Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock for NBC, the old home of their “30 Rock,” “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” instead arrives by way of Netflix, where it’s streaming now.
The series stars Ellie Kemper (from “The Office”) as a woman freed after 15 years from an underground bunker, where she was held as an unwilling member of a post-apocalyptic cult. After a “Today Show” appearance with her fellow Indiana Mole Women, Kimmy decides to remain in New York City, to live life. She’s like “That Girl,” out of a bunker.
In short order, she acquires a dotty landlady (Carol Kane) with a radical past, a roommate with show business dreams (Tituss Burgess, star of Broadway), and a rich uptown boss (Jane Krakowski), who hires her and fires and hires her again to watch her entitled, unhappy son (Tanner Flood) and stepdaughter (Dylan Gelula): “I don’t like giving second chances,” Krakowski’s Jacqueline tells Kimmy, who has asked for her job back, “but I appreciate your lack of pride.”
There are bumps: The creepiness of the premise — women really have been kidnapped and held underground for years, after all, — is played with but never quite looked at straight on. Kimmy might as easily have been rescued from a desert island or come out of a coma.
It’s a time travel comedy. Much of the humor precedes from what she doesn’t know about how the world has changed: Whitney Houston is dead, “Word up” and “As if” are not things people say anymore. She calls the present “the future.”
Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times
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