'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt': Crazy and Witty With a Good Heart

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Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is super-clever, features a winning performance by The Office’s Ellie Kemper, and moves like a well-oiled joke machine. In its combination of sharp wit and crazed loopiness, you have no trouble believing this new Netflix show is the post-30 Rock project from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock.

The premise is like something out of an old Ann Rule true-crime book, played for gags: Kemper’s Kimmy was kidnapped when she was in the eighth grade and held captive along with other women in an underground cult (literally underground!) led by the Rev. Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. Newly freed, the women become brief media sensations pegged by the press as “the Indiana Mole Women.” There’s a very funny scene in which some of the cult members are interviewed by Matt Lauer on The Today Show; after their appearance, a Today assistant ushers them out with gift bags and a fond farewell: “Bye-bye, victims! Bye-bye, victims!”

Related: 5 Reasons to Binge ‘Kimmy Schmidt’ From Tina Fey and the Cast

What Fey and Carlock understand is that, in a pop culture that’s grown so jaded and cynical, centering their show around a protagonist who’s as optimistic and smart as Kimmy serves a dual purpose. First, her sunniness is a novelty. Second, Kimmy’s smiling acceptance of the world lets all sorts of sarcasm, irony, and bleak humor slip past her notice, but not ours. In other words, what Fey and Carlock really understand is Candide, Voltaire’s 18th century satire about precisely the same subject.

Kimmy decides Manhattan is the place for her — she likes the bright lights after all that cultish darkness. She’s operating with the sensibility of someone snatched from society almost two decades ago, so she has certain cultural disadvantages. (One of the more obvious jokes involves Kimmy’s puzzlement at “being Googled.”) Kimmy gets a job working for a rich woman played by Jane Krakowski, doing a variation on her 30 Rock Jenna Maroney, and I don’t intend that as an insult — that ol’ Fey-Krakowski Kemistry is always a wonder to behold.

Now, all that said, I must also add I didn’t laugh much at the first few episodes of Kimmy Schmidt. Kemper’s fixed grin takes on a rictus of madness at times, and there is, overall, a detached chilliness, an almost inhuman cartoonishness, that may elicit more admiration than guffaws in a viewer. That was my experience. I’m not at all surprised that NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt didn’t think this show was right for his network; it doesn’t have much mass appeal. There is an admirably persistent eccentricity in Fey and Carlock’s vision of the world according to Kimmy. But Greenblatt has to counter-program in a Big Bang Theory world, where obviousness trumps eccentricity every time. This show is a good fit for Netflix, where quirkier, cultier material can thrive.

And when it comes to shrewdness, I think Kimmy Schmidt would flummox even Frank Underwood.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is streaming now on Netflix.