Kevin Can F**k Himself is the Kevin Can Wait/Breaking Bad Hybrid We Never Knew We Needed
A little over a decade ago, I had what I saw as a brilliant idea for my fifth book. It would be an exhaustive exploration of 1990s pop culture called The Simpsons Decade.
The book’s premise was that the 1990s represented a unique, utopian era in American life, politics, and pop culture. We’d kicked the Soviet Union’s butt in the Cold War (USA! USA! USA!), and the miraculous power of the internet would make all our lives ideal imminently.
It was a time of relative peace and prosperity when the biggest political scandal involved a sketchy dude getting a blowjob from someone who was not his wife.
Because everything was now perfect, pop culture turned inward and explored what was then the greatest force known to man: television. The internet would soon usurp television’s malevolent power, in no small part because it made watching television easier and more enjoyable.
The seminal comedy of the 1990s was self-referential, post-modern, and obsessed with television.
The Simpsons is many things. It could be argued, persuasively, that it is about everything. But it is also, on a fundamental level, a television show about the joys and horrors of television.
I failed to sell The Simpsons Decade to my former publisher, Scribner. They were still salty at me on account of my books losing money for them. Then, I somehow managed to sell the column to Rotten Tomatoes when they were in a curious, quickly abandoned fever to work with me.
Rotten Tomatoes had no idea how to sell The Simpsons Decade to their audience. I don’t blame them. In my neurodivergent brain, the idea had incredible commercial appeal.
As far as I knew, it was the first ambitious unifying theory of 1990s pop culture and comedy. And it had The Simpsons in the title. Everyone knows and loves The Simpsons. They’re better than ever! There’s a reason that it has been on the air for well over a century.
I probably don’t need to tell you, dear reader, that the column failed. Oh, sweet Lord, did it fail. It failed first as a book proposal and then as a Rotten Tomatoes column, and finally, as a column here that I didn’t continue because it was wildly unpopular and something that I will always associate with failure.
I’m resurrecting the melancholy ghost of The Simpsons Decade because the darkly comic Kevin Can F**k Himself would be perfect for The Simpsons Decade if it had aired in the 1990s and not from 2021 to 2022.
Kevin Can F**k Himself is self-referential. It’s post-modern, and it is obsessed with the comforting cliches and conventions of television comedy and drama.
The lazy shorthand for Kevin Can F**k Himself is that it is a show that somehow combines Breaking Bad and Kevin Can Wait.
That’s an audacious conceit. Breaking Bad and Kevin Can Wait aren’t just very different shows; they are antithetical. They don’t just represent different genres; they seemingly inhabit different worlds.
Kevin Can F**k finds the dark, revelatory places where these shows overlap and blur in their depiction of toxic masculinity.
Dark dramas like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men depict toxic masculinity as a tragedy that destroys lives and families and maintains a poisonous status quo. Sitcoms, in sharp contrast, tend to see toxic masculinity as a load of laughs and certainly nothing to think too hard about, or at all.
Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy stars as Allison. She’s the smart, funny, beautiful, long-suffering wife of the titular Kevin McRoberts (Eric Peterson), a narcissistic man-child who stubbornly refuses to grow up or treat his wife with the sensitivity and concern she deserves.
Until the final episode, when Kevin is onscreen, Kevin Can F**k Himself takes the form of a 1980s-style two-camera sitcom that’s brightly lit and permeated with the braying artificiality of canned laughter.
In these sequences, Kevin comes off as a lovable loser, a casually charismatic neighborhood guy with a gift for roping people who should know better into his harebrained schemes.
Kevin’s need for attention is a black hole that sucks in everything around it, including his troubled best friend/sidekick Neil (Alex Bonifer) and father Peter "Pete" McRoberts (Brian Howe).
In segments that nail the look, feel, and sound of traditional sitcoms, Allison responds wryly to her husband’s childish misadventures. She’s the perfect combination of mother, wife, servant, and caretaker.
Allison puts on a good front, but she is dying inside. Years of putting her needs, wants, and desires aside to serve a man who doesn’t appreciate anything have left her miserable and lonely.
She doesn’t just resent her husband and his selfish refusal to grow up and do his part; she despises him. She wants him dead. She’s suffered long enough; now she feels compelled to take action before she’s an old woman looking back bitterly at a life dominated by a man she hates.
When Allison leaves the brightly lit, canned laughter-filled world of her life with Kevin, the show’s look changes dramatically. Two-camera comedy is replaced by single-camera drama as Allison tries to find an escape from a life she cannot live anymore.
She was the quintessential long-suffering wife until she reached a point where she couldn’t suffer anymore.
The all-too-relatable protagonist hits upon the darkest possible way out of her dilemma: killing Kevin. Divorcing him is not enough; his pull is too strong. In order to have him out of her life for good, he needs to stop living.
Allison finds an ally in her escape plans in Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden), her next-door neighbor and Neil’s excessively indulgent sister. Patty is tough except when dealing with her brother.
She’s tart-tongued, prickly, and seemingly unremarkable. Like Allison, however, she leads a secret, criminal life far from the forced bonhomie of sitcom life at Kevin’s home.
Patty sells pills to her customers at the hair salon where she works. When Allison needs assistance in her quest to get rid of Kevin for good, she steps up, in part because life in Worcester, Massachusetts, is so goddamn boring that she needs a thrill, even of the dangerous and illicit variety.
Allison needs to leave her home, literally and figuratively, to be treated like someone with dignity whose feelings matter. She falls into a fling with Sam (Raymond Lee), a married high school friend who remembers her as she once was. He knew a more confident, assured Allison whose inner light had not been snuffed out by life’s casual cruelty.
Like Breaking Bad, Kevin Can F**k Himself is about how a seemingly average person can resort to criminality if pushed far enough. However, there’s nothing particularly average about Walter White/Heisenberg, an Einstein-level science genius with a Pablo Escobar-style gift for crime.
Allison is funny and smart and beautiful. In that respect she’s just like many of the sitcom wives of chubby losers who think only of themselves and their own selfish needs.
The hot wife of a goober of a husband is a hackneyed sitcom cliche that Kevin Can F**k eviscerates by articulating the darkness, bitterness, iniquity, and casual sexism lurking just underneath the blindingly bright surface.
Allison’s relationship with Patty is particularly fascinating
They’re very different people with many of the same concerns. Allison’s misguided selflessness empowers her husband to believe, with good reason, that he can get away with anything. On a similar note, Patty’s excessive kindness towards a brother who lives with her but does not pay rent allows him to remain a selfish child deep into adulthood.
They’re smart, grown-up women afflicted with man babies who take and take and take yet feel no responsibility to give back.
The arc of Allison and Patty’s relationship, from guarded mutual distrust to deep friendship bordering on love, feels organic and earned, largely due to Inboden’s stubbornly non-sentimental performance.
I was intrigued by Kevin Can F**k Himself because of my fondness for Murphy and its audacious premise but also because two of my favorite podcasters wrote for it. The Best Show’s Tom Scharpling worked on the first season, and Sean Clements wrote and produced both seasons, in addition to playing Patty’s nothing of a boyfriend in a few episodes.
Clements is incredibly sharp and funny on Hollywood Handbook, so it’s fascinating seeing him play a faded grey sweatshirt of a human being.
Patty later develops a romantic relationship with Detective Tammy Ridgeway (Candice Coke). She’s every bit as blunt and no-nonsense as Patty, but they are on opposite sides of the law when Allison’s attempts to rid herself of Kevin go awry, leaving her to scramble for a plan B.
That plan B takes the form of faking her death as a way of freeing herself from Kevin permanently.
As Kevin Can F**k Himself grows progressively darker and deeper, the fuzzy lines separating the sitcom wackiness from dramatic intensity begin to blur.
Characters from the sitcom side turn up in single-camera scenes where the faux cheerfulness that is the default mode of the traditional sitcom is replaced with something much grimmer and more authentic.
When Allison’s initial plans fail, she resorts to an option only slightly less dramatic homicide: faking her death.
The sitcom aspect of Kevin Can F**k is exactly as good and bad as it needs to be. It might represent a horrible, toxic fiction with the power to ruin real lives, but the broad comedy element is not without a certain cornball charm.
The same is true of Kevin himself. We know that he is a monster and that he has ruined Allison’s life, but he also has a certain cheeseball magnetism that makes you almost like him.
Murphy is equally brilliant as a broad comic actress and a dramatic lead, while Peterson's Jackie Gleason/Kevin James big guy energy is perfect for the role and the show.
Kevin Can F**k Himself captures the oddly irresistible charm of hacky sitcoms as well as their fundamental insidiousness.
Kevin Can F**k Himself ends with the mask coming off, and Kevin luxuriating in the kind of rage and hatred that he has been repressing. The ugliness oozes out, and we see him for who he really is, as opposed to how he sees himself.
The two-season wonder is equally compelling as a comedy and a drama, but it also works splendidly as a darkly comic exploration of white male privilege, both individually and as a culture. At its core, it is a warning about the damage wreaked by treating arrogant white men with deference because they’re arrogant white men and demand it, not because they deserve it.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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