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| Ellie Kemper |
One of last year's best new shows was the one with an infamous existence. Having been rejected by most of the networks despite having 30 Rock creator Tina Fey's name attached, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt managed to find a home at Netflix. By some luck, the show wasn't merely dumped there because it was a last resort. It was also so rich with humor that saw Fey doing what she did best. With Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) as the bubbly redhead who frees herself from a cult and discovers the joys of modern life. It garnered the series with Emmy nominations and left many to wonder what was next now that the initial story had run its course. What the series did was explore the private life of Kimmy and helped to give Titus (Tituss Burgess) a more fleshed out character. The results managed to be consistent with the first season, though maybe not always as good.
What made season one of the series wasn't just that it had a rich pallet of humor. It was also the ability to turn the story of a victim into an empowering source of rediscovery. It was inadvertently feminist, even if most of what Kimmy Schmidt did had little to do with the actual trauma. In fact, it's generally easy to forget about this aspect had it not been for the ear worm that is the opening credits and the occasional flashback to the years spent in the bunker. The season also had an impressive arc where Kimmy confronted her captor, thus putting an end to a concrete and thematic story that was possibly too rich for a comedy of its ilk. The issue is that without this text that secretly drove most of the appeal of the first season, the show quickly loses way as Kimmy decides to work at a Christmas store and deal with her ongoing relationship to Dong (Ki Hong Lee). The big arc that ends the season comes when Kimmy looks for her mother, who turns out to be somewhat of a deadbeat.
The issue isn't that the show isn't funny. It just may be that there's too much that is now familiar and comfortable about the series. It is likely why the series evolved to focus on a variety of characters. Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski) is going broke while having personal conflicts with her Indian family. Titus must put aside his narcissism for his new boyfriend. Lillian (Carol Kane) tries to be an activist but finds herself failing at every turn. While the stories all have their moment of inspiration, the show's quest to go wild in between the beats isn't nearly as successful. The references and agility of the humor sometimes feel forced, and the resolution is at times underwhelming.
It could in part be due to how aimless the show begins to feel after a certain point. The new arcs aren't nearly as exciting as the previous season. Kimmy's mental recovery to her trauma gets redundant as things become more bizarre with animated sequences and a Jeff Goldblum cameo. She even sees a therapist (Fey), who is a drunk in denial. There's not a lot that gets explored within these grounds, and it often benefits solely from running gags. However, there's no ingenuity that's on par with the previous season, save for Titus' off-brand Broadway show tunes, which are an inspired commentary on copyright laws. Save for a few episodes, there's very little story here that matters. While the point of a comedy is to make one laugh, it definitely begins to wear thin halfway through the series where even the gags become too familiar.
As evidence that the show going bigger isn't always better, Lillian's ongoing activist story only wears her character thin. Where Carol Kane was a welcomed presence of aloofness in the first season, she now comes across as the desperate random reference machine. Even her quest to identify graffiti makes her somewhat obnoxious and a character without any boundaries. It could just be that Fey prefers broad humor to more grounded characters, but it definitely hurts the show when Kimmy is the only character who has a deeper emotional core on a frequent basis. Even then, her season's revelation of discovering who her mother is ends up being one of the few high points. The back half of the season is the duller of the two, with very little necessarily being interesting.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is still a fun show when it wants to be. Even at its average, Fey is reflecting a knack for engaging content. It's just a shame that the manic energy has overwhelmed the overall quality of the series. It's still good, but its novelty as this great collage of ideas is starting to fall into novelty. At least 30 Rock waited five seasons before this happened. While Kemper is still excellent in the lead, there's very little else that has come out of the episodes here without some wear. They're still funny characters and have plenty to offer. It's just that the novelty is starting to fade, and the quality that is showing isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.
Overall Rating: 3 out of 5
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