httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i4s5LgdmjQ
In its first season, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the Netflix show cocreated by 30 Rock alums Robert Carlock and Tina Fey, was the recipient of quite a bit of flak.
I enjoyed the first season of Kimmy Schmidt and found the show’s use of stereotypes no more problematic than much of what went down on 30 Rock.
“I feel like we put so much effort into writing and crafting everything, they need to speak for themselves. T’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.” And with the second season of Kimmy Schmidt now streaming on Netflix, we’ve got an even clearer picture: Season two is just as irreverent as season one, if not more so.
In season one, the show had a very clear villain: Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, the doomsday cult leader who kept Kimmy and her fellow mole women imprisoned in a bunker in Indiana for 15 years.
The first half of season two sees the Reverend safely behind bars, and the show’s other unsavory characters are also MIA: Jacqueline’s scoundrel of a husband, Julian, is out of the picture; Julian’s cranky, meddling daughter, Xanthippe, has been shipped off to Connecticut; Logan Beekman, Kimmy’s duplicitous erstwhile boyfriend, is long gone.
Absent such clear loci of evil, Kimmy Schmidt season two has to work hard for its drama, and Fey and Carlock mine some less salacious plotlines: Kimmy’s still-unresolved feelings for Dong, who got green card married to his elderly GED classmate Sonia in last season’s finale; Titus’s unfinished business with his recently resurfaced wife, Vonda; a newly single Jacqueline’s angst over her inability to relate to her Native American family, and her adventures living on the paltry $12 million she received in the divorce; Lillian’s persistent fears that her fringey neighborhood is about to be gentrified.
As Titus tells Kimmy earlier in the episode: “That’s what the Internet is! Just anonymous hosers criticizing geniuses!” The message is clear: Back off, humorless Internet users! Let Tina and Robert do their thing.