I've just finished watching Kevin Can F**k Himself. I'd say there are two central theses of the show:

• Sitcoms were super misogynistic: The sitcom / drama duality allows it to present an uncompromising and sincere sitcom, while also criticizing the rampant misogyny of the genre.
• Narcissistic abuse sometimes looks like a silly manchild: Kevin abuses, steals from, physically harms, and takes advantage of Allison at every turn. But it's all through the mannerisms of a lovable sitcom guy. As I noted in my last post, people online are saying this show helped women identify abusive Kevins in their own life.

But I'd like to point out two other things this show does well:

• New England mentioned! I spent the first ~20 years of my life in New England, and the show feels very authentically New England. It's based in Worcester, which is kind of hard to describe. I've been there a few times and it's never a good time, but not really awful either?
• Our culture is alcohol-obsessed: Just as the show highlights and criticizes the misogynistic culture that was reflected and perpetuated by sitcoms, this show also highlights and criticizes the (intertwined) alcohol obsessed culture. Almost everyone is drinking to cope with issues, to different degrees. Alcohol is a part of the abuse, both as an accelerant and as a coping mechanism. It's nice to see a show that doesn't glamorize alcohol as a social lubricant, but instead portrays it as a social poison.

On that line... The subtext of "alcohol is intertwined with misogyny and abuse" has a throughline to the temperance movement. A lot of the Feminism you can identify in this show is from the first, second, and third waves. Having had finished the show, I'd notch this up as another White Feminism show.

That's not to denigrate it, but, I've watched a lot of Feminist^TM shows that focus exclusively on the lives of white women now. The last episode has some great lines...

• "You can fix me." "That's not my job."

• "If you're offended by what I said, I was just joking."

... But almost all the characters in the show are white, except for Tammy, a black lesbian police officer. If that sounds reductive, that's because it is. Tammy exists almost exclusively as "a police officer who is in a relationship with Patty". The only indication of an external life is one scene in the entire show she is spending with her family. The contention between her identity as a cop and her identity as a queer black woman is mentioned two times in passing.

There's a lot I have to say here, but it feels like Tammy and policing are two issues handled poorly. The righteousness of policing is left mostly uncriticized, and I get the sense that Tammy was chosen to be black just so they could have the traditional dramatic element of a Police Officer Character without addressing any issues of policing. She's the only character of color! Worcester is way too diverse for this show to be so predominately white.

Tammy's character, along with the opioids subplot, feel like issues that were not handled as well as the rest of the show. But I know not enough about opioids to talk about it.

But I still love this show. I now want to crudely segue to my final notes on the cinematography:

The sitcom style is flat, colorful, and brightly lit, even when it makes no sense, while the drama-style has dynamic camera angles, and is poorly lit. It makes the "drama" part feel more real, but its style is forced even when it makes no sense. A diner at daytime having no overhead or bright outdoor lights? C'mon.

I started to anticipate some critique of dramas that I haven't seen yet, but the drama side felt kind of like a mediocre season of Fargo. (Shows can be mediocre at some things and still be worth watching.)

But the sitcom is handled faithfully. The sitcom parts are part horror, part "I forgot sitcoms can make me laugh". Eric Petersen needs credit for nailing every scene he's in. Sometimes, feminism can look like a man being really good at acting.

Notably, over time, the sitcom style grew more and more desaturated as the miniscule cracks between the sitcom and the drama started to show. Characters speaking in hushed secret tones in the drama-style turning in reaction in the sitcom-style after Kevin enters the room, Allison openly calling Kevin an asshole (before he brings the lighthearted sitcom energy back into play), Neil wearing more and more of Kevin's abuse on his face, etc. But if you played all the sitcom parts without the rest of the show, you'd see almost nothing amiss.

There's so much that this show does good. It's a B+ in every metric I can find, but it's so out there with its presentation and how it utilizes cinematography as a narrative tool of storytelling.

I want to see whatever Valerie Armstrong makes next, because this kicks ass