AMC’s new TV series Kevin Can F**k Himself is such an inventive satire that in a more just world, it would kill the worst impulses of the classic American family sitcom for good. For every series that propels the medium forward like The Bob Newhart Show or more recently The Carmichael Show, there are three more that boast pernicious sitcom stereotypes and regressive humor: mainly, the schlubby, man-child husband and the doting, out-of-his-league, and unconditionally supportive wife like Everybody Loves Raymond or the Tim Allen grunting vehicles Home Improvement and Last Man Standing.
Kevin Can Fk Himself creator Valerie Armstrong, a former writer for the great, gone too soon AMC series Lodge 49, knows this well. A fan of the genre growing up, she started to see how pervasive and problematic these tropes were in adulthood and started to wonder what a show would look like that focuses solely on the inner life of the generic sitcom wife. In what she describes to the New York Times as a “feminist fit of rage,” she wrote Kevin Can Fk Himself, now airing on AMC and AMC+. It’s the year’s most thrilling and darkly funny new show, and its title is an apparent reference to the popular CBS Kevin James sitcom Kevin Can Wait, which infamously and ridiculously killed off his on-screen wife played by Erinn Hayes and replaced her for James’ old King of Queens castmate Leah Remini.
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By just honing in on the most under-appreciated character in traditional sitcoms, Kevin Can Fk Himself would already be subversive but the show tackles its subject in revolutionary ways. The show follows Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy), a blue-collar Worcester, Massachusetts housewife who works at a liquor store and who’s married to the titular Kevin (Eric Petersen), a total doofus. When they appear on screen together, Kevin Can Fk Himself is shot like a multicam sitcom: there’s a studio audience laugh track, bright lighting, and outdated jokes at Allison’s expense. But when Allison is in a different room from her asshole partner, the perspective shifts and the show becomes single cam, darkly shot like Better Call Saul or The Americans, complete with a foreboding soundtrack, and no studio audience to cackle at their marital strife. It’s a wholly effective storytelling device where the jumps from sunny sitcom to brooding drama are just as jarring and disorienting as Allison’s emotional life as a neglected partner.
On a lesser series, writers would neglect the sitcom element in this show-within-a-show format in service of the prestige-style drama. By committing so hard to creating an uncanny classic sitcom structure and abruptly shifting back to Allison’s depressing perspective, it forces the viewer to not only empathize with her but also think more critically about the regressive network comedies that have been so ubiquitous in American pop culture. At one point, when Allison tries to convince Kevin to buy a new house and hopefully live a better life, her neighbor Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden) reveals Kevin blew their life savings on worthless sports memorabilia and lied about it. This is Allison’s radicalization: She fantasizes about stabbing Kevin with a broken beer mug, killing him, and escaping, and her plan to actually kill Kevin becomes the narrative arc of the first four episodes of the series provided to the press.
Even with a premise this unflinching, Kevin Can F**k Himself doesn’t really wallow in the darkness or get overly bleak. It does get close though, especially in episodes where Allison tries to acquire opioids so she can get her husband to overdose. Despite several moments where the depravity gets overwhelming, both Murphy’s and Petersen’s performances are so electric and the writing is so sharp it softens the blow. Murphy, whose role is night-and-day compared to the self-obsessed fashion maven in her breakout series Schitt’s Creek, is especially compelling in the way she can jump from the ideal sitcom wife in the multicam scenes to rage-filled would-be murderer in the single-cam scenes. But Petersen’s Kevin provides so much chaotic energy to his role, which he says was inspired by “Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners and Peter Griffin in Family Guy” nails his character so perfectly, he could’ve been the next Kevin James in another career.
While Kevin’s ultimate fate is unclear, whether or not he survives isn’t really the point of the series. Instead, the show is about one woman’s epiphany that she deserves a better life. Sitcoms have provided escapism with the onscreen nuclear families that are aspirational for upholding societal norms, for better and worse, but Kevin Can F**k Himself finds its North Star in Allison’s escape.
