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Ellie Kemper in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The show is heartfelt without being sappy, and consistently smart and quick-witted.
Ellie Kemper in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The show is heartfelt without being sappy, and consistently smart and quick-witted. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix
Ellie Kemper in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The show is heartfelt without being sappy, and consistently smart and quick-witted. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

The radical subversion of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's survival narrative

This article is more than 5 years old

In the final season of the acclaimed Netflix comedy, there’s an increased topicality of the story of a woman dealing with her past of abuse

In the genre-bending third episode of the final season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, we take a step out of Kimmy’s cheery, colorful world to watch a “House Flix” documentary devoted to exonerating the Reverend, the man who kidnapped her and three other women 15 years before. The documentary is written, filmed and produced by an empty-headed DJ who begins a quest to find his childhood DJ hero (yes, the Reverend was a popular midwestern DJ before becoming a kidnapper and cult leader) but ends up being coerced into shooting a Making a Murderer-style documentary in the hope that the trial might be re-opened.

The spoof is hilarious and painful, as we see all the tropes generally used to discredit women on full display. In one scene, Kimmy openly weeps while she is explaining her ordeal shortly after she is being rescued. “It was horrible,” she sobs. “And I missed, like, 10 Olympics!”

“It was only nine, Ms Schmidt!” the detective replies, throwing a folder of various crime facts at her. “Now, are you ready to be honest with us?”

The film-maker circles Kimmy Schmidt’s sobbing face in red ink and writes “not cute” in all capital letters. Similarly, fellow mole woman Donna is depicted as too old to have piqued the Reverend’s interest. Gretchen is maligned as crazy and Cyndee is dismissed as mouthy. None are deemed attractive enough to be taken seriously.

In another clip, we see Kimmy and Cyndee when they are first released from the bunker. “They look like women, but they stink like hogs,” the news reporter states as we see the women dressed in long dresses coming out of the Reverend’s bunker and into sunlight.

“Do you have a mirror?” Kimmy, who hasn’t seen her own face in 15 years, asks the reporter excitedly. When she is handed one, a look of horror flits across her normally perky face: “No, sorry, I asked for a mirror, not a picture of an old Irish witch.”

When Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt first came onto the scene in 2015 its premise was shocking. The show was a comedy built around a bleak scenario – how a young woman who was kidnapped, abused and held captive in an underground bunker, re-integrates into the world. The show worked and still works for a number of reasons – it’s heartfelt without being sappy, is consistently smart and quick-witted, and it draws on tremendous talent, with stars like Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski, Jon Hamm and Ellie Kemper at the helm. The show has also been the most consistent pop-culture critique of the way American culture talks a big game about empowering women while also exploiting female pain. Throughout the series, Kimmy strives to move forward in forging a life that is happy, fun and kind, even as she faces inevitable setbacks and disappointments.

Today, four years after the series initially aired, telling stories about female survivors of sexual violence is more common, yet Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt still explores what it means to be a survivor in ways that are unique. As I pointed out a few months ago, the explosion of angry women who are ready to shake up the status quo is a testament to a very real cultural mood. Yet the fantastic thing about Kimmy is how the show illustrates the ways that being a kind, feminine, do-gooder is just as badass as being a ball-buster.

Kimmy’s positive thinking is presented as a kind of resilience, helping her to get through long, boring, frightening days in the bunker, and also guiding her as she works to understand the adult world of 2018. Over four seasons, Kimmy has learned to work, support her friends, embrace her own anger, go to college, take constructive feedback, and stand up for herself, all the while keeping true to her inner Kimmy. In a world where empathy is often portrayed as weak, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt consistently illustrates how warmth, kindness and creativity are actually heroic attributes, rather than the relics of a girlhood that Kimmy never got to entirely experience.

Tituss Burgess and Ellie Kemper in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

Kimmy’s transformation from ingénue to working woman is on full display in the first six episodes of the fourth season, as we see Kimmy don a blazer over her colorful clothes and struggle to connect with co-workers who view her cheerful and affectionate behavior as off-putting. Her cluelessness when it comes to interpersonal interactions is even used to spoof sexual harassment! Yet while Kimmy continues to glow with radiant enthusiasm for life this season, there are lots of subtle reminders that fourth season Kimmy has grown up a lot since we first met her.

When Jacqueline asks her to complete a task for her as a favor, Kimmy reminds her bluntly that she doesn’t work for her any more. When she finishes watching the House Flix documentary she attempts to call and complain about the show. When she ponders if it’s time to put away childish things and discard her purple backpack (who she talks to like a person and who she imagines with big goggle eyes and pigtails) she ends up realizing that she doesn’t have to discard things she loves in order to become an adult.

In a world where survivors are still often presented as damaged, the insistence that Kimmy is really OK, despite her various struggles, is perhaps the series greatest legacy. Kimmy isn’t perfect. She makes a ton of mistakes on her road to recovery. She often misinterprets situations and misjudges people’s motivations. She is constantly having to navigate a world that underestimates her or doesn’t see the value in her ideas. In episode six, after becoming frustrated with the ways that men like the Reverend and men’s rights activists diminish women, she decides to create a children’s book that will help to teach boys the importance of being kind to girls. When she goes to sell the book (which she stayed up all night writing!) to a publisher, he rejects the premise offhand.

“Kimmy, no. See, this is what we want from you,” he explains, taking out a cardboard display with a book titled Tubes of Terror: The Super Sad Story of Kimmy Schmidt by Kimmy Schmidt. “People see you as a mole woman and it’s my job to keep you in that box,” he continues.

The joy of watching Kimmy learn to grow and change while still staying true to herself is that so few survivors of sexual violence onscreen are ever given the opportunity to be defined by more than their pain. Kimmy’s triumph comes not necessarily from being free of the Reverend or even acclimating completely to the world outside the bunker. After all, even as the series comes to a close, we know that our hero is always going to be at least a little weird. It’s her insistence on finding a “Kimmy” way to approach whatever problems come her way that is going to free her from ever being placed in someone else’s box.

  • Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt returns to Netflix on 30 May

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