early episodes, is strong. (Loved that "bitch" joke too).

I was thinking more of the stuff around Mrs Vorhes, when a Kimmy encourages her to divorce her husband. And later, when the group is trapped in the bunker for a second time.

There's a lot of lines that sound like half cribbed, jokey riffs on Michelle Sanberg & Eat Pray Love & TEDx. That made me squirm whenever I stopped to consider the story at the center of the show.

[Mara]

I understand where it's coming from. This is a woman who refuses to be defined by the worst thing that happened to her. The (uneasy) comedy comes from how horrifically bad that one thing was. I like that the same mechanisms she developed in the bunker to survive are the things that she needs for her new life: an intense need to help people, bravery, optimism, and hard work. I think I would be more uncomfortable with the subject matter if they minimized how traumatized Kimmy is, but there are relentless, quiet hints that she is pretty badly damaged right under the surface.

One moment I thought was funny the first time I saw it was when she meets Jaqueline and mistakes her for another captive. "Tell me: DO YOU NEED HELP?" But in retrospect that's both brave and terribly sad. Kimmy's idea of the world is terribly unsafe and hostile. She uses her sunniness as a weapon against it.

[number8]

I believe the show tried to comment on it, too, by hiring Jon Hamm. This is the second show after the Black Mirror Xmas special that I've seen capitalizing and subverting our image of Hamm as the ultimate salesman. We see how, from everyone else's reaction to him, we're not supposed to think that the women are especially gullible, but that the preacher is extremely manipulative (within its universe's cartoony standards, of course). Isn't that the whole trajectory of Kimmy's arc, too? That she went from being ashamed of having been a mole woman to publicly confronting her history and actually blame the guy who deserves 100% of the blame.

[number8]

My latest issue of NY Mag arrived with this packaging tear in the back.

https://36.media.tumblr.com/753ec50155c0b016b0675f4aef7654 10/tumblr_nkyxq9N2V41rg365do1_540 .jpg

[Mara]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiBbtrSI83c

I haven't mentioned how hilarious I thought Daddy's Boy was. He only has a second, but that's John Cullum as Daddy's Daddy.

As far as musical numbers go, Pinot Noir cracked me up, too.

[Spun Lepton]

Kimmy's date in "Kimmy Goes on a Date!" had me laughing my head off.

[Spun Lepton]

Troll the respawn, Jeremy!

[Neclord]

"Yes? I'm Goliath Gary Willikers."

[Lucky]

Pinot Noir. Roseann Barr.

[Spun Lepton]

7 episodes in and I'm still lol'ing a few times per episode. That's such a rare thing for me. Even comedy shows I love only illicit a chuckle and smirk from me. Because I'm so bitter. I would make a great supporting character for this show.

Carol Kane keeps me in stitches. She gets so many great lines.

[Spun Lepton]

Finished the season. Looking forward to S2.

[Acapelli]

In the pilot, Titus tells Kimmy to go home to Indiana; he’s trying to protect her. “Protect me from what?” she snorts. “The worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard.” The line echoes an incident from Fey’s life: at five, in her family’s yard, she was slashed by a mentally ill stranger, leaving her with a scar—a distinctive but not defining feature. It’s not the type of experience that you’d think would inspire comedy, but that’s the key to “Kimmy Schmidt” ’s ambition: by making horrible things funny, it suggests that surviving could be more than just living on. It could be a kind of freedom, too. ♦
fuck

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/candy-girl

[Mara]

I read that article yesterday and thought it was great.

[number8]

I knew about Fey's scar (she talked about it in Bossy Pants) but didn't make that connection. Good echo.

[Henry Gale]

Watched the final three in one go last night. Really perfect way to do it since they played like one long awesome finale. The guest stars alone... I was spoiled on Jon Hamm, which made me watching the pilot with someone else really highlight his vocal performance truly being him (even if it seemed to change in the final episodes). And also just how beautiful Kimmy's rat flashback moment is as a revelation to her staying in New York on second viewing.

But my god, why isn't there already a spinoff series for Tina Fey and Jerry Minor's prosecutors in the works?! At the very least they need to show up again and again in this show.

Now I sit and wait for Season 2, but having all the existing episodes at my disposal the very same way they were premiered is a great thing only the Netflix model really provides. I mean, TV shows never used to premiere as box set DVD's, but they became a lot of people's preferred way of digesting them. This show has really been the thing that's clicked to allow me to realize just how perfect it can be.

[Henry Gale]

Also, late season casting spoiler that lends to a crazy true-life fact between two key actors in the series I don't know how many people know about (that I remember from podcast interviews with each of them years back):

Ellie Kemper (and her younger writer sister Carrie) grew up in St. Louis, and while attending middle school they had a drama teacher for a year who went by the name of Mr. Hamm. (Or Jonathan Hamm as you may know him.)

[Gizmo]

Pretty solid show. Funny enough to keep me mildly amused and the story line was nice and compact in the 13 episodes, that it didn't feel like there was a lot of filler.

[dreamdead]

To me the Fey and Minor prosecutors were the most off thing about the final episodes, and where the absurdity of their dealings is undone by the legitimate sexual horror of what the mole women were likely exposed to. It's ludicrous to believe that the show doesn't imply that some, if not all, of the women were raped, and yet the show tries to elide that reality constantly.

However, the exact second that the show tries to suggest that the state (even Indiana, zoinks!) would put forward such inane legal council is where the showrunners have a hard time maintaining a core sensibility. The show wants to gloss over the ugliness of its conceit and having Hamm there certainly gives them an actor with enough charisma to try, but then the whole thing feels weirdly... off.

[Grouchy]

I marathoned six episodes of this a couple of nights ago. It's really pretty good, I always LOL three or four times per episode. I don't think I'll continue with it because I don't feel such a huge interest on where's the plot going, but I enjoyed it.

Kimmy's elderly date and Jacqueline's secret past were the highlights for me.

[MadMan]

The pilot was really good. The second episode wasn't as funny. However I found episodes 3-5 to be hilarious. I'll try and finish Season 1 this week.

[Skitch]

Just finished this. My wife thinks I'm nuts but I love the theme song. I sing it all day. Sometimes I just walk in the room and say "Uuuuuunbreakable!" just to get it stuck in her head. :D We both dug the show. I also echo the comments about Dong and Kimmy's parents, a little odd, missing something to be fully tongue-in-cheek. Also, the courtroom scenes were just too ridiculous. I know the show is pretty damn ridiculous, but those lawyers were so incredibly stupid it robbed it of laughs. Overall, another cool Netflix original show that I'll watch more of.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Enjoying the first four episodes mostly for Kemper (good lord, she's got the perfect stew of charming and manic), but I also like how almost-equal weight is given to the impeccably named Titus Andromedan. I figured him for a quota-filling gay black man (two minorities at once, phew, room for more white people), but he gets some dimension on top of his outsized gayness. His crisis over failing to seduce Brandon made me laugh pretty hard, and him rebounding with the construction worker (and immediately dismissing him) was a great payoff.

[number8]

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