Just about any casual sitcom viewer will recognize the predicament that ensnares Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy) in AMC’s Kevin Can F**k Himself. Her husband, Kevin, (Eric Petersen) is a boorish man-child, a cable guy who’s prone to coming up with hare-brained schemes and using a little whiteboard to track how many times he’s “won” against the world. Theirs is marriage beaten down into routine, and Allison’s only defense is her snarky, laugh-track-assisted asides. Mostly, she tends to either be ignored or suffer whatever misfortunes come courtesy of Kevin and his gang, which includes his father (Brian Howe) and their omnipresent neighbors, Neil (Alex Bonifer) and Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden). These characters all have big Boston-adjacent accents, as if to augment the broad, mugging performances expected from the average brightly lit, multi-camera sitcom.
Kevin Can F**k Himself depicts Allison’s disdain and disconnection with a succinct filmmaking flourish: The scenes without Kevin are all shot in a single-camera format with dreary lighting and no laugh track to speak of, creating the impression of a real space rather than a stage in front of a live audience. It’s the “real world” to the sitcom universe that goes wherever Kevin does, where something like Allison’s hand injury is conspicuously absent until he leaves the room and we return to the unfiltered reality where she daydreams about murdering him.
In much the same way that relaying a comedic scene with a straight face out of context might sound unintentionally unfortunate or horrifying, the familiar persona of the lovable schlub husband has done real, seemingly oblivious harm to Allison. In a sitcom context, secretly dipping into their savings account or accidentally getting her fired might be played for laughs, with any real grievances forgotten by the next episode. But in Kevin Can F**k Himself, these actions thwart Allison’s attempts to assert some level of independence over her life.
The show’s visual hook is so clean and easily understood that little of the ensuing explanatory groundwork feels necessary. The switch between the formats is stark enough to suggest an unbridgeable divide in terms of how Allison and Kevin perceive the world, and Murphy’s performance allows Allison’s discontent to leak out through an otherwise chipper personality with total clarity. And yet in spite of these perfectly credible details, Kevin Can F**k Himself laboriously shows its work for fear that the audience won’t go along with Allison’s homicidal resolve. Thankfully, the series leaves some of the rougher edges to the character intact, but watching each 40-minute episode gradually sand down the rest is a tedious process that only makes the show less angry and engaging than it initially suggests.
While Kevin’s segments could easily slot into your average network sitcom, the contrast with Allison’s perspective is crystal clear without needing to cram a conventional sitcom storyline into each episode. These types of shows are so firmly entrenched in our cultural memory that the premise of Kevin Can F**k Himself could easily be communicated in the space of a brief comedy sketch. The show’s insistence on doubling down on genre tropes before attacking them doesn’t feel cutting and modern so much as a pointless burden on the pacing. Only when the show gives more space to Patty, examining her desire to be accepted as “one of the boys” while forming a reluctant friendship with Allison, does it begin to justify its runtime.
As far as the first four episodes provided to press for review portray, the single and multi-camera division is metaphorical rather than literal, with little indication of any further visual invention or a suggestion that the characters are all caught in something like a cosmic version of The Truman Show. Kevin Can F**k Himself is a series about rebellion with a format that feels rebellious in only the most superficial sense, an effective visual statement that ultimately doesn’t do much more than very slowly mash together two eminently familiar TV staples, the bland sitcom and the escalating problems faced by a character who breaks bad.
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