Thoughts on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

So yeah... I haven't really had a lot of time to go to or watch any movies lately so I'm doing this instead. I wrote a review for the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt back in 2015 and saw it very akin to 30 Rock. The Tina Fey produced Netflix comedy ran for 3 more seasons after the first, quite a few more than I originally thought it would, and then it came to a close after 4 seasons, that's not bad.

So why am I writing this "thoughts" piece? Well, I've blown through the past few seasons that I couldn't really do a season by season analysis and I want to talk about the impact the show has had over the past 4 years its aired.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt follows the story of Kimmy (played by Ellie Kemper) a young woman who was abducted when she was young and forced to live in a bunker for 15 years with three other women. She emerges from the bunker when the cult leader who imprisoned her (played by Jon Hamm) is arrested and Kimmy starts her new life becoming accustomed to the modern New York world.

She moves in with an obnoxious gay wannabe actor named Titus (played by Titus Burgess), has a landlord who is afraid of her neighborhood being gentrified (played by Carol Kane), and works for and befriends a trophy wife by the name of Jacquelyn (played by Jane Krakowski).

The overall theme of the show is about Kimmy becoming accustomed to the world around her, but more importantly deal with some of the trauma that she and her fellow "mole women" experienced in the bunker. Kimmy, Titus, Lilian, and Jacqueline go through quite a lot over 4 seasons like relationships, jobs, etc and they deal with it all in a super absurd but relatively heartfelt way. And similar to 30 Rock, the humor is pretty nuanced and very wordy that you have to pay attention to pick up on it sometimes.

The show also feels a little timely. I mean that some of the jokes are really specific to the time when this aired.

Sure it's funny now that Titus does a weird rendition of Lemonade, but for someone who is not a die hard fan of Beyonce, I can't imagine that scene having the same effect now in 2019 that it did in 2016, much less someone who wants to watch this show in two or three years when that music video is in a long faded memory of pop culture. I think there are a lot of jokes that are fun and will stand the test of time, but the Lemonade video and a lot of other jokes will kind of be relics of the time between 2015 and 2019.

And that timeliness both helps and hurts Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

So in my review of season 1, I made slight mention to the off color humor that started to appear early on. Most notably in the fact that Jacqueline is Native American even though Jane Krakowski is pretty damn white. Well they don't let that joke go.

And it doesn't really stop there. There were a lot of episodes where I had to stop and wonder what their angle was here, why they were making some of the choices they were making. Was it to make a point? Was it to get a shock factor? Or was it to do both?

Comedy is subjective. There are probably some insensitive jokes in here that some people won't like that I found funny and others that you might find funny and I thought were in bad taste.

I'll repeat what I mentioned in my season 1 review, apart of me feels like Tina Fey has had this desire to break these rules for a while and was always constrained by prime time television. A streaming service with no regulations can do whatever the hell they want and if it crosses a line, it's one episode in a huge ocean of content, chances are, not that many people are going to see it, especially if its that subjective comedy where it could be offensive depending on your sensibilities.

I think one way Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt will stand out in the future is that it is probably the first show to really take a stab at the MeToo movement and make a lot of jokes about it while still pushing a positive message about consent, female empowerment, and a lot of other MeToo ideas. Again, it's a mixed bag. Some of it feels productive, and some of it feels in bad taste.

One thing I might take back from my previous review is that I would have liked to see more of the mole women, I saw more of the mole women and I did not enjoy that nearly as much as I thought I would.

There are a couple of episodes where the Mole Women show up and its a good way to tie back to Kimmy's journey of dealing with her trauma. But I do think they kind of lost a lot of steam with the Mole Women. I do think there were still some pretty funny bits flashing back to them from time to time, but I do take back that I would have enjoyed a whole show about them, these particular women ended up not being nearly as funny as Titus, Lillian, and Jacqueline and that should say something about this cast. They grow on you after time. They're all caricatures so there's only so much I can really get invested, but over the course of the seasons, I definitely wanted to see more of them and not the mole women, so I think they made the right choice.

The main difference I found between the first season and the following seasons was the sense of direction. The first season was focused on Kimmy's reintegration and ended with her facing her fears and confronting the Reverend at his trial. It came together really nicely and felt complete. The following seasons kind of drifted from one plot point to another that I honestly couldn't tell you exactly what happens in season 2. I remember some details but it wasn't exactly a show that caught my attention all the time. It serves best as a show you can put in the background while your on the internet or doing homework. It attracts your attention enough for some good laughs, but the overall plot drifts a little.

The last season overall feels a little odd. I couldn't tell you what the through line of it was, and it was split in two. The first half aired in May of last year, and the final half aired this month. The split had such a long gap that I had totally forgotten what happened in the first half of the season and I didn't care to go back and re-watch it.

By the end, I saw a stitched together ending that felt complete, but ultimately felt pretty hollow to me. A lot of the time, when comedies like this have a lot of heart and soul to them, you can feel the passion behind the last few episodes and you can feel the cast giving their all because they know this great opportunity is coming to an end. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt never felt like that, especially in the end. Which is a bummer because I think this show hit its stride in its second season in 2016 and 3 years later I doubt a whole lot of people know that its final season is out. I know its only been 5 days, but you can tell when something on Netflix is a big deal and when its just kind of a whimper, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt ended on a whimper for me.

I've been reading a lot of praise for this show and even saw someone say that its the "first great sitcom of the streaming era". And to be fair, I guess that's true. There are not a lot of sitcoms on streaming services that have broken ground like this show and it did kind of have a reputation of its own. But I can only hope that we understand that this is a pretty low bar and we can do better than this in the future.

I don't want to shit on this show too much. I had fun watching it. I do think I came to have a lot of fun with the characters, and I think the celebrity cameos that showed up in this show were really well placed and executed well.

But I do think the show is far from perfect. For me, this was a show with an expiration date and they probably could have closed it up after the third season. I like it for what it is, but I don't think it's going to have a huge impact for me.

But at the very least, at least its not The Ranch right?

Those are my thoughts on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and its final season. What did you think? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for reading!