The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Season 3

Lemonading.

This past weekend was a festival of threes, as I watched three season 3s: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, iZombie and 12 Monkeys.

The first and lightest of these saw Kimmy refuse to divorce her dubious husband in order to protect yet another easily-led woman (played by Laura Dern) falling into his clutches, and thus have to find her own funding to attend college. She briefly attends Columbia on a rowing scholarship, but fails a vital test on the grounds that all sorts of weird shit just keeps happening in her life, like being dragged off by the Feds to help talk down her former bunker-mate Cindy who has turned cult leader herself, apparently on Kimmy's advice. Meanwhile, Jaqueline is struggling to have the Washington Redskins renamed, ultimately persuading them that 'Washington Gun-Takers' will result in a massive uptick in merchandise sales as a much larger demographic flock to buy and burn team shirts.

But it's not really about the ongoing plot, such as it is, so much as the moment to moment interplay of characters and dialogue. On this front, Kimmy and Titus's unhealthy co-dependence goes from horror to horror, while the interlude at Columbia brings back one of my favourite dynamics - Kimmy vs. Xanthippe - although their rivalry has eased somewhat at this point, not least because Kimmy is back to calling herself Schmidt and it turns out that everyone knows that she was a mole woman now. Through all this, and all the terrible things that people thoughtlessly do to one another in the show, it is ultimately about the uplifting power of hope and friendship, and the fact that Sea Lions control the media.

Once more, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a hit and miss show that scores largely through unrelenting weight of fire. Did a joke fall flat? Who cares? Here's the next one! And in fairness, far more land than don't.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

I don't think I've encountered anything this yellow since Season 1 of Utopia.
That was also less funny than The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a sitcom created by Robert Carlock and unstoppable comedy machine Tina Fey, with the 13-episode first season released on Netflix in a oner; like Daredevil, but with more jokes.

The eponymous Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) is one of four 'Indiana mole women' rescued from a bunker where they had been held for fifteen years by charismatic preacher Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm), who decides to move to New York City using her share of the 'Mole Fund' donated by the public. Before long, she finds herself sharing a flat with flamboyant gay actor Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess), renting from insane septugenarian landlady Lillian Kauschtupper (Carol Kane) and working for socialite Jacqueline Vorhees (Jane Krakowski) as a sort-of nanny.

That's the sit; the com arrives in the form of a barrage of short exchanges and one-liners, mostly revolving around the culture clash between the worlds of the four regulars and in particular Kimmy's attempts to deal with the world after fifteen years of isolation and no post-eighth grade education that wasn't received from a manipulative jerk who taught her about Jesus's crazy brother Terry. Kimmy herself has an utterly unbreakable (roll credits) air of optimism that powers through obstacles and shrugs off her own misunderstandings. She is an absolute innocent, and yet in her way more worldly than her friends.

Each of the characters is drawn as a sketch and then fleshed out, mostly in the form of jokes, such as the revelation that Jacqueline is a Lakota Sioux who rebelled against her parents and Titus' constant struggles with his insecurities. They also have Titus sing at every opportunity, since Burgess has a lovely tenor. Carol Kane's completely deadpan delivery is amazing, even if I did occasionally think Kimmy had fallen in with the Penguin's mum. The minor characters are also wonderful, if less deep, and if not every bit works the show takes the tried and tested approach of just having so many of them that you're rarely kept waiting for a laugh. The pace is actually so frenetic that its hard to keep up with at first, with the upshot that binge watching is a great help, letting your brain get into the right rhythm; the The Wire, but with more jokes.