When was the last time I binge-watched an entire series in a day? Well, the day has come, and the show is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. To be honest, I’d been looking forward to it for quite a while. The reason: This Netflix production (which, for a while, resided with NBC before it was canned and acquired by the online platform) is penned by none other than Tina Fey.
If we’ve spent any amount of time talking about what we consider funny, you should know the truth: I honestly find Fey one of the most funny people on the planet. Her dialogues are hilarious, her plots come together in the most unexpected ways imaginable – and no matter how absurd her characters get, she never loses sight of their emotional core. At its best, 30Rock was a hilarious comedy chock-full of crazy ideas but with a weird sense of truth at the core.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt certainly appears to take a page from 30Rock‘s book of absurdities, but at its core, the show’s way more down-to-earth and emotionally straightforward – if you can get past the set-up of a young woman (played by a brilliant Ellie Kemper) who gets freed from a doomsday cult after spending fifteen years inside an underground bunker and promptly moves to New York. It’s fish out of water with a twist.
I won’t go into further details. Suffice to say this show is weird, witty and wonderful. It’s drenched in optimism and honesty without being annoyingly corny. And it’s got a totally rad auto-tune theme song about the power of women.
(Little side-note: You will see a lot of women pop up in the credits, which I find awesome – women are super underrepresented and duper necessary in the comedy biz.)
