Kevin Can F**K Himself isn't Just Taking Aim at Sitcoms

**Minimal Spoilers**

Something that’s interesting about TV is that because it’s so formulaic, shows can be in direct dialogue with their predecessors. More than film, genres have really rigid conventions that shape everything from story to lighting and setting to the physical confines of runtime. When you turn on a family sitcom from any era—whether it’s All in the Family or Everybody Loves Raymond or King of Queens—you know what you’re getting 9 times out of 10.

Some people find this really boring, but it also opens the door for really interesting commentary. This is exactly the place Kevin Can F**K Himself, the AMC show starring Annie Murphy, thrives in.

The show takes place in Worcester, Massachusetts and focuses on Allison, the wife of Kevin McRoberts. Kevin is the kind of manchild you’d expect to find in one of these sitcom families: he’s self-centered to the nth degree – completely oblivious to anything that isn’t about him. Whenever Kevin is on screen, the show is shot in the style of a sitcom that might bear his name in the title (Kevin Can F**K Himself is a not-so-subtle riff on the Kevin James sitcom Kevin Can Wait, which killed off Kevin’s season 1 wife off-screen).

But Kevin Can F**K Himself, isn’t about Kevin, it’s about Allison, the wife who is so often just a prop for the male lead. Whenever Kevin leaves the room, the show takes on the look of a gritty drama. The saturated colors and laugh track drain from the world, leaving us with a reflection of what life is like for Allison.

Allison’s dreams of leaving Worcester—the place that has seemingly sucked her life out of her—come crashing down when she learns that Kevin has lost all their savings, and she decides to kill him.

I will note that this show strikes a special note with me, as I grew up right next to Worcester and moved cross-country when I looked up and realized I’d lived almost 30 years in one place. The show absolutely nails Worcester too. I mean, this is a city famous for its Barstool Sports knockoff website Turtle Boy, named after the statue that sits outside the public library and depicts a boy having a little too much fun with a turtle. Kevin might have actually designed it.

Kevin Can F**K Himself makes an obvious but artful commentary about the nature of these sitcoms and how they excuse the actions of obnoxious men and peddle in simmering misogyny. The sitcom side of Kevin Can F**K Himself usually follows some wacky hijinks featuring Kevin, his best friend Neil, and his father Pete. In one episode they create a wedding themed escape room in the McRoberts basement, in another they have a chili cookoff. The best case scenario for Allison is that she’s ignored completely, like when Kevin tries to juggle his birthday dinner with her and Neil. The worst case scenario leaves her as the butt of the joke, picking the pieces of exploded chili out of her hair.

Everything in Kevin’s world revolves around him, he single handedly warps reality by entering a scene. Every time we return to the sitcom from Allison’s show, the laugh track rings more and more hollow. Back in the heyday of The Big Bang Theory (and then again when Friends blew up on Netflix), there was a trend of removing the laugh track from scenes on YouTube to show how bad they were.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY0Zkthn8Og

I made a video about this a little while back, but the problem with the laugh track isn’t that it exists but that it can be used to gloss over bad jokes. In The Big Bang Theory video above, the absence of the laugh track brings attention to the sexism inherent in the show, or as Pop Culture Detective calls it—Adorkable Misogyny.

When we toggle between this sitcom setting and Allison’s reality, the contrast forces us to see how there is a social culture that allows and encourages such relaxed chauvinism. It is deconstruction at its finest.

All of that commentary makes the show good, but what makes it great is that it is also commenting on the nature of the other genre on the show—the gritty drug drama. Allison and Patty become tangled in the local oxycodone trade through Allison’s first idea of killing Kevin (a drug overdose). Patty’s been dealing for a little while now, but when her connection dries up due to a drug bust, a customer who’s been selling on his own comes looking for more. Patty and Allison team up to try to solve both of their problems at the same time and a bond is formed.

The Patty and Allison bond is the emotional spine of the season and it’s not hard to see its parallels in other grimey crime shows from Breaking Bad’s Walt and Jesse to Ozark’s Marty and Ruth. These are two characters who find themselves in a tough spot and are using the drug trade to solve both their money problems and to break out of the life rut they find themselves in.

These shows feature characters embracing their antihero persona and engage in a cycle of self-destruction. While fans of these shows have often idolized some of the most toxic elements of these protagonists, these are stories about the downward spirals of middle-aged men, and they rarely end well.

In response to the Difficult Man style, we’ve seen a number of Difficult Women shows arise in response, shows that similarly allow their female characters the same latitude as the very serious men.

We’ve had Fleabag, Girls, Sex and the City, Weeds, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I May Destroy You, Killing Eve, Homeland, UnReal, Nurse Jackie, and now Kevin Can F**K Himself. But more than maybe any other show on this list, Kevin Can F**K Himself is using its antihero to make a commentary on those male antihero shows.

Allison is planning a murder after all. Kevin might be the absolute worst, but killing him is a pretty extreme step. We understand where Allison is coming from, of course. The show’s stylistic switching roots us in her perspective and Kevin is really, really unbearable. Like truly unbearable.

But Allison is also spiraling quickly out of control. She has no real plan for what happens after she kills Kevin, and spends the season self-destructing. She reconnects with an old flame named Sam, a former alcoholic who used to cheat on his girlfriend with Allison but has gotten his life together. He’s sober and he’s faithful, but Allison’s newfound thrill seeking has them start up an affair again.

This is not to say that the shows I mentioned above don’t have self-destructive female protagonists, but that Kevin Can F**K Himself’s drama half is in direct conversation with a show like Breaking Bad. It knows how much we want to root for Allison to break free from both Kevin and the outdated show he represents, but it also is subtly nudging us to think twice.

Kevin Can F**K Himself finds itself at the convergence of a long time television debate. In her excellent collection of essays titled I Like To Watch, legendary critic Emily Nussbaum writes extensively about which shows we choose to take seriously as a culture. She compares Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, two of the most influential shows of all time, writing “From my perspective, both of the shows were equally radical interventions into their medium: one of them was a mindblowing mob genre drama about postwar capitalism and Boomer masculinity, the other a blazing feminist genre experiment about mortality in sex. But only one of the shows transcended television. The other was television.”

Some of the most critically acclaimed shows of the past 20 years have been those that reject television conventions. The rise of the auteur comedy show (ex. Louie, Atlanta, and Master of None) have been praised for their singular visions, their intricate camerawork, and importantly their seriousness. We are all too eager to dunk on the multi-camera sitcom format as outdated. Sitcoms aren’t for serious viewers, they have a laugh track after all!

Kevin Can F**K Himself needles those sitcoms, of course, but I think that contrast works both ways. It’s fitting that the unserious part of the show is focused on a type of arrested development masculinity, while the serious half is focused on a female character who just wants to throw back margs on the beach. It’s not the grittyness itself that makes that half of Kevin Can F**K Himself great, it’s that it’s being told from a new perspective. Sitcoms and laugh tracks aren’t inherently bad, but they have been used as cover for rampant sexism and misogyny. Likewise, dark dramas aren’t inherently good, and have often used the style of film and CINEMA to do just the same thing.