Tituss Burgess, left, Jane Krakowski and Ellie Kemper in Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” (Eric Liebowitz, courtesy of Netflix) This post discusses some of the basic plot elements of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which arrives on Netflix today powered by the infinitely renewable energy of Ellie Kemper’s smile, has a concept that sounds like a pitch for a skit on “TGS With Tracy Jordan,” the variety show that was the setting for “Kimmy Schmidt” creator Tina Fey’s last series, “30 Rock.” Kemper plays Kimmy, a survivor of an apocalyptic religious cult who decides to make up for lost time after a decade and a half of imprisonment by moving to New York City.
But it’s actually a concept that works for a multilayered series. “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is a sharp satire of the way the media treat women who have been subject to terrible abuse. It’s a reunion for “30 Rock” actors Jane Krakowski and Tituss Burgess, as well as the starring vehicle that Kemper has long deserved. And most of all, it’s a sly, silly continuation of a conversation about what it takes to be happy in New York that Fey and her producing partner Robert Carlock began with “30 Rock.”
In the New York of “30 Rock,” the city was a place with problems: a pervasive maple syrup smell that could be from a chemical weapon or contamination from food-flavoring plants on Staten Island, literal rat races conducted in apartment building hallways, and the world’s most persistent beeper salesman. If you weren’t careful, like Liz’s writer icon Rosemary Howard (Carrie Fisher), you could slide into a neighborhood like Little Chechnya and go slowly insane.
But if Liz and her colleagues weren’t members of the 1 percent, or aspiring to be, like executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), they could still build fun and reasonably comfortable — if slightly weird — lives in Manhattan. By the end of the series, Liz owned her own apartment and was running another television show, making enough money so that her husband, Criss, could stay home and take care of their two children. Kenneth the Page (Jack McBrayer) may have started “30 Rock” at the bottom of the NBC hierarchy, but he was proof that upward mobility was possible: In the series’ coda, he’s head of the network.
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” sets up a much sharper contrast between strivers who are struggling just to stay in New York, and those who lounge in the plush comfort the city has for those who can afford it. Kimmy has all her money in the world stolen shortly after she decides to stay in New York and moves in with Titus (Tituss Burgess), who works for tips as an off-brand costumed character in Times Square. Victories in their world aren’t about vanquishing a co-op board; they’re more about teaming up to defeat the evil proprietor of Ray-Ray’s Costume Depot.
Kimmy’s toehold in the city comes courtesy of Jacqueline Voorhes (Jane Krakowski), a trophy wife with a secret New York origin story of her own, who hires Kimmy as a kind of contemporary maid-of-all-work after mistaking her for a dog masseuse.
“It’s $17 an hour, cash, under the table. You’ll need to sign an NDA and a DNR. Do you get sick in helicopters?” Jacqueline asks. “You’ll need to be here by six every morning to get Buckley up for school. Then get me up at ten, but don’t wake me up. … Are you good at braiding hair? Fantastic. Of course, you’ll have to meet the horses first. … This is Charles, he’s a tutor, he’ll help you do Buckley’s homework. … Also, it’s Buckley’s birthday tomorrow, so you’ll need to make a cake that’s cute but also paleo. Ninety minutes, Swedish, medium pressure,” she finishes, handing a tiny dog off to Kimmy.
At first, it seems like Kimmy’s experience in Reverend Richard’s cult has left her woefully unprepared for the big city. “Kimmy, that’s crazy. You have a middle school education. You won’t make it here,” fellow Mole Woman Cyndee (Sara Chase) tells Kimmy when she declares her intentions to make it in Manhattan. “It’s like Reverend Richard always says, we’re just garbage, Kimmy,” chimes in Gretchen (Lauren Adams).
Titus, embittered by his own experiences, tries to warn her just how hard New York can be.”Girl, my name is not Titus. My name is Ronald Wilkerson. I came here in 1998 on a damn bus from Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Do you know who leaves Chickasaw County? Nobody,” he says. “Escaping is not the same as making it, Kimmy.”
But “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” has a slyer message. Kimmy’s isolation from the world might leave her delighted by candy bars and automatic sinks, and naive enough to get robbed at a club. But it’s also given her inner resources that luckier characters have never had to develop. And the contrast between New York, even on its worst days, and Kimmy’s former life as an involuntary congregant in Savior Rick’s Spooky Church of the Scary-Pocalypse is so stark that street harassment, bratty rich kids and poverty can’t discourage her for long.
Surviving a cult turns out to be the perfect training for thriving in the Big Apple — and not just because cures for botulism come in handy when you need to make a jaded teenager throw up because she has alcohol poisoning.
“I think that’s one of the refreshing things, that something you or I might be jaded by is totally new in her eyes. Automatic sinks! Riding the train! Those are things that are fun for a 6-year-old, and essentially this woman has missed a large chunk of her childhood. And also, to have been trapped and now to be free, I think you would not take that freedom lightly,” Ellie Kemper told me when we spoke about the show in January. “It puts me in a good mood when we’re working, because I think ‘Yeah, this woman is only choosing to focus on the brighter parts of things.’ ”
And while Kimmy is wildly different from Titus and Jacqueline, Kemper sees the characters’ New York stories as essentially similar. “They all left something behind during an earlier phase of their life, as many people do,” she said. “And so they’re all working towards something else. Now whether that thing rings true to them, or is worth pursuing, is sort of fleshed out as the series goes on.”
“Titus, like me, when I got to New York, that was a very rude awakening,” Burgess says of his character, who finds his hopes revitalized when his landlord foists Kimmy on him, hoping she’ll be able to help Titus make the rent on time. “To come, thinking ‘Oh, I’m going to be discovered, I’m going to be found.’ And then you realize you’re not a size 32 in the waist, you’re not a bass baritone, you’re not white, you don’t dance, and there are all these things that begin to push you out and exclude you. … I think Titus, the character, has taken that beating and that bruising. And I think part of the not trying is exhaustion, and it is the exclusivity of the theater community that has shut him out of what his would-be dreams were.”
But for all that rejection, “I think one of the interesting things about Titus is that even though he’s burned out, he never quit,” Burgess notes. “There’s always this hope that’s kind of leading him, even though it’s far, far, far in the background. I don’t think he ever considered stopping an option. And you don’t move to New York to not do anything. And he came from the South, from a very Southern — in all that may entail for a gay black man — to this world where can be free and openly himself. And I think when Kimmy comes along, her relentless sunniness sort of snaps him out of the haze that he was in. Although it’s sad how he’s been unable to achieve his goals, I think she makes him think it’s possible again, particularly after witnessing what she went through.”
For Jane Krakowski, who plays Jacqueline, the main characters are prisoners or former prisoners: Kimmy was literally in a bunker, Titus is weighed down by disappointment and her character has locked herself in a “gilded cage.”
“Everybody is sort of working through their own thing through [Kimmy’s] joy and optimism of her new life,” Krakowski observes of Jacqueline, whose backstory I won’t reveal for fear of ruining its delights. “I also love that Jacqueline, she’s self-made, really. She’s hiding, she has such a secret that she’s holding. And the strength to reinvent yourself to such an extreme level is interesting to look at.”
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” lives in its contradictions. It’s a sunny comedy about what it’s like to survive sexual assault, among other things that happened to Kimmy in the cult. It argues that even as New York has become a more punishing city, optimism can still overcome some of its worst obstacles. And in an often grim television environment, Kimmy herself makes a forceful case for the raw power of joy.
“It’s here,” she says, emerging from the bunker in the show’s first episode. “It’s all still here.”
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” reminds us that the world, and expensive, wrung-out New York City, can still feel like a miracle.
