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Kevin and Allison in a scene from "Kevin Can F ** ck Himself": Welcome to a good old sitcom - you think
Photo:
Jojo Whilden / AMC / AMC / Amazon
The woman serves the man his breakfast.
Does he roll his eyes and say: "What did I say about green stuff on my food?" The woman replies: "But that's only parsley as a garnish." Then the man: "On scrambled eggs and hot dogs?
No, thank you! ”He puts on a shark grin and sticks the few papers in his mouth, but then throws them behind the sofa.
Plus laughter from the tape.
Welcome to a good old sitcom where the cheapest jokes were made at the expense of women.
This was the norm until the very recent past.
However, with "Kevin Can F ** ck Himself" everything is different from what it appears at first glance.
Cut.
The woman alone in the kitchen.
She furiously hits an empty glass on the work surface so that a shard digs into her hand.
Suddenly the picture is no longer brightly lit like in cheap TV shows.
Shadows lurk in the background, the colors have faded.
And the canned laughs too.
"Kevin Can F ** ck Himself" is a bitter satire on TV conventions.
Not exactly subtle, but extremely effective meta-television, which throws a bright spotlight on a social development and its representation on the screens.
And shows in a striking way how poisoned many gags were that most viewers laughed about yesterday.
For years, Allison (Annie Murphy) has endured the daily humiliations of her husband Kevin (Eric Petersen). Outwardly, he's in his thirties with a potbelly and frog eyes, but emotionally on the same level as a spoiled five-year-old. His hobbies include eating, drinking and making stupid jokes, preferably with his dumb-to-be-friend friend Neil and his father. Still, Allison is banking on a fresh start in a new, bigger, nicer house. Against Kevin's resistance, for whom any change is a horror. However, when Allison learns that Kevin has secretly spent her savings on senseless fan articles, she changes her plans. New target now: murder Kevin.
"Kevin Can F ** ck Himself" makes hardly any concealed reference to the sitcom "Kevin Can Wait" (2016-18) with Kevin James as a macho cop, whose tirades, moods and problems the whole series world revolved around. At best, women were cues. The dramaturgical trick in "Kevin Can F ** ck Himself" looks like a late revenge with the freedoms of modern series narration: only female characters break out of the ugly, cheap sitcom world into a sophisticated television drama with modern imagery to be allowed to.
The focus is on Allison with her murder plan, which she intends to implement using strong painkillers.
Patty, Neil's sister, who has always liked to take part in the teasing directed at Allison, but now tries her own emancipation from the toxic world of men, is supposed to get her pills.
It crunches at the dramaturgical seams
On the one hand a caricature of a sitcom, a television genre that breaks down social reality into a gag parade, and on the other a drama about drugs, a lack of perspective and a lower one sinking into the opioid crisis, reminiscent of »Breaking Bad« Middle class: It should come as no surprise that the dramaturgical seams of this experiment are considerably crunching.
One wonders why Allison endured this hell for so long and why she willingly returns over and over again in the course of the story, in which she slowly frees herself from it. Especially because Kevin and Neil are so overblown that you can never take them seriously as opponents for Allison.
This discrepancy increases in the course of the eight episodes, because Allison and Patty are told more and more differentiated, while Kevin and Neil do not develop anything. But it is precisely the ever-widening gap that transforms the sitcom scenes into a horror show. After a few episodes, the question arises as to which is creepier: the hopelessness into which Allison maneuvers with her marriage and her plans to kill - or the monotony of manic, thigh-thumping, brutal humor that paints a world that maybe not really already a thing of the past.