Midge builds her “tight ten” routine faster than any comic ever, according to Susie (Alex Borstein), who gets teary at her client’s raw talent. (The butch Susie is so focused on Midge’s prospects that she never gets a crush on her, or on anyone. Neither does Lenny Bruce. For a show about a woman who works blue, it’s oddly prudish.) By the finale of the first season, Midge has a dangerous enemy—Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch), an older star who tells fat jokes, in a fat suit—but, as ever, Midge keeps killing, swatting down sexists. As the crowd roars, her louse of an ex wanders the street, moaning at her talent: “She’s good. She’s good.” The show is downright Sorkinian in its emphasis on Midge’s superiority—and more than a bit Streisandian, too, except that Midge starts and ends as a swan.
Many people found this fantasy invigorating. For me, it felt grating, and not just in terms of verisimilitude—the verbal anachronisms (“totally”), the sitcom clams (“Good talk!”), the cloying Disneyfication of Midge’s Jewish family—but in its central psychology. In The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, sexism exists. But it never gets inside Midge. Her marvelousness comes from the fact that she’s immune, a self-adoring alpha whose routines feel like feminist TED talks, with some “fucks” thrown in. Brosnahan delivers them with moxie, but they’re rarely funny. They’re also the opposite of Rivers’s act, which relied on the tension between looking pretty and calling herself a dog—provoking taboo laughs from the revelation that even this nice girl felt like a loser, desperate, unfuckable.
In Mrs. Maisel, Rivers’s more unsettling qualities—her vengefulness, her perception of women as competitors, her eating disorder—all get displaced onto Midge’s foe, fat-joke Sophie, who lives in an opulent French-themed apartment, like the one Rivers lived in, collects furs, and, like the real Joan, wanted to be a serious actress. It’s as if Rivers has been split into good Joan and bad Joan, because it’s too hard to make such a caustic trailblazer seem cute, to acknowledge how much her success derived from being shaped by misogyny, not from transcending it.
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Believe me, when a TV hit unites women, it’s no fun to be Morales in A Chorus Line, feeling nothing. As with Sherman-Palladino’s earlier shows, the sometimes charming, often irritating Gilmore Girls and the more effectively bittersweet Bunheads, this is a show that is fantastical by design. Why nitpick? Why growl at Midge’s icebox parenting, which the show sees as adorable? Why kvetch about Midge’s greedy father-in-law, a portrait so coarse that it verges on anti-Semitism? Why mutter that, if the series hadn’t magically pushed Rivers’s nightclub origins back into the fifties, it might have had to show her 1961 peers at the Gaslight Café, including Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, figures who are far tougher to sanitize?
So I tried to open my heart to Season 2. People grow, people change—even critics, even shows. But the season begins with a tooth-rottingly twee trip to Paris, followed by a cloying trip to the Catskills, a setting far better served by Dirty Dancing. It veers from one inconsistent family plot to another, with a baffling focus on Joel, who screws around but finds no one who lives up to his ex. (Despite its feminist theme, Mrs. Maisel has more one-line bimbos than Entourage.) There’s loads of ethnic shtick, from chain-smoking Frenchies to an Italian family singing “Funiculì, Funiculà.” Things perk up whenever the focus shifts to the salty, bruised Susie, a scrapper from the Rockaways—but even her plots are marred by dese-and-dose mobsters.
The show’s writers do, to be fair, give their heroine more pushback this season. When she slams male comics (rightly, because they’re pigs), she loses gigs. When she gives a filthy toast at a Catholic wedding, the bride won’t forgive her. (I cheered for the bride.) When her dad catches her using him as material, he gives her the silent treatment. Her act rarely matches her charmed life—why would Midge, so wooed and worshipped, rave about how women are experts on rejection?—but Brosnahan jolts each bit with charisma. Yet, by the finale, nothing adds up. When the season lands on a note of darkness, tied to Lenny Bruce’s routine “All Alone,” it feels unearned. Why should Midge choose art over love? Her patient, supportive boyfriend and her ex think she’s a comic genius. Her childcare is free (and often invisible). No force keeps her from having both, other than her own unacknowledged solipsism.
There are better escape hatches. There’s also high-feminine mythmaking (as well as fashion inspo and more authentic Jewishness) available on less pretentious TV shows, among them Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Claws, Younger, GLOW, Call the Midwife, and Jane the Virgin. But what I’d really recommend is digging up an old copy of This Is My Life, the first movie Nora Ephron directed, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer. Julie Kavner stars as Dottie Ingels, a divorced Jewish comedian from New York, whose quest for fame leads her to ditch her kids. The movie manages to celebrate that choice without stacking the deck. It’s realistic about a sexist industry. It treats Dottie’s children as real people, who are as interesting as she is. It even manages to be funny. There’s more than one way to have it all.
CANDY GIRL
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
The New Yorker, March 30, 2015
The first season of Tina Fey’s follow-up to 30 Rock looked trivial but concealed odd depths.
In the credit sequence for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a trailer-park resident gets interviewed on local TV, only to have his words auto-tuned into a catchy jingle, a variation on a viral meme. Flooded with emotion, the man is struggling to describe a bizarre police rescue, in which four women have emerged from a bunker where they’d been held captive, for years, by the “weird old white dude” next door. “Unbreakable!” the man shouts, waving his arms. “They alive, dammit. But females. Are strong as hell.”
At once crude and affecting (and impossible to get out of your head), the clip operates as shorthand for the show itself, the first post–30 Rock series to be produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Like its opening credits, Kimmy Schmidt is a peculiar, propulsive mash-up of tabloid obsessions, a sitcom about one of the “Indiana mole women,” Kimmy Schmidt, who was kidnapped by the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne in eighth grade. She then endured—the show strongly implies—pretty much what you’d imagine. When Kimmy escapes, however, she doesn’t look wrecked: Instead, her expression is pure sunshine, a toothy grin of astonishment and delight. In her intractable optimism, she shares something with another Indiana native, Leslie Knope, from Parks and Recreation, except that this is a Leslie Knope who has been to hell.
In the first episode, Kimmy and her fellow captives appear on the Today show, where they’re offered an “ambush makeover” and gift bags, then sent off with a cry of “Thank you, victims!” As the van heads out, Kimmy makes a run for it. Rather than go back to her hometown, she decides, she’ll reinvent herself in Manhattan: She’ll get a job, an apartment, and a life in which no one sees her as damaged goods. She finds a batty landlady, played by Carol Kane, and an outrageous roommate, Titus Andromedon (played by Tituss Burgess, who was D’Fwan on 30 Rock’s Real Housewives parody, Queen of Jordan); she also finds a boss, Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski), an Upper East Side trophy wife, whom Kimmy initially mistakes for another captive—because, after a face peel, Jacqueline isn’t allowed to step outside her gated town house. “Is that your reverend?” Kimmy asks, seeing a portrait of Jacqueline’s husband. “Did he peel your face? Do you need help?” She does need help, actually: Kimmy becomes her assistant.
Fey and Carlock sold the show to NBC under the title Tooken, but the network eventually passed—at which point Netflix stepped in, committing to two seasons. In the context of cable comedy, Kimmy Schmidt is a very odd bird. Plenty of ambitious series do dark material, but they match their insides to their outsides: They’re dramedies, like Getting On, or indie-inflected auteurist shows, like Louie and Girls; sometimes they’re caustic satires, in the tradition of the original British version of The Office. Kimmy Schmidt, on the other hand, is network bright. It’s all ne
on pink and Peeps yellow, energized by the Muppet-like intensity of Ellie Kemper’s performance as Kimmy, and packed, like 30 Rock, with surreal zingers. At times, it resembles a Nickelodeon tween show—which is just how its heroine might imagine her own life. Yet, without any contradiction, it’s also a sitcom about a rape survivor.
The show doesn’t address sexual violence head-on; it’s possible to watch without dwelling on the details. But Kimmy’s ugly history comes through, in inference and in sly, unsettling jokes about trauma, jagged bits that puncture what is a colorful fish-out-of-water comedy. The backstory that emerges combines elements from a number of familiar tabloid stories: those of Katie Beers (abducted from her abusive family, kept in an underground bunker), Elizabeth Smart (snatched from her bedroom by a self-styled messiah), Jaycee Dugard (abducted from her front yard), and the three women who were rescued two years ago in Cleveland, after having been beaten and raped for years by Ariel Castro. At times, the story feels inspired by Michelle Knight, one of Castro’s victims, who wrote a memoir called Finding Me. Like Kimmy, Knight had no family to go back to; her upbringing was a horror. But, to judge from newspaper profiles, she has not merely survived the abuse—she’s resilient and downright giggly, a fan of karaoke and dancing, angels and affirmations. It’s a powerfully girlish model of human toughness.
Kimmy’s vision of the good life has exactly that vibe: She wants to enjoy what she’s missed out on. Roaming around New York, she binges on candy, like a crazed toddler. She buys sparkly sneakers. Peppy and curious to the point of naivete, she acts as if she’d learned about life from sitcoms—she gets into a love triangle, she goes back to school, she’s eager for every party. But there’s also something tense and over-chipper about Kimmy’s zest, an artificial quality that even the cartoonish characters around her can sense is “off.” Yes, there was “weird sex stuff” in the bunker, she blurts out to her roommate. She has an unexplained Velcro phobia. At night, she wakes up from a fugue state and finds herself rinsing off a knife in the shower or attacking her roommate. (“This isn’t the Chinatown bus!” Titus tells her. “You can’t just choke people who are sleeping.”) When Kimmy decides to take things to “the next level” with her new boyfriend, she mashes his face with the heel of her palm and tries to overpower him. She marvels, “All the stuff I thought I knew was way wrong.”
This is rare material for a sitcom. But it’s not unusual for modern television, which has been experiencing an uptick in stories about sexual violence—a subject once reserved for Lifetime and Law & Order. Here’s a partial list of dramas in which at least one central character has been raped: Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, American Horror Story, Outlander, The Americans, The Fall, The Fosters, Scandal, Top of the Lake, How to Get Away with Murder, and Switched at Birth. You could call this a copycat phenomenon, but I’d argue that better roles for actresses made it happen: When women’s lives are taken seriously, sexual violence is going to be part of the drama.
For some critics, these recurrent rape stories seem cheap and exploitative—a way to show violent sex in the guise of social commentary or, in other cases, to insert a sad backstory to justify a woman’s harshness. There are definitely examples of this: A scene in Game of Thrones last season in which an evil brother overpowered his evil sister (who was also his evil lover—this is Game of Thrones we’re talking about) was so incoherently conceived that it couldn’t separate kink from assault. But what’s striking is that most such plots, in genres from camp melodrama to domestic fiction, are skillfully handled. Well-drawn characters like Mellie Grant on Scandal, Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans, and Callie Jacob on The Fosters may be rape survivors, but that’s not where their stories stop. They’re more than their worst day.
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In Kimmy’s sparkliest dreams, that’s how she hopes the world will see her, too. Like many newbie sitcoms, Kimmy Schmidt stumbles, at times, to find its tone—and, with thirteen episodes launched at once, it doesn’t have the freedom to rejigger itself. A few characters flop, such as Kimmy’s Gomer Pyle–ish stepdad. While jokes about race were a strength of 30 Rock, in Kimmy Schmidt they have a lower hit rate. Titus, an effervescently gay, black failed actor from Mississippi, pulls off every daring gag. (He also gets the best subplots, including a truly silly music video called “Pinot Noir,” by which he means “black penis.”) But Kimmy’s Vietnamese boyfriend, Dong, is bland, and one of her fellow hostages, a Latina maid, is a cipher. As Arthur Chu wrote in a sharp essay for Slate, the problem isn’t that the show’s hackier ethnic jokes are rude, it’s that they’re not rude enough—they don’t explode stereotypes with real daring and specificity.
When it comes to jokes about trauma, however, the show takes more risks. Kimmy buries her PTSD attacks in a SoulCycle–like class, only to find that she has submitted to another cult. She dates a Second World War veteran, since he’s the perfect shrink: He’s too senile to remember what she tells him. In one of the show’s funniest episodes, Kimmy and Jacqueline bond over their desire to hide any sign of sadness—an “outside in” philosophy. When Kimmy is disturbed by seeing her first selfie, Jacqueline takes her to her plastic surgeon, played by a deranged Martin Short, his face perverted into gargoyle features. Dr. Grant (pronounced Franff) is fascinated by Kimmy’s appearance: “Absolutely no sun damage, but you’ve clearly experienced a tremendous amount of stress. Are you a coal miner? Submarine captain? Because you have very distinct scream lines. Where did those come from, I wonder.”
In the pilot, Titus tells Kimmy to go home to Indiana; he’s trying to protect her. “Protect me from what?” she snorts. “The worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard.” The line echoes an incident from Fey’s life: At five, in her family’s yard, she was slashed by a mentally ill stranger, leaving her with a scar—a distinctive but not defining feature. It’s not the type of experience you’d think would inspire comedy, but that’s the key to Kimmy Schmidt’s ambition: By making horrible things funny, it suggests that surviving could be more than just living on. It could be a kind of freedom, too.
CONFESSIONS OF THE HUMAN SHIELD
I’d originally planned to write a few straightforward essays about television for this anthology: one on collaboration, one on “bad fan theory,” one on morality and TV—I hadn’t decided yet. Instead, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, the #MeToo movement started, and this is what I wrote instead.
Well into my twenties, Woody Allen was my North Star. The first movie I ever saw was Bananas, back when I was just five years old, snuggled up in my pajamas at a drive-in with my parents. In junior high school, I read Allen’s three books of comic essays, Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Getting Even, giggling at my favorites, especially “The Whore of Mensa,” a satire about lonely johns who hire intellectual prostitutes to discuss Ezra Pound. I wore out my vinyl records of Allen’s stand-up performances from the mid-sixties. I could recite his routine “The Moose” by heart, imitating his inflections. (“He and the Berkowitzes lock antlers in the living room.”)
Allen’s sensibility became the base coat for nearly everything about my identity as a teenage girl: my notion of what was funny and what was sophisticated, my idea of what intellectual and romantic adult life might consist of—my larger vision of what it meant to be a writer in New York, to have a broken heart, to have taste, to have a nervous breakdown, to have a cocktail party. Although my boss at The New Yorker once told me that Allen’s movie Manhattan had become unwatchable, I’ve watched it at least twenty times. Decades earlier, I had gotten tickets with a friend to see the director play clarinet at Café Carlyle, which was a thrill even though I hate jazz. The point was to see my hero in person.
Around sixteen, I had a dream that I still remember, decades later. In it, I went to visit Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in the Hamptons. At the time, the two of them were a famous celebrity couple, and I had been charmed by newspaper accounts of them waving towel
s at one another from separate apartments across Central Park (a story that makes much less sense now that I’ve been to Central Park). In the dream, I’d baked Allen chocolate chip cookies, but I packed them inside one of those fancy round gift tins, the kind for expensive store-bought desserts, the sort of gift you’d bring to impress a rich friend. I was worried that because of the way the cookies were wrapped, he wouldn’t understand that mine were homemade.
You could come up with a Freudian interpretation for that dream—that would certainly be on-brand for Woody Allen—but to me, it’s a pure fan dream. It’s about wanting the artist you care for to know that your admiration for them is authentic, genuine, and from the heart.
When Dylan Farrow’s heart-stabbing open letter was printed in The New York Times in 2014, it was aimed specifically at people like me. “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” it began. “Before you answer, you should know: When I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house.” By then, I was ready to read it. Allen hadn’t been my hero for many years—a slow decline, over decades, as his movies got worse and his reputation degraded, on parallel tracks. In a detective-like way, with an anxious, unhappy, obsessive focus that was the exact mirror image of fanhood, I’d gulped down every book ever written about Allen, including biographies both authorized and unauthorized, as well as Maureen Orth’s coverage of the child molestation allegations in Vanity Fair, plus all those essays by Allen’s friends that were meant to defend his reputation (and central to that process, attack Mia Farrow’s) but mostly made Allen look worse, like a manipulator who was surrounded by sycophants. I was no longer agnostic about the question of whether Woody Allen was innocent of molesting his young daughter, or even whether he was “not guilty,” those two linked but separate existential states. I believed her account.
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