Allison’s artificial smile melts away, and we see the dissatisfaction of a woman who has dreams of her own but, instead, has to keep biting her tongue and looking the other way as her husband’s various schemes and harebrained ideas leave them stuck in a blue-collar hole in a nearly colorless Worcester, Massachusetts.
I love the idea of a show that literally exposes the quiet desperation of the sitcom-wife archetype, as well as revealing how borderline-sociopathic so many sitcom husbands have been over the years.
Of the Schitt’s Creek stars, Murphy’s future would have been the one I was most unsure of — with Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara coming in as icons and Dan Levy boasting writing-directing chops — but this cements her likability and depth.
In the fourth episode, we watch nearly an entire episode’s worth of Kevin’s plot to start an escape room in the family basement; acknowledging that it’s an uncanny reproduction of the sort of show that would have gotten five seasons on CBS in the ’90s, bad is bad, and anybody who knows the genre at all won’t need nearly as much convincing about Kevin’s malignant sloth as the show thinks we do.
The show seems to want us to think that outside of the multicam, Allison is in the “real” world, but it’s actually more like she’s jumped format to a SMILF or Wayne or other Sundance Lab-friendly “indie” comedy of your choice.
But to what end? There are Kevins in the real world, and Allisons, but the show doesn’t want to be satirizing them, so the joke has to be directed more consciously at the Hollywood system that breeds bad shows, the advertisers that keep the shows afloat and even the audiences that make them hits.
The fourth episode begins steering the show toward something darker and more potent, and establishes Inboden as a capable foil for Murphy — a reminder that the snarky, just-one-of-the-guys gal is a multicam cliche of its own.