Tina Fey and Robert Carlock take a kidnapping and build a sitcom on it, and for two seasons the jokes arrive faster than the doubts. Ellie Kemper and Tituss Burgess carry it; the last two seasons give them less to carry.
Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) has spent fifteen years in an underground bunker in Indiana, told by the preacher who put her there that the world had ended. It had not. She is dug out, put on breakfast television, and decides on the spot to stay in New York rather than go home to be pitied. Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, who made 30 Rock, have built a sitcom on that, and the odd thing is how rarely it feels like a bad idea. It is quick, kind and funny for two seasons, less sure of itself for two more, and we recommend it to anyone who liked 30 Rock and can forgive a programme for not knowing when to stop.
The pace is the first thing you notice. The writers, Fey and Carlock among them, put a joke in nearly every line and a second one in the background, and the editors, Ken Eluto and Meg Reticker among the ten credited, cut so that a punchline is gone before you have finished with the one before it. A gag about Kimmy’s fifteen-year-old slang sits next to a cutaway to the bunker, which sits next to a shop sign you have to freeze to read. Plenty of it misses. Enough lands that we found ourselves going back for lines we had talked over, which a sitcom does not often make us do.
Kemper plays Kimmy’s cheerfulness as a decision rather than a temperament, and that is what stops the premise curdling. She is twenty-nine, in yellow trousers and light-up trainers, and Kemper lets you catch her checking each new room for the way out. John Inwood lights it all flat and bright, in the colours of a packet of felt-tip pens, so New York looks like the city a child would draw. Teresa Mastropierro’s sets do the same job: a basement flat with the bath next to the cooker, and a white flat on the Upper East Side where nothing has been sat on.
That flat belongs to Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski), who hires Kimmy to mind her children and treats her as a project. Krakowski is doing a close relative of the part she played for Fey before, and she is still good at it, though the show hands her one storyline in the first season that we will not describe and that never stops being a mistake. Carol Kane is Lillian Kaushtupper, the landlady, a Brooklyn holdout who mutters about gentrification; Kane plays her half a beat behind everyone else and gets a laugh every time she catches up.
The other lead is Tituss Burgess as Titus Andromedon, the actor Kimmy shares the basement with. Titus has renamed himself, owns a costume for any occasion and has decided to be magnificent because the alternative is going home to Mississippi. Burgess sings, sulks and films a music video called Peeno Noir in the flat, and he is why the show has two leads: he is as damaged as Kimmy and has picked a louder disguise.
We laughed at the bunker for twenty minutes. Then Kimmy explained, as a handy tip, how she got through it: you can stand anything for ten seconds, and then you start on the next ten. Kemper says it brightly, to a stranger, as if recommending a brand of toothpaste, and we did not laugh for a while after that. The show keeps doing this, sliding the awful thing under a joke and letting you find it, and in the first two seasons it does it with real control.
The control goes. By the third season the writers have run out of things for Kimmy not to know and start writing episodes about the news instead, which is a thinner show. Her romance with a classmate at her adult-education class is a placeholder. The fourth season, twelve episodes rather than thirteen, plays like a programme that has said its goodbyes and been asked to stay for one more drink. And the 15 certificate is earned: the jokes about what the Reverend did get cruder as the seasons go on, and not everyone who liked the yellow trousers will want to hear them.
Next to 30 Rock it is warmer, and its best episodes are not quite as good. Watch the first two seasons two episodes at a time; any more and the jokes blur into a single high-pitched noise, which is roughly what Titus would say about Kimmy.
