DeConstructing The Sit-Com Format: Kevin Can F**k Himself

That's an excellent way to start off bad with a strong explicit headline. No fear of censorship.

The kicker - Instead of following the breakdown of a boundary between reality and fiction, we end up watching two increasingly unrelated narratives – the better of which keeps getting interrupted by a clunking 90s sitcom, complete with dull storylines about get-rich-quick schemes or the boss coming to dinner that neither illuminate nor complicate Allison’s story, nor create any thematic symbiosis. 

Kevin Can F**k Himself review – the sitcom wife finally snaps in Breaking Bad-lite

The brilliant Annie Murphy skewers TV cliches in this meta-sitcom that takes a detour into drug-fuelled crime drama. But can it deliver on its ingenious premise?

By Lucy Mangan 

@LucyMangan

Fri 27 Aug 2021 04.00 EDT

Last modified on Fri 27 Aug 2021 14.12 EDT

(Loooooooks ffffffamiliar but ddifferent

 

Let's re-wind to the start: "It’s a classic multi-camera sitcom setup: an ordinary Joe sitting on his couch in a brightly lit sitting room, trading beer-fuelled wisecracks with his dad and his buddies while a laughter track greets every utterance. His inexplicably beautiful wife appears – a new butt of new jokes! – to roll her eyes at the schlub on the sofa, gather glasses from the coffee table and leave more beer.

Then she returns to the kitchen on her own and everything darkens, goes quiet. Artifice disappears. She closes her eyes in despair and gashes her hand as she shatters one of the merry gang’s empty beer steins against the counter.

Such is the setup of new Amazon drama (or comedy-drama) Kevin Can F**k Himself, which deconstructs the sitcom format to turn the lens on to the most traditional, and traditionally second-string, character of them all: the patient, beleaguered wife. Here, Annie Murphy (breakout Emmy-winning star of Schitt’s Creek) is the long-suffering Allison. She is married to boorish Kevin (Eric Petersen), works at the local liquor store owned by her aunt and uncle, and dreams of a better life in a home they can call their own – perhaps even outside the drab city limits of Worcester, Massachusetts.

The conceit – a happy facade in front of friends and family, bleak realism when she’s “off” – is a good one, a metaphor for the human condition we can all get behind. It promises a new and highly fertile way of examining both the cultural messages we are shaped by and the divisions between our – particularly women’s – public and private selves. . .

Maybe the show pulls its two narratives together in the second half of the season. I hope so. It’s too good an idea, and features too many great performances, to waste."

Reference for more details: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/aug/27/kevin-can-fk-himself-review-amazon-annie-murphy