In a handful of warmly lit, multicam scenes punctuated by a laugh track, Schitt’s Creek alum and actual Emmy winner Annie Murphy appears to be playing the role of the gorgeous, long-suffering wife in the kind of crass, casually misogynistic sitcom that stars Kevin James.
Premiering June 20 on AMC and already available to stream on the AMC+ app, Kevin Can F**K Himself certainly does what it has been promising to do since the project was announced, in 2018: Murphy stars as Allison, a “beauty paired with a less attractive, dismissive, caveman-like husband who gets to be a jerk because she’s a nag and he’s ‘funny.’” If only the show crafted a worthwhile plot around this eternally disrespected character or meaningfully interrogated the messages TV sends about gender and class, instead of getting bogged down in faithfully recreating the thing it’s critiquing.
Set in the post-industrial environs of Worcester, Mass., Kevin the multicam sitcom hovers around the living room and kitchen of Allison and Kevin McRoberts .
In this desaturated realm, we get to know the real Allison, who fantasizes about a sophisticated life marked by gleaming Nancy Meyers-style kitchens and mornings spent at a seaside cafe with a copy of Ulysses.
Nested within each hour-long episode is a spot-on impression of a typical story arc from The King of Queens or Kevin Can Wait—the short-lived James sitcom notorious for unceremoniously killing off Erinn Hayes’ wife character.
Along with the vicious verisimilitude of creator Valerie Armstrong’s multicam pastiche, Petersen’s performance is surprisingly layered, working in glimpses of Archie Bunker and even Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, the series that set the slob-husband and bullied-wife archetypes.
Each step in the direction of freedom sends her down a new rabbit hole of crime and danger—and the thing is, we’ve also seen a lot of stories like this one before.
It’s true: couples like the McRoberts are everywhere in what remains of network-television primetime, and they perpetuate ideas about men, women and marriage that are unrealistic at best and virulently sexist at worst.
From the point of view of gender, isn’t there more to explore than the awfulness of one stock character? And couldn’t we have an episode that digs into the shame Allison feels about their working-class lifestyle? What about the role of TV itself? Along with its multicam sitcom and prestige drama modes, there are references to premium-cable soaps about posh women with man problems, like Big Little Lies and The Affair, plus some nods to police procedurals when cops enter the story.
I don’t hate Kevin Can F**K Himself, but the gulf between the thrillingly subversive series teased in the trailer and the slower, tamer final product makes the early episodes that much more disappointing.