A SARDONIC COMEDY WITH BITE
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt gets laughs despite seriousness
At the beginning of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when the title character (Ellie Kemper) is rescued from the underground apocalypse cult in which she’s been captive for the past 15 years, Mr. Bankston (Mike Britt), the neighbour of the cult leader, gives an interview to a local television station that gets auto-tuned and goes viral, landing Kimmy and her fellow survivors on the Today Show.
The bit is an homage to the famous remix of Charles Ramsey, who helped rescue three women imprisoned in a Cleveland basement, explaining the incident to reporters.
It’s also a thesis statement for the series.
“White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes,” Bankston says, “But females are strong as hell.”
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — the sitcom from Tina Fey now streaming on Netflix — has attracted a lot of attention for its treatment of post-apocalyptic cults. But that’s not actually the most radical or unusual thing about it.
Instead, it’s that this weird, lively little show that has the audacity to tell a story about surviving sexual trauma, is a comedy, rather than a competitive exercise in how far and how fast television can descend into the gritty darkness.
It’s fairly common for dramas to have rape plots, whether to explain aspects of a female character’s personality, or to draw her more directly into a cycle of violence and retribution.
These stories can be done well, as with the reveal in The Americans that KGB spy Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) was raped during her training. Or they can be handled so poorly that showrunners aren’t even aware they’ve told us a story about a rape, as was the case on the last season of Game of Thrones, when the series’ creators seemed surprised that audiences saw an encounter between Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as a sexual assault.
Unlike these other shows, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt conceals its bitter pills in shark gummies.
In keeping with Kimmy’s own response to her trauma, the show is vague about what she actually experienced in captivity. “Yes, there was weird sex stuff in the bunker,” she tells Titus irritably in the pilot.
Kimmy goes out with the elderly Grant Belden (John McMartin) a wealthy, elderly veteran because he is so senile that she can confess all her secrets to him without fear of judgment. “Sometimes the reverend would braid our hair together,” she tells him with disgust.
“Within the show itself, we don’t physically see the things that went on during that time,” Kemper says. “The focus is, instead, on overcoming that, and how you move forward from something as traumatic as that.
“Because while this is certainly severe in its degree of intensity, everyone has horrible things that have happened. Whatever coping mechanisms she called on to get her through this terrible time, they were effective.”
I have mixed feelings about the decision Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt makes to elide Kimmy’s actual experiences in the bunker, a primness that seems like a potential holdover from the time when it seemed like the show would air on NBC rather than on Netflix.
It’s a choice that saps some of the power from the trail of Kimmy’s kidnapper later in the season, making him seem charming and weird, but not truly malevolent. At the same time, it’s a choice that forces us to abide by Kimmy’s decisions about how she’ll see herself. We can’t define Kimmy by the abuse she experienced if we don’t know exactly what happened.
Some of the best jokes in the show grow out of the fact that Kimmy’s so naive that she doesn’t always recognize when she’s been harassed. In one episode, her sunny response to a construction worker who catcalls her so befuddles the man that he ends up questioning his own sexual orientation. Later, when she’s saved from wandering into an unmarked van to buy alcohol, she tells her rescuer, “I finally have a bra that fits right, thanks to that bra salesman in the other van!”
These bits are simultaneously incredibly dark and utterly triumphant. Returning to the world doesn’t mean Kimmy will never be harassed or attacked again. But at least out in the free world, Kimmy’s optimism is a kind of superpower, the same force that lets her swing a full 360 degrees on a swing set. This isn’t just a matter of Kimmy toughening up to survive in New York: Her outlook on the world transubstantiates sexist harassment into entertaining adventures.
White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes. But females are strong as hell.