Then Allison walks into the kitchen and this trope-y world abruptly transforms. Suddenly, she’s in what appears to be a single-camera drama along the lines of Better Call Saul or Barry.
That last action is a metaphor for what Allison will attempt to do in the first, fascinating season of Kevin Can F**k Himself: destroy her current, unsatisfying existence with the hope of building a new life.
In the first two episodes, which debuted Sunday on the streaming service AMC TV+ and will more officially premiere on AMC on June 20, Allison learns that Kevin has been reckless with their finances and lied to her about it, prompting her to come up with an extreme plan to get revenge and reclaim her independence.
For Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda, the sitcom fantasy provides an escape from feelings she is trying to avoid; for Murphy’s Allison, the sitcom construct is precisely what she wants to escape.
The title flips an obvious middle finger at Kevin Can Wait, the CBS Kevin James sitcom most famous for bumping off the wife of James’s character, played by Erinn Hayes, and making Leah Remini, who starred opposite James in King of Queens, the new female lead.
In the same episode, when Kevin, incapable of managing things on his own, keeps calling Allison in the multi-cam, it plays as a gag about how Kevin is so hilariously inept, but in the single-cam, we see how unnerving the constant calls are for Allison.
Directors Oz Rodriguez, who handles the first two episodes, and Anna Dokoza, who oversaw episodes three through eight, depict everything in the single-cam in a literally harsher light.
It’s a dense, rapid-fire piece of physical comedy that also does the work of highlighting that Murphy is just as good at that sort of thing as the skilled, deliberately over-the-top Petersen is in the multi-cam.
As Patty, the only principal character other than Allison who appears in both the single and multi-cam environments, Inboden initially projects the low-key hostility of a townie annoyed that she only gets five-minute cigarette breaks.
Kevin Can F**k Himself proves that there’s a richer story to be told once the silently suffering wives and next-door neighbors are given the opportunity to shove the Kevins of the world out of the frame and take center stage.