Review: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt : Kimmy vs. The Reverend
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt : Kimmy Vs. The Reverend
Director: Clare Scanlon
Released: 12 May, 2020
Available via: streaming on Netflix
It’s fair to say that I’m a bit of a fan of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s weird, warm and whip-smart sitcom The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. So you can imagine my delight when, during the depths of lockdown, Netflix released a brand-new interactive episode, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend.
This is Netflix’s latest offering in its series of innovative interactive shows (of which Charlie Brooker’s Bandersnatch is a notable prior offering) and the first comedy to receive the choose-your-own-adventure treatment.
Fey and Carlock are well up to the challenge of the format, creating a movie-length standalone story with a dizzying array of narrative paths, dead-ends and alternative outcomes, in which the viewer is constantly asked to call the shots.
The result is an all-singing, all-dancing (literally – there is, as always, a significant amount of singing!) roller coaster ride.
It’s not possible to say much about the plot without giving away major plot points, and of course, each viewer’s choices result in a different version of events, but the story begins with Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) planning her imminent wedding to Prince Frederick (Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe), and needs help choosing her wedding dress. Fun or fancy – you decide!
However, when Kimmy finds a choose-your-own-adventure library book hidden inside Jan the Backpack, she turns detective and makes a horrible discovery – the Reverend (Jon Hamm) has another bunker full of mole women!
We must now help Kimmy in her quest to discover the bunker, free the women and get back in time for her wedding. Meanwhile, Cindy (Sara Chase), Lillian (Carol Kane) and Jaqueline (Jane Krakowski) take Prince Frederick out for a bachelorette party like no other, and Titus (Titus Burgess) is supposed to be preparing for a starring role in an action movie, if only Jaqueline can persuade him to go to the gym.
The stakes are high and the consequences of making the wrong choice are very, very real. Will Kimmy and Frederick ever get to their wedding? Will the mole women be found? Will Titus’s movie career end in tears? It’s all in your hands.
Whichever combination of choices you make, these characters all get a fantastic showing, with interesting story arcs for each and numerous opportunities for the actors to shine.
Ellie Kemper is as effervescent as ever as the ‘Unbreakable’ heroine, and gets a rare opportunity to explore Kimmy’s dark side as she confronts the Reverend and makes some difficult decisions.
Daniel Radcliffe delivers a perfect guest turn as Kimmy’s daft, sheltered and painfully sincere royal fiancé, showing impeccable comic timing and being generally adorable. Titus Burgess is fabulous as ever, offering up a flawless rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird and some great one-liners (“Ooooh! These glasses might as well be a clown in a sewer, because they are IT”), and Jon Hamm is on sinister-yet-ridiculous form as the Reverend.
Meanwhile, Carol Kane treats us to a hilarious Mary Poppins parody and Jane Krakowski blesses us with a vision of Jaqueline’s Happy Place, in which she is the star of a weird 1960’s French pop video, naturally. Sara Chase is a ditzy dream.
Depending on your choices throughout the episode, you will also catch cameos from other regular favourites such as Mikey, Mimi Kanassis and Bobby Durst, and perhaps even sneak a glimpse of Josh Groban.
The interactive format is a perfect match for the show’s madcap humour, allowing for multiple outlandish scenarios to unfold along with an unending barrage of jokes. But as always, the absurdity is undercut by a real current of darkness. I mean, a bunker kidnapping is one of the bleakest premises for a comedy that I can think of…
In this episode, it’s possible to take the story down some pretty unsavoury roads with life-and-death consequences for the characters. In the hands of the viewer, Kimmy can become a killer, the Reverend can escape to Florida with his victims, and you can unwittingly call time out on the Time Out movement and end feminism for everyone.
Luckily, when you take a wrong turn and get a false ending, you’re offered a do-over with no harm done, allowing you to travel back in time and try again. The disasters are as hilarious as the triumphs are heart-warming, so I heartily recommend that you watch the episode at least twice through, in order to see as much of the content as possible.
I played along three times in total (#lockdownlife), got significantly different storylines each time, and I still don’t think I’ve seen the entire episode.
First, I simply made choices which appealed to me. I got a lot of false endings and possibly killed a baby, but I ended up with a wedding, and the added bonus of Lillian singing a seductive rendition of Yes, We Have No Bananas at the North Korean karaoke bar.
I then played as if I were a complete monster, making terrible choices on behalf of the characters and seeking out disaster at every turn. This resulted in a Yuko uprising which ended all humanity.
I finally played with all the moral integrity of Kimmy herself, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, this is how you ‘win’ the episode. No false endings, no accidental murders and the happiest of happy endings. As always, Kimmy teaches us that being a better person is always the right choice, but being a worse person is far too fun not to try out first!
Written by Catrin Woodruff
