Eric Petersen

Kevin McRoberts sits on his sofa under the flat bright light of a three-camera sitcom, and brays. Eric Petersen plays him big and plays him straight: the chest out, the hands wide, the certainty of a man who has never once been told he was wrong and would not have heard it. He has said that his two models were Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden and Peter Griffin, and you can see both. Then the series cuts to his wife alone in the kitchen, shot with one camera and no laughter, and the same man is still in the next room, still shouting. Petersen never winks at us. That is the whole trick, and it depends on him.

He came to it from the stage, and from a particular kind of stage part. After a theatre degree from Bradley University in 2003 he toured as William Barfee in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, understudied Shrek on Broadway and then played him on the first national tour of Shrek the Musical (2010 to 2011), took over Dewey Finn in School of Rock (2016) and originated Brick in Escape to Margaritaville (2018). Big men, loud rooms, an audience to hit. Television gave him Arlo Barth in Kirstie (2013 to 2014) and a small part as a boarder in the Coens' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). He has also taught multi-camera acting, which is the sort of detail that explains a performance: Kevin is not a parody of the form by someone who dislikes it. It is the form, done properly, by someone who loves it.

That is why it works. In our review we called it total commitment to a part the series holds in contempt, and said it was a harder job than it looks; we stand by that. A lesser actor would have softened Kevin, or signalled his own distance from him, and either would have broken the series. Petersen gives Valerie Armstrong's idea a solid object to push against, and Annie Murphy's Allison and Mary Hollis Inboden's Patty something to walk away from. We laughed at him in the first run and felt grubby about it, which is what the series wanted; by the end of the second run we had stopped laughing at Kevin altogether, and the final episodes give Petersen something to play beyond the braying, which we will not describe. It felt earned.

The caveat is the frame. For most of sixteen episodes Kevin is kept in one room and one register, and our complaint that he stays on the sofa too long is a complaint about the writing, not the man on it. We have only ever seen Petersen inside a structure built to make us dislike him, and he has been very good at that. Whether there is a quieter actor underneath, one who can hold a scene with no studio audience and no bray, we do not yet know. We would like someone to find out.