Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
A KOOKY CULT HIT
Who knew a story about a girl kidnapped by a religious maniac could be so utterly charming?
Gosh darn it all to heck! We’re surrounded by great TV, but so much of it leaves us feeling bleak – endless murders solved by Danish detectives, true crime marathons and drugs barons. What can you watch if you want cheering up?
Well, say rootle-toot and whoopdee-dee, because Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is back for another relentlessly upbeat series. Every snappy episode, around 25 minutes long, sizzles with nonsensical one-liners and inspirational quotes in terrible taste.
Ellie Kemper plays Kimmy, the redheaded girl with the world’s biggest smile who bounces into New York determined to start a new life. It’s the all-American tale: she’s a country mouse full of quaint expressions whose can-do spirit lifts everyone she meets.
Jeepers, that sounds so... bleuch! But this is no Disney story. Kimmy was held captive with three women in an underground bunker for 15 years by a religious maniac who brainwashed them into believing they were the only survivors of a nuclear armageddon.
When they were released, the women were treated as freaks by America’s TV networks, before being forgotten. Kimmy’s family, who assumed she was dead, want nothing to do with her.
All sitcoms have a cruel streak, but this one is downright twisted. And that bestows special privileges on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This show has the right to be as sweet and soppy as it likes, because it is never saccharine.
Kimmy falls in love, gets a job, and goes to college – all with the wideeyed excitement of a naive teenager, even though she’s in her thirties. She’s oblivious to other people’s cynicism. And even if she does sometimes see the world doesn’t share her enthusiasm, she knows she’s right to be happy: after all, she spent 15 years without seeing daylight. She knows what misery is.
Fifteen years is a long time! That’s the running joke. When Kimmy was kidnapped as an innocent schoolgirl, Bill Clinton was president, 9/11 was just the number Americans dialled for the emergency services, and connecting to the internet required a computer, a phone line and a spare afternoon.
Now she’s in a USA where same-sex marriage is common and people use their mobile phones for dating. Kimmy is completely confused by the way her generation communicates in coarse acronyms (she decides MILF must stand for ‘My Interesting Lady Friend’) and she disapproves of Google – it’s just a way of snooping on other people’s lives, she says. She might not understand the 21st century, but she’s going to enjoy it. And if anyone tries to stop her, she promises, ‘I’m going to make waffles out of him.’
What kind of mommy fudger would dare hurt Kimmy? The Reverend Wayne Gary Wayne, that’s who – played by Jon Hamm, who was Don Draper in Mad Men but also had a stint in real life as a drama coach: his students included a young Ellie Kemper. Here, he is a conman with a neat line in Bible Belt hypocrisy, who insists he wasn’t holding Kimmy and her friends captive. He was protecting them from the evils of the world.
Series one built to a hilarious courtroom drama, parodying the OJ Simpson trial, where Wayne convinced the jurors he was so Creator Tina Fey
as Dr Andrea pious he was incapable of even mild blasphemy. ‘I believe in Gosh,’ he declared, ‘and his son Jeepers.’
The show is crammed with flashbacks to Kimmy’s life in the bunker, endlessly cranking a handle to generate electricity for Wayne’s PlayStation.
Doesn’t Kimmy have any friends? You betcha! Arriving in New York, Kimmy meets Titus (Tituss Burgess), an overweight, ve r y sassy Broadway wannabe. Titus may be Kimmy and Reverend
Wayne in a flashback scene living in a rat-infested basement on a street full of junkies and scratching a living by handing out flyers for musicals while dressed as a robot in Times Square, but he has dreams of stardom.
What he lacks is confidence. But Kimmy has plenty. As he teaches her to be streetwise and step outside without being mugged, she encourages him to follow his heart... whether that is auditioning for chorus lines or propositioning builders. Their landlady is Lillian Kaushtupper (Carol Kane), a hippy who may have murdered several husbands. Her happiest memories are of disposing of bodies. But she’s a fearless freedom fighter, willing to be chained to a bulldozer or beat up a drug dealer to help her tenants. And she doesn’t mind if the rent is late. Is every New Yorker nice? Not exactly. Kimmy gets a job as a babysitter for Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski), a super-rich trophy wife. All Jacqueline cares about is money – when Kimmy tells her she looks ‘just a million dollars,’ the Yummy Mummy is insulted. Then there’s Kimmy’s therapist, Dr Andrea, played by the show’s creator, Tina Fey. She is smooth and competent until she starts drinking, when she turns into a sweary nymphomaniac bent on ruining her own career.
Stars are queuing up for cameos. Martin Short is Jacqueline’s plastic surgeon, Dr Franff, Jeff Goldblum is a talkshow host, Laura Dern is a stalker, Kimmy’s mother is played by Lisa Kudrow, and Kiernan Shipka – Sally Draper in Mad Men – is Kimmy’s sister, Kymmi.
No wonder Kimmy’s so happy. At the start of the new series, she throws her beret into the air, for sheer joy. It doesn’t come down. The camera pans up: there’s a treeful of colourful berets caught on branches. It seems Kimmy never learns, but she never gives up. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt series 1- 4 is on Netflix.