Four years ago, Valerie Armstrong was listening to a discussion on a podcast about how funny, talented actresses still get stuck auditioning for generic sitcom-wife roles when the opening scene of a television pilot started to stream in her head.
That flash of an opening scene has now been turned into an AMC show with an unapologetically blunt name: Kevin Can F**k Himself.
As we learn the truth about Kevin and Allison’s life together in the single-cam scenes, what may seem like harmless comedy in Kevin Land — his habit of making important decisions without consulting his wife, a joke about how he got their mail carrier deported — begins to look more disturbing.
Armstrong acknowledges that the title is a riff on the defunct Kevin James sitcom Kevin Can Wait, an entry in the “zhlubby guy with a hot wife” genre that famously bumped off the wife character, played by Erinn Hayes, so that James’s former King of Queens co-star Leah Remini could be cast as the new female lead.
Writing the show was a puzzle in which the multi-cam and single-cam plots became so intertwined that Armstrong admits they were like “a fishtail braid.
For the multi-cam scenes, Armstrong and the writers set out to directly re-create that style without engaging in parody.
He and Armstrong staffed the writers’ room with people who had experience working in a mix of genres — drama, multi- and single-cam comedy — and they all spent time rewatching sitcoms like Last Man Standing and, yes, Kevin Can Wait and The King of Queens.
The pilot shows Allison breaking a glass beer mug three times: once when she’s alone, once in a fantasy sequence, and a third time in the multi-cam kitchen, where she’s surrounded by her husband, his father, Neil, and Patty.
This part of the show is a metaphor for “the emotional and situational prison Allison finds herself in,” says Anna Dokoza, who directed episodes three through eight.
“Everybody went through covid watching Schitt’s Creek for comfort, so they were like, Who is this guy making a joke about our Annie Murphy? ” she says.
That’s where we find out about his financial betrayal and see how much Allison is breaking down in its wake; he has crushed her dreams of buying a nicer house, which she views as the ticket to the perfect life.
When Oz Rodriguez later took over directorial duties on the pilot, he and the team often placed Allison where she could never be in the multi-cam: in the center of the frame, with the camera zoomed in to capture every subtle change in her expression.
When Kevin decides to roast a pig to use in a chili recipe, then abandons it in the yard, Allison and Patty find themselves staring at the animal still on its spit a day later.
“It was challenging to be a female in that environment after having looked through the filter of what Kevin Can F**k Himself is trying to do,” says Inboden.
Murphy recalls a day on the multi-cam set when they were shooting a scene in which Petersen had to regurgitate steak all over her while giving himself the Heimlich maneuver.
The transitions needed to be purposeful without being too drastic — “to cut seamlessly and just be something you don’t even think about” while you’re watching, says Dokoza.
There are also Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the multi-cam that confirm information we’ve learned elsewhere, like the brand-new sneakers Kevin is always wearing — evidence that he really has been spending all of the couple’s savings on frivolous things for himself.
What does change is the way these environments are shot and lit: While the multi-cam makes the home look open and inviting, for the single cam Rodriguez and Dokoza chose angles that capture the fourth wall and the ceiling.
In the pilot, Allison tears a hole in her sweater in the single cam, but we never see the snag in the multi-cam scenes; it’s covered by a jacket, and the cameras don’t zoom in close enough to capture it.
In so many ways, Kevin Can F**k Himself is telling its audience to look closer — at Allison, at jokes that punch down, at gender dynamics on TV and in real life, and at how human beings, women in particular, can do a better job of supporting one another.
“I wish for millions and millions and millions of women out there that they just had a nice, fake breakaway beer mug to shatter,” she says.