The Profoundly Well-Timed Return of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’

A pre-#MeToo show about survival has exactly the right spirit for 2020 — and offers some hope, too

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
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Published in
5 min readMay 13, 2020

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Photo: Universal Television/Getty Images

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was a show made for dark times. When it premiered in 2015, its premise — Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) a teenage girl held underground by a John Jamelske-esque kidnapper, escapes and moves to New York City, still with the mindset of a small child — sounded like a mean-spirited rape joke. Laughing at what happened to Kimmy was cruel; laughing at her was worse. Instead, in what feels like a minor miracle, the show did neither: It told a story about class and gender and the difficulties of navigating a world run by predatory, powerful men that also managed to be profoundly fun.

Its newly released special, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. The Reverend, comes at a time when those questions of power and violence are on everyone’s mind: Both of the men running for president have been accused of sexual assault, the #MeToo movement has been declared “dead” many times over, and the world is falling apart so theatrically that Kimmy’s manic, irrepressible cheer feels unthinkable. As Kimmy would probably insist, that’s a sign we need her now more than ever.

Gimmicks aside, the special is about Kimmy’s…

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Jude Ellison S. Doyle
Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Written by Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.