unbreakable kimmy schmidt netflix television show

recap and twitter 'culture' being the way they are, shooting first and actually engaging with the art later if at all is SOP...

tbf nobody owes a sitcom (if we even want to call that art) full-season engagement before tweeting that they don't like a joke

frederik's point about "passing" being the overarching theme is OTM - obviously with Kimmy and Titus but it also extends to the teen daughter's fake bad girl story arc too and the bike guru and his "it's what's on the outside that counts" message.

tbf nobody owes a sitcom (if we even want to call that art) full-season engagement before tweeting that they don't like a joke

'tweeting that they don't like a joke' can in the aggregate seem like a full-on social media contest of 'trying to be the first on the block to strike something down'

but ymmv

well everyone's a critic (on a critic's twitter feed)

if you feel like everyone's trying to take down kimmy schmidt follow more comedy types they're doing cartwheels

eh i was more extrapolating a pattern. i get enough comedy in my own existence

There a bunch of things about the show that are I suppose ethically questionable--is it making light of trauma, is it offensive that Jane Krakowski's character is a Native American, is Dong too much of a stereotype, is Titus too much of a stereotype, etc. I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms to be made about all of those aspects and more.

30 Rock had a lot of similar issues.

LIke Dr. Casino I have reservations about the premise, and personally think the lead actress could stand to dial it down a bit, but I'm hanging with it so far. The throwaway jokes are great, like Mrs. Voorhees wearing the stewardess outfit and saying (iirc) "Look around you!" while making the classic flight attendant exit-indicating hand gesture.

The teen daughter is the funniest and most promising character imo. She's not a Millennial as I've seen reported - she's the generation under them. "He fought a war against the Germans. The guys from soccer!"

people calling elements of this show racist or w/e either forgot or should also have a huge problem with

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTj47rcuM-4

Or "problematic"

I finished this and thought it was very enjoyable, titus and xanthippe are my favourites and kimmy is knopesque in her endearing optimism (she reminded me a little bit of liz lemon x kenneth as well).

Drawbacks: the "Dong" jokes were overdone, Kimmy's father was extremely tiresome, and Jane Krakowski (who I do think is terrific, fwiw) playing a native American seemed just needlessly inappropriate. Aside from the final episode, her having that backstory just didn't seem to serve any real purpose at all? And if the purpose was just to set up white people jokes, then why bother when the character is already established as an absurdly wealthy WASP? Omitting those details would've avoided the casual racism and left plenty of space for ironic skewering.

xanthippe is kinda bad at acting, though

Tim Blake Nelson is terrible in this, otherwise I loved the show

keep up with your cool garbage culture

A+

tim blake nelson makes me miss jim varney. r.i.p.

keep up with your cool garbage culture

pretty board description, but maybe a little too on-the-nose

after three episodes, i think this show is very mediocre. will continue watching for ellie kemper. her schtick is really good, but i think it works better in a less zany context like the office.

also tina fey's comedy has always been racist how is this news

comedy has always been racist how is this news

i never learned how to cross things out...

i mean i'm pretty sure the first joke was about how cheap the jutes and the angles were or whatever.

show is funny as heck watched it all in one day

I asked some Vietnamese coworkers, and "kim-mi" doesn't mean anything. :(

Hey, I'm jute! But ok, guess we are pretty cheap, so I'll allow it.

Dong means 'gascompany' in jutish, and ke-mi means 'chemistry'.

I never really got into any of the recent-years NBC sitcoms but this has some funny bits

The best bits are usually really obvious but they're about rich white people being horrible. Even snuck in a joke about the senile old rich dude having assaulted Blake Lively. And Kimmy's frame of reference for everything being the late 90s.

Titus! When are us guys gonna talk about cars?

senile old dude = Oscar from Sweet Charity!

i've noticed a lot of jokes about race and racism in 30 Rock and UKS that haven't really scanned to me as racist jokes like they have to some other people. obviously sometimes going "ha ha check out this racist thing but ironically get it" can in itself come off as insensitive/tonedeaf but most of the jokes about racism on the show don't let the characters off the hook for it (particularly 30 Rock which was never afraid to implicate Tina Fey's Fey stand-in character). the Dong jokes definitely felt a little painfully outdated and Sixteen Candles-y even when they tried to be meta about it, though.

love this big time

Dr casino I totally get your quease. I read an earlier version of the pilot script back when the show was named TOOKEN and it was considerably more of an issue. Most of the changes made involved putting the focus on Kimmy's strength rather than the acts done to her (a shift seen right in the title), so the idea is not that we're laughing at her circumstances but impressed by her courage.

I appreciate this point, but personally, I found myself wanting to see more scenes in the bunker, mainly because I liked those characters and it seemed like they had a dynamic in the flashbacks that could have been developed in interesting ways. Maybe the show hits the right balance between NYC scenes and flashbacks, but I'd be tempted to push that darker stuff further and see what could be done with it.

She was underground for 15 years; where does her perkiness come from?

I feel like this show sprays jokes at you, 90% of which are not funny at all and 10% of which are hilarious

she is perky because she is unbreakable, it is in the title

Oh, I get it now

:)

I got maybe a third of the way through this before spraining my eyes from rolling them so hard:

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/03/i-liked-unbreakable-kimmy-schmidt.html

you lost me at pastemagazine.com

fair point!

anyway this show rules top to bottom, eagerly awaiting more of it

I am still only about 2/3 of the way through, but I really enjoyed the brief Kymmi bits, including the Olive Garden shtick

anyway this show rules top to bottom, eagerly awaiting more of it

IMO the episodes where Ellie Kemper pulls funny faces are clearly superior to the rest.

holy moly, that paste article completely misses the point of this show

how can you get even two episodes into this show and think the main focus is "country bumpkin in the big city"

I think part of it involves being super stupid

I’m not suggesting that Tina Fey plagiarized Khan’s show outright but maybe she binge-watched it on Netflix over a weekend like I did, forgot it existed, and then created Unbreakable a year later while fighting off a case of déjà vu.

yeah i'm pretty sure this is what happened too

The Unbreakable writers can’t decide which hat they want Krakowski to wear: the sheltered Upper East Side housewife, the woman scorned, the self-hating Native American reconnecting with her past—wait, what? Yes, Krakowski’s ample talents are wasted on a bizarre backstory and a fractured character that feels more like connective plot tissue than a definable person.

...because a person can't be sheltered, scorned AND self-hating, amiritie? I mean, pick one dimension and run it into the ground already! This is a sitcom!

if anything she's making apartment 23 seem more mundane than it was - "a wacky show about urban living...without all that weird talk about trauma and self-analysis!"

i feel like the post mad men generation is unlearning how to watch tv /:

recap culture is killing us all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFieEzoaDRQ

Clearly Kimmy is not too much of a stretch role for Ellie Kemper.

I'm glad I watched this again because I stumbled onto the Josh Groban cameo. Such a silly and simple gag but it was the hardest I've laughed in a while.

Meatwad Groban