Television is a medium that allows for ambitious storytelling swings, but there’s one formula that rarely changes: the situational comedy. Sitcoms, with very few exceptions, are half-hour comedic shows with grounded premises, and most are still filmed with multiple cameras and a laugh track. Plenty of sitcoms have broken this pattern in the age of streaming, but only one show flipped the whole concept around by telling a dramatic, thrilling story that worked within the bounds of a sitcom.
The result is a criminally underseen masterpiece that plays on our assumptions of how TV works and, in doing so, creates a Gone-Girl-esque story of female empowerment baked into a familiar setting. While it struggled to find an audence, it’s finally streaming on Netflix and could now find the viewership it deserves.
In 2016, CBS premiered Kevin Can Wait, a classic Honeymooners-style domestic sitcom starring Kevin James. In 2021, Kevin Can F**k Himself premiered on AMC+ as a darkly comedic response to not only Kevin Can Wait, but every “oafish man with a beleaguered wife” sitcom before it, like King of Queens and All in the Family.
But Kevin Can F**k Himself isn’t a parody. In fact, much of its runtime is spent painstakingly replicating the tone of those shows. The series follows Allison McRoberts, who lives with her underachieving goofball husband, Kevin, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Allison, played by sitcom veteran Annie Murphy is the perfect sitcom wife: she cooks and cleans for Kevin even as she rolls her eyes at his ridiculous schemes.
But everything changes as soon as she leaves the living room sitcom set. When Allison is alone, the series changes to the stark, single-camera format used for hour-long dramas. And when Allison is out of her husband’s presence, she only has one thing on her mind: getting out. Allison is keeping her husband’s perfect sitcom life intact, but she’s also plotting to murder him and start living her own life.
Annie Murphy showed off her comedy chops in Schitt’s Creek, but she also knows her way around an experimental, ultra-meta dramedy. This series came before work like her Black Mirror episode “Joan is Awful,” but she shows off an impressive range in a niche setting. When she finally escapes her saturated life and ventures out on her own, her Bostonian sitcom sass quickly derails into mania.
But what makes Kevin Can F**k Himself so interesting isn’t just the show-within-the-show concept: it’s the commitment to the bit. While the centerpiece is Allison’s slow spiral into feminine rage, the interstitial sitcom scenes could be pulled from any half-decent multi-camera comedy.
Take, for example, Episode 2, where Kevin spends the entire runtime obsessed with figuring out who stole a framed Bill Belichick sweatshirt delivered to his porch. While we see him plot increasingly elaborate acts of revenge on his neighbors, we also see Allison walking around town in the sweatshirt, enjoying her moment of quiet rebellion.
Kevin Can F**k Himself doubled down on its premise in Season 2, but even outside of the gimmick it’s an affecting story of how pop culture can allow audiences to lose empathy for women without noticing, and what happens when those forgotten women fight back. It’s also pretty damn funny, two factors that make it well worth your time.
