Been watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix this week. It’s a fascinating show, and easy to digest as background noise while working.
Kevin Can Fuck Himself is a serious drama sendup of the classic sitcom dynamic. It’s two different shows mashed into one another.
The show’s front is your typical Manchild Husband sitcom about a man named Kevin McRoberts. Every episode, he has a new wacky shenanigan to drag his wife and neighbors into, which usually blows up in his face spectacularly.
But Kevin is not the show’s main character. Whenever he’s onscreen, the show is lit and shot in sitcom fashion, with laugh track and applause and musical cues and all that jazz. The universe revolves around him and responds as sitcoms do to his every whim.
But this show is actually about his wife Allison. And whenever she’s away from Kevin, the show changes genres to a serious drama piece. It’s a show about the emotional and financial abuse of being tied down to the role of the Manchild Husband’s “Nagging Wife”, and more broadly the effects that his Comedic Sociopathy have on the put-upon supporting cast around him as well.
It’s the story of a woman’s quest to finally escape from the cage that her marriage to an impulsive, inconsiderate, and entirely self-centered piece of shit has trapped her in.
It’s a really fun angle. This is what the show looks like whenever Kevin’s present for a scene.
Kevin’s show has bright colors and fixed camera angles for that “filmed in front of a live studio audience” effect. It takes place mostly within this one studio set, with characters coming and going through the front and kitchen doors.
Nothing that happens ever has any lasting consequences, and no matter how much trouble he gets into, it always works out fine for Kevin in the end.
Then, when he leaves:
Allison’s story, the actual story of the show, has muted colors and a dramatic camera with four distinct walls. The camera will pan around her or zoom in on things that are important. There’s no laugh track. People bleed. People do drugs or get hurt or all the things that can’t happen on Kevin’s show.
Hers is a serialized drama with a persistent plot running from episode to episode.
These two tones are constantly locking horns with each other throughout the series. Allison might walk on set from the front door into Kevin’s latest stupid scheme and “have a few laughs” about how he’s forgotten something important to her and wants her to pick up his laundry. Then make a few passive-aggressive barbs for laughs, enter the kitchen, switch tones, and break down in front of the door.
It’s both an interesting series and artistically creative.
