In a recent NPR interview about why she always plays such optimistic characters, Ellie Kemper explained that it’s probably because she has a large face, which makes her smile looks proportionally huge, which gives her “a naturally sort of sunny go-to image because I have a big moonface smile.” I loved the way Kemper talked about her physicality in such a pragmatic way. Women, if we’re not fussing with or complaining about them, aren’t really supposed to talk about our bodies.
Kemper, her smile, and her refreshing candor are newly starring in the Netflix series The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This is also known as “Tina Fey’s new show with Erin from The Office, you know, the super smiley chick from Bridesmaids?”
Because I happen to like all the words in that last sentence, I recently sat down to watch the first episode. And ended up watching them all.
The basic premise is that, when she was in eighth-grade, Kimmy Schmidt was kidnapped and held captive in an underground bunker with three other women as victims of a charismatic Doomsday cult leader. The women are freed after fifteen years and Kimmy moves to New York City to make her life.
If Tina Fey weren’t involved, this whole thing would sound like a weird Pollyanna/Blast from the Past/The Nanny Diaries mash-up with a dark core of Jonestown and the uncomfortable ripped from the headlines frequency of men holding women hostage. Given that, I had some doubts of how this would go. Mean Girls was awesome; Baby Mama was not, so I try to not trust even Tina Fey blindly.
But even from the opening credits it was clear that Kimmy was something good. The credits are done partly as an auto-tuned remix of comments made by the Black trailer-dwelling neighbor of the cult leader, much like the “auto-tune the news” sensations of various witnesses to similar crimes in recent years. However, on top of the pulsingly repeated word “unbreakable,” this pseudo remix includes the amazing line “females are strong as hell.”
And that’s where we are. This is a show about strong, flawed women trying to keep from breaking, failing, and picking up all the pieces to remake their real selves. They are absurd and cartoonish—Carol Kane acts so much like her character from The Princess Bride that I was sure she’d actually tell Kemper to have fun storming the castle; Jane Krakowski is basically Jenna from 30 Rock but with more snobbery; the Mole-Women from the bunker are impressively dense—but they are amazing in how they are variously hungry for escape, freedom and identity. These characters are goofy and gritty, which is a rare combination in television, but also describes pretty much everyone I know and love.
Most of what I’ve read about The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has referred to it as, in some variation, “a dark comedy about women trapped in a bunker.” The show isn’t, though, about the bunker. This is about post-bunker traps and real-life darkness. This is about women—and a gay Black man, an illegal Korean immigrant man, and a few other decidedly non-straight-white male characters—and the traps that we fall into or build for ourselves into.
We live in a world where the prospect of a religious cult holding people hostage underground for fifteen years is believable, but it still seems ground breaking that a television show has no sympathetic straight white male leads. As a character says glumly when scrolling through the glut of trials about religious cults, bunkers, and kidnapping, “What is UP, Society?”
Put another, equally direct way, Kimmy skeweringly asks a group of women: “Why do we keep doing this to ourselves, replacing one male authority figure for another?”
These are both questions that are well-asked in comedy. As one of my other Feminist heroes, Caitlin Moran, says, Feminism is so crucially important that it needs to be aired and discussed and debated by everyone, not just serious Academics. Asking why society is so fucked up while having expensive plastic surgery on one’s toes in order to preserve a marriage is an amazing and effective juxtaposition. The trial of Kimmy’s kidnapper showcases absurdity within the legal system and Americanism, and how—although not why—charismatic chauvinism works. I was so thrilled to see who played the kidnapper that I don’t want to give it away, but I think better of this individual as a human for playing against type to prove these larger points. Ditto for Tina Fey’s cameo.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt isn’t a mirror being held up to society, but a hugely inflated Mylar balloon in a satirical fun house. What we see is ridiculous, but at all times we can still recognize the truth within.
And the truth within? It’s time to break out of society’s—and our own—bunkers. Because women are strong as hell.
Bethany Taylor lives in New England, blogs and blogs at Granite Bunny and Hothouse Magazine, works as a farmer and a librarian, and generally tries to have a good time saving the world and writing about it.
