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
Last modified on Fri 27 Aug 2021 14.12 EDT
(Loooooooks ffffffamiliar but ddifferent
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
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