Installment of ‘Kimmy’ lets viewer steer story
The Netflix sitcom “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which ceased production last year after four seasons, is back with a new featurelength special, “Kimmy vs. the Reverend.” This new installment, which began streaming on Tuesday, May 12, has an added gimmick: It’s interactive. The audience can determine the direction of the story as it goes along.
The interactive gimmick works like this: At a number of junctures in the story, at five to 10minute intervals, the viewer is given a number of choices where the story should go. You have about 20 seconds to choose, and then the story follows your chosen direction.
This means that the version of “Kimmy vs. the Reverend” that I saw is slightly different from the one you’ll see, though it’s clear that the general destination is the same in any case. Meanwhile, the show records your previous choices, allowing you to go back and revisit other possible directions.
To enjoy the special, it’s not necessary to have watched the show, but it might help to know just this much: Kimmy (Ellie Kemper, who is delightful) was imprisoned underground for 15 years in an Indiana doomsday cult. After being rescued, the alwaysupbeat Kimmy moves to New York City, and the show follows the adventures of this chipper, vaguely dislocated woman as she navigates modern life.
If you were to watch only two minutes of “Kimmy Schmidt” — either the sitcom or the special — you might think you were watching a children’s show. It’s not. The surface is all primary colors, and Kimmy is always smiling and happy, but the undertone is darkly comic and cynical, very much an absurdist response to the times.
In keeping with the show’s caustic sense of humor, some of the choices end in death, disaster and the immediate end of the movie. But in those cases, Netflix allows the viewer to go back and choose again.
Just a word of advice: At one
point, you’re given a choice whether to hear Kimmy’s roommate, Tituss (Tituss Burgess) sing the theme song. If you choose no, you still get the theme song, only longer. So, choose yes.
Jon Hamm plays the nowincarcerated leader of the doomsday cult. The character’s name, Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, is perfect — exaggerated enough to be comic, but very much in the ballpark for this kind of criminal. Early in the story, Kimmy, who is about to marry a British lord (Daniel Radcliffe), finds out that Richard Wayne Gary Wayne has other women locked up somewhere and she goes on a search to find them.
The search takes her and Tituss to rural parts of the country in which the citydwelling Tituss is uncomfortable. “No wonder Hillary didn’t bother to come to towns like this,” he says.
Behind the light delivery, there’s a cutting quality to the jokes. For instance, a rural man makes a sale and says, “I could sure use that money for opioids.” In another scene, a previously imprisoned cult victim is introduced to the past 20 years of American history. We only hear one line of her response: “But if they were all Saudis, why did we invade Iraq?” (It comes as little surprise to find out that Tina Fey is one of the movie’s four screenwriters.)
Its combination of an artificially positive sitcom world and the suggestion of a creepy and alltooreal world hovering at its edges gives “Kimmy vs. the Reverend” a knowing, postmodern feeling. It’s a feeling very much in harmony with the interactive gimmick. To watch “Kimmy vs. the Reverend” is to get the sense that we have collectively chosen a series of deadend scenarios, but, unlike in this movie, we lack the power to go back and switch paths.