'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt': Wackier Than Ever In Season 2
“What’s your deal? You’re like a cartoon person!” says one character to Kimmy Schmidt in the opening episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s second season, premiering today. And indeed, there are times when Ellie Kemper’s performance as the perennially sunny young woman is exaggerated — both physically and verbally — to the point where you expect Bugs Bunny to sidle up to her, chewing on a carrot, and asking, “What’s up, Doc?”
The outlandish extremes of this sitcom created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock have only grown bolder in the second season. Kemper’s Kimmy is, if possible, even more aggressively cheerful to the point of lunacy. The award-winning performance of Tituss Burgess has increased in prominence: His one-man show about the life of a geisha forms the narrative backbone of a couple of the episodes made available for critics to review. And the series is so confident that its fans will follow it anywhere that Carol Kane’s landlady Lillian seems to exist in parallel storylines that have little to do with the rest of the characters.
Many of Kimmy’s initial interactions early on in the season are with Jane Krakowski’s recently-divorced Jacqueline, who is trying to adjust to New York City life without the vast wealth of her husband. I find Jacqueline to be the show’s weakest link, her comic complaints about the plight of the fabulously rich rather repetitive. And truth be told, there is a certain over-reliance, in general, on certain forms of joke-construction, such as taking a cliché literally while twisting it (“The clock is ticking, Kimmy” “Like the 60 Minutes theme song!”) or Kimmy’s constant misunderstanding of the modern world around her (Kimmy on online trolling: “I’m going to talk to the internet and make it apologize”).
But there are also fine appearances by like-minded wacky spirits such as Amy Sedaris — just her grand entrance into a fancy party made me laugh out loud — and no one will ever accuse this show of slacking off in its rapid pacing and non-stop barrage of punch-lines. As I said, it’s almost cartoonish in its approach to the sitcom, to an extreme that sometimes pushes it into avant-garde territory: Not only would Daffy Duck understand what Kimmy is up to — so would turn-of-the-20th-century Dada and Surrealist artists. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is Fey and Carlock’s PhD project in comedy.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season two is streaming now on Netflix.
