Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Review: Come for Tina Fey's Signature Humor, Stay for Everything Else

NBC's loss is Netflix's gain when it comes to the energetic new comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Originally developed for the former by 30 Rock masterminds Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, the series moved to the latter in November, (and earned an immediate Season 2 renewal in the process). Now it's finally making its much-anticipated debut, and having seen the first six episodes, I feel comfortable in saying that Kimmy's network switcheroo was for the best. The comedy is eccentric, charming, and optimistic... and it probably would have failed on NBC.

Ellie Kemper (The Office) stars as the titular Kimmy, a naive but plucky 29-year-old who was kidnapped by a doomsday cult leader named Richard Wayne Gary Wayne when she was 14. After being rescued from the underground bunker in Indiana where she lived with her three "sisters" for 15 years, Kimmy decides to start over in New York, where she moves in with Titus, a gay wannabe Broadway actor played by Tituss Burgess (a real Broadway actor you'll recognize as 30 Rock's D'Fawn). Even though they don't have much in common, they support one another's dreams and ultimately bring out the best in one another.

The series and its humor will feel instantly familiar to fans of 30 Rock. Not only is Fey's voice fairly recognizeable at this point, but Jane Krakowski co-stars as Kimmy's narcissistic boss, Jacqueline Voorhees, a former stewardess-turned-trophy wife who's doing her best Jenna Maroney impression ("Feet are the new butts!"). It's a testament toKimmy's writing that Jacqueline is so over-the-top that you have to wonder whether people like her can actually exist, yet she's still likable and relatable. Even when she's lamenting the fact that she's not a perfect "foot slut," seeing that she's unhappy in her marriage to a man who can't be bothered to return home for his son's birthday adds a humanizing layer to her otherwise shallow character. Like Kimmy and so many other New Yorkers, Jacqueline is trying to escape her own surprising past while building a new life. You can hardly fault the woman for that.

However, while it's easy to see that Kimmy contains some of 30 Rock's DNA, the two shows' outlooks are pretty dramatically different. Whereas 30 Rock was a cynical satire,Kimmy has a much sunnier disposition, replacing Liz Lemon's skepticism with Kimmy Schmidt's relentless optimism. Spending 15 years underground prevented Kimmy from becoming jaded, and her newly minted fish-out-of-water (fish-out-of-bunker?) status means she gets excited by sinks with automatic sensors, doesn't know what a selfie is, thinks Sketchers that light up are still incredibly cool, and relishes the freedom of being able to eat gummi sharks for dinner. She's basically a (29-year-old) kid in a candy store, and thanks to Kemper's energetic performance, she's almost guaranteed to grow on you. In less capable hands, Kimmy's inconsistencies would probably annoy me—she's incredibly naive in one moment only to turn around and show great skill in navigating the world in another—but she makes it work.

Which brings me back to why Kimmy probably would've failed on NBC. The network's long-running Thursday-night comedy block—the home of many of its smartest, most memorable sitcoms—was officially dismantled earlier this year after struggling for a while. And based on NBC's hurried and unceremonious scheduling of Parks and Recreation's excellent final season, it's clear that the network doesn't have time for series that can't promise big ratings, no matter how acclaimed they may be. Kimmy's tone is frequently sunny and sharp, but there are some darker moments throughout, and it doesn't strike me as broad enough to appeal to more casual viewers. Every bit as funny and quotable 30 Rock and every bit as cheerful and heartwarming as Parks and Rec, the show is populated with unconventional but sympathetic personalities that would do either show proud.

In fact, there are times when Kimmy actually feels like a spiritual cousin to Leslie Knope. She doesn't have the same level of ambition as Leslie—right now she's focused on getting her GED and figuring out how to be "an adult who is also a grown-up"—but her zest for life and her kind heart are contagious to everyone around her. Kimmy will never forget what happened to her, but instead of allowing her past to get her down, she channels it into sunshine and rainbows. Plus, it's hard to hate a character who takes down Jacqueline's spoiled 15-year-old stepdaughter by showcasing her expert knowledge of a Baby-Sitter's Club plot.

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BREAKING IT DOWN

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– My favorite joke from the first six episodes? Titus auditions for a role in the new Spider-Man musical, which is titled Spidermen Too: 2 Many Spidermen.

– Kimmy and Titus's landlord is played by legendary actress Carol Kane, and unsurprisingly, she nails every scene she appears in, whether she's talking about doing the walk of shame, getting punched in the face by an old woman, or helping Titus film a music video in an abandoned chandelier factory.

– Traditional Indiana courtship rituals apparently dictate that men should present women with meat and flowers.

– Fake product I wish was real: Buhbreeze!

– Jacqueline's stepdaughter (played by Chasing Life's Dylan Gelula) is named Xanthippe.

– "I've been Googling you!" "You have? I didn't feel it."

– "This isn't the Chinatown bus! You can't just choke someone who's asleep!"

– "Don't use that kind of language in front a unicorn!"

– "Who among us is a perfect foot slut?"

– For a different take on Kimmy, check out the latest episode of our Totally Tubularpodcast.

What's your take on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? How many episodes have you watched so far?

Banshee "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You" Review: A Lose-Lose Situation

In the past, I've praised Banshee for successfully shepherding stories through distinctive trajectories. The ability to juggle a range of different arcs—some beginning, some still developing, some ramping up to a big conclusion—all at once, oftentimes in a single episode, is the hallmark of a great show, and Banshee has only grown more skilled at that over time. But even the greats occasionally produce and hour that feels overstuffed or a little jarring, because so many things are happening simultaneously, and at their own pace. The penultimate episode of Banshee's truly wonderful third season, "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You," felt that way to me.

Still, it wasn't a BAD episode of Banshee. I'm not sure bad episodes of Banshee even exist, particularly at this stage in the game. Nonetheless, even though it had a substantial amount of maneuvering to do to set up what will surely be a great finale, it was my least favorite installment of the season, and by a comfortable margin. Penultimate episodes can be tricky for serialized TV shows, and maybe some of that trickiness bogged this one down a little, but there was also simply a lot of stuff going on, some of it more immediately relevant than the rest, and the episode wasn't quite as well-balanced as the rest of Season 3.

Looking at "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You" from a vacuum, I can minimize my complaints to some degree. The "main events"—Proctor's personal and professional crises and the crew's showdown with Stowe—were given their just due, and many of the scenes were as sturdy and exciting as we've all grown to expect from Banshee these days.

In particular, I thought the extended sequence near the end of the episode—wherein Stowe and his crew of mercs (and the tech nerd) rounded up Sugar, Job, and Carrie in hopes of identifying the elusive fourth member of the heist, was pretty awesome—and it was a perfect way to build anticipation for next week's finale. "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You" did a nice job of creating individual moments of capture for Sugar, Job, and Carrie, giving each actor something to play with and really making something out of the different ways in which Stowe & Co. had to account for them. Sugar played it coy and then immediately went for the firepower, and that didn't work. Job was distracted by other things—namely, his dissolving relationship with Hood—and it caused him to stumble into being caught, almost literally. Stowe brought a mini battalion down on Carrie and while she surrendered relatively quickly, she was willing to weather the physical punishment necessary to keep Hood's identity a secret from her former lover.

And the hour made some fine moves to arrive at those moments, too! Sugar and Job have had their time in the sun over the past couple of weeks, but "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You" extended the ongoing tension between Job and Hood, complete with some decent flashbacks that featured an amazing hairdo on Job; it was especially fun to see more of each character's backstory and how they met. In fact, this episode was generally packed with little nuggets about Job—including just how important the CIA has deemed catching him. All that made for a great mini-showcase for Hoon Lee, who was unsurprisingly up for the challenge. Meanwhile, the communication breakdown between Hood and Job yielded a compelling scene in the bar, and then made Hood's discovery that his friends had been apprehended a bit more powerful.

For Carrie, being kidnapped came soon after her realization that she wants to keep the Hopewell family together for a while longer. Gordon showed up with divorce papers, but the two of them decided, probably rightfully, that while their relationship is far from a normal or functional, it's still an important one to both of them. Of course, while Gordon might be well aware of and willing to forgive parts of Carrie's past, he's not, as we saw at the very end of this episode, going to be thrilled to learn of her role in the heist—or the methods she used to get the proper intel from Stowe. The situation is a prime example of one of those great Banshee tics where the show's "normal" people start accepting the lead characters' crazy criminal behavior, and yet there's always another level of criminal and crazy that makes those normal folks hit pause and say, "Hold up, what?"

In general, this is where we expected the show to go, and now we're there, with Stowe, Hood, and everyone else. And I enjoyed most of the "en route" scenes on their own. Yet, I also could've also used some additional set-up from time to time, particularly with Job and Hood in the present. The flashback stuff was totally fine, but it wasn't essential in the way I feel like some of the present-day squabbling has become. It's a minor quibble, I know.

The Proctor stuff was more successful, especially because of what it meant for the character's season-long arc. Having been tortured and nearly burned to death by the Black Beards to atone for some of Rebecca's crimes, Proctor snapped out of his more recent "emotionally open" mindset and back into the vengeful, murderous SOB that many of us know and love. That included biting a dude's nose off, burning one alive, ditching Emily (to Rebecca's unbelievable delight), and destroying his own mini-chapel in a fit of rage.

One of the fun things about watching serialized television is that you can often gauge where the story might be headed, only for the ultimate destination to be even more satisfying than you originally hoped (although the opposite can happen, too). For much of this arc, I wondered what it would be like to see Kai as a fully changed man, and how that might impact his relationships with Rebecca and Hood. While exploring that story and characterization for an extended period of time certainly would've been cool, it was surprisingly awesome to watch Kai turn off his emotions off and retreat back into the man we already know. His monologue about how this temporary change was all a response to his mother's death was built on a beautifully dark sentiment about the impact of loss on even the most corrupt of individuals, and it was really nicely delivered by Ulrich Thomsen. Kai knows what kind of man he has to be to defeat the Black Beards, but I'm still curious as to how this shift will influence his relationship with Rebecca, which is more than fraught at this stage. However, it was another instance where I could've used just one more scene to flesh out that tension a bit more.

Elsewhere, some of the tertiary stuff illustrated that it's not always easy to make time for supporting characters, especially so late in the season. Brock's issues with Emily are boiling over, and that's all fine. We can see where that's going, even if I feel like maybe that plot missed a beat somewhere along the way. Similarly, while I think Bunker has so much potential as a character in this world, Episode 9 is an odd place to start seriously diving into his past, some of the dudes he used to run with, and how all of that affects his day-to-day in the present. And Banshee typically does solid stuff with Deva and her response to the effed-up situations she finds herself in, but getting arrested to smoking pot by the recovered Billy Raven? Meh.

As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I enjoyed "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You" a little more than I originally thought, but that's partially because I know in my mind that there's a big, probably bloody, finale up ahead. And with more than a few pieces to position on the proverbial chess board, the decision to toss in some flashbacks and a couple of lesser C- and D-level plots produced a somewhat bumpy final product. All in all, the episode was just a little too busy for me. But next week? OH MAN. You just knowthat's going to be tremendous.

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NOTES

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– Great job by the location-scouting team in finding that high school gym, and bravo to director Loni Peristere for the way in which she filmed the sequences that took place there with Kai and the Black Beards. The overhead shot with Kai strapped to the chair in the middle of the court? Awesome.

– Someone needs to inform Bunker of all the messed-up crap happening between the mayor, the sheriff, and the beautiful waitress from across the parking lot, huh?

– Maybe I'm misremembering something, but I found it a bit weird that no one asked Hood and Brock where they've been, and that Amy didn't make an appearance asking about Chayton.

– Job's hair in the flashback: MY. LORD. Quite the look.

What's your take on "Even God Doesn't Know What to Make of You?" What are you expecting to see in next week's finale?

Helix "Vade in Pace" Review: Here's to the New Breed

Listen while you read! Click play to hear "Plow Under" by The Almanac Singers, which played at the beginning of the episode.

I think of Helix as a show that's constantly sliding around on banana peels, and every once in a while it slips so hard that it does a complete backflip and lands firmly on its feet before letting out a triumphant, "Ta-da!" And it always acts as if it meant to do that, when in reality, the series tries so many things that it's bound to hit on something that works every now and then, with frequent stumbles in between.

The population-control revelations of the recent "M. Domestica" were a great example of Helix pulling off a story that I never imagined it could handle, giving me hope that the series is actually a lot smarter than I give it credit for and that there's a master plan behind its endearing madness. The gist was as follows: Ilaria was a group of immortals who were looking for ways to trim the overall population because the planet was overcrowded and resources were in shorter supply. I can totally get down with that! It successfully tied Ilaria's idea to reduce the population to Michael's smaller-scale scheme to do something similar on the island. And it cleared up a lot of what happened in Helix's first season, as if the writers forgot to include a few important details back then and are finally getting around to it.

Unfortunately, the two hours that followed "M. Domestica" once again left me twiddling my thumbs and scratching my head. The grandness of Ilaria's plan was shelved in favor of concentrating on the Abbey, narrowing Helix's scope. The Abbey stuff isn't terrible—and let's be honest, the sister wives and Jonestown feel of the place are pretty rad—but dang it! I'm dying to learn more about what's going on with Ilaria and their nefarious strategy to limit the mortal population. That's some sinister shit, and the different ways in which individual Ilaria board members want to achieve the group's goals—some of them favor a more humane approach involving infertility, while others want to unleash a plague—added some much-needed depth to the organization instead of broadly labeling them all as silver-eyed assholes.

But rather than follow up on the Ilaria stuff, this week's "Vade in Pace" saw Michael thinning his "family" by poisoning their apple juice or whatever. Meanwhile, Amy maneuvered her way to the top through a devious combination of sexual temptation and lies, and she ended up burying the immortal Michael in a hollowed-out tomb (which she wryly referred to as a "monument"). That allowed for a bridge between the two timelines that have dominated Season 2: Julia released Michael in the future, believing he could help her solve the plague that's killing off "immortals" (that's in quotes because we know they can die in the future), in what was probably the best part of "Vade in Pace." Julia has been isolated on her own metaphorical island for a while, and now we have a bit more intel on why she's there and how she'll be incorporated into the rest of the story.

Back at the Abbey, Helix showed some restraint with when to bring in a highly militarized group of super soldiers (who dropped by in Episode 6 of Season 1, as I recall), this time employing a group of Coast Guard badasses (though members other Armed Forces may disagree) to help evacuate the island and cause more arguments about who should go and who should stay. Those left behind included Sarah, who discovered that her immortal fetus hadn't been aborted while she was under... it was removed! And it's sitting in a jar in Amy's office! And Julia wants it in the future because she wants its immortal stem cells to help formulate a cure for the plague! Helix, you brilliant twisted bastard. I still don't really understand what's happening, but anytime this show delivers even the faintest amount of clarity, it feels like a huge victory.

Just when I think Helix is freestyling an entire season as it goes along, little details begin to fall into place and validate certain aspects of the story. I'm not saying everything fits together perfectly, but the series has always solved puzzles by jamming pieces together like a frustrated 6-year-old instead starting with the edges and filling in the center to match the picture on the cover on the box. That's why Helix will never be a great show, but also why it's so incredibly unique and such a pleasure to watch.

Of course, the big question now is, "Where does Helix go from here?" Michael has been removed from the equation after being buried by Amy and then decapitated by Caleb when he was freed in the future. Will Michael's absence make the Abbey story that much less compelling? What is Amy in control of now? And will Julia find her immortal fetus so she can suck out its stem cells and cure her disease? As usual, there are endless questions and only a handful of answers, but if you're like me, you're just here to enjoy the wacky ride.

What did you think of "Vade in Pace," and what do you think of Season 2 so far?