Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kevin Can F**k Himself’ On AMC, Where Annie Murphy Is A Woman Leading The Dark Life Of A Sitcom Wife

When the series Kevin Can F**k Himself was first introduced, it seemed like it was in direct response to Erinn Hayes’ character getting killed off on Kevin Can Wait. It probably is. But the idea of examining the life of a put-upon sitcom wife is actually an interesting one to explore, especially if that sitcom wife is played by the versatile Annie Murphy.

KEVIN CAN F**K HIMSELF: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a stock sitcom shot of a house, and then two guys playing beer pong in the living room as two others cheer them on.

The Gist: Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy) lives in working-class Worcester, Mass, with her cable-installer husband Kevin (Eric Petersen). Kevin’s life is like a sitcom, and when he’s in the room, the scenes are brightly lit and shot like a multicamera sitcom. He’s practicing beer pong with his buddy and neighbor Neil (Alex Bonifer) — his dad Pete (Brian Howe) and Alex’s older sister Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden) cracking wise the whole time — to get ready for his 10th “rageaversery”. In other words, he’s celebrating his 10th wedding anniversary to Allison by throwing his usual beer-and-booze rager.

When Allison is in the room with Kevin, she acts like the typical sitcom wife, being the “rational” one (i.e. the wet blanket) and making mild jokes at Kevin’s expense. But when she leaves Kevin’s presence, the darkness takes over again. The scene looks more realistic, shot like a single-camera show. The loneliness and monotony of being married to Kevin buzzes in her head and she slams a mug down, breaking it and cutting her hand. She also steps on a huge roach, using the new home brochure she had on her fridge to scrape up the mess.

As she walks to work at her aunt and uncle’s liquor store (“The Happiest Place On Earth,” according to Kevin), she rips a hole in her sweater, grabs a box of Munchkins at Dunkin’ and goes to a makeup store with a face full of powdered sugar. She also stops at a real estate office she’s been to a number of times; the agent tells her there’s a house in the development she’s been eyeing that might be within her price range, but she accidentally clocks him on the chin while she tries to unhook her ring from the snag in her sweater. At the store, her aunt Dee (Jamie Denbo) thinks that Allison and Kevin have a model marriage.

Kevin finds out that someone invited his boss to the rager, so he concocts a plan: Allison hosts him in a nice quiet dinner party in the front while the rager goes on in the backyard. He instructs her to get a plate with “Meats”, and she walks into a new diner to get a charcuterie plate. Running the place is her old school friend Sam (Raymond Lee); she’s not only surprised to see him back in Worcester, but then gets more bad thoughts about Kevin in her head.

She somehow convinces Kevin to move to that new house, but after the scheme with his boss goes awry, the boss offers Kevin a new job and Kevin says they’re staying, Allison walks out of the house. In a heart-to-heart, Patty tells Allison that Kevin blew the money they saved for a down payment on bad sports memorabilia deals, which leads Alison to wander the streets all night, snort a little blow with a local mechanic, and try to figure out what went wrong in her life.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The King Of Queens, Still Standing, Kevin Can Wait, etc., mixed with a dark comedy like Physical.

Our Take: Valerie Armstrong (Lodge 49) came up with an ingenious idea for Kevin Can F**k Himself: What is the life of a typical sitcom wife like when her husband isn’t around? And not just any sitcom wife, but the long-suffering, pretty wife of a fat schlub manchild that has been a trope in so many sitcoms over the past 25 years (many of which have been on CBS)? Such a high-concept idea sets a high execution bar, and the first episode shows that Armstrong, her writers, and her crew are able to get over that bar without distracting from the story itself.

The sitcom scenes, shot in multicamera format, aren’t an homage to the form, like the sitcom scenes in WandaVision were; you could easily see a sitcom with Kevin and Allison as the main characters airing somewhere on the cable dial. It hits the right tone and the right narrative notes. It doesn’t even exaggerate the oafishness of Kevin all that much; we could envision Kevin James uttering Kevin’s lines, as Armstrong intended, and Petersen does a great job of embodying the fat slob husband stereotype.

But Murphy, so good in Schitt’s Creek, is what ties everything together. While the smooth editing from sitcom scenes to darker, single-camera scenes lets Murphy transition from wisecracking sitcom wife to a woman living in misery, you can also see the misery just underneath the surface when she’s making mild fun of Kevin as an audience guffaws. In the scenes away from Kevin, she brings in the humanity that you don’t see in most sitcom wives, because their roles are generally to be the one who ruins the fun. She just wants to live the life she imagined for herself, and always wonders if she made the wrong choices in marriage and life.

The Allison in the “real life” scenes is the Allison we wanted to see more of; she’s human, she has dreams, and she really wonders what in tarnation led her to get married to such a doofus. It likely takes all the mental strength she has to enter a room where Kevin is and not, as we see in a dream sequence, stab him in the neck with a shard of glass. As the series goes on, we hope to see Allison’s life away from Kevin and how she deals with a life that she hates and a husband that stopped maturing at 16.

Sex and Skin: When Allison pulls the collar of her pajama shirt down to scratch her shoulder, Kevin takes this as a signal that it’s sexy time.

Parting Shot: After the fantasy where she plunges a mug handle shard into Kevin’s neck, she realizes she smashed a mug in front of Kevin; Neil calls her “Mrs. Hercules.” Allison leaves the kitchen looks at the handle shard, and puts it in her jacket pocket for later use.

Sleeper Star: Two sleepers here: The production designers, who made the McRoberts’ living room look eerily similar to the Bunkers’ living room in All In The Family, and Inboden, who plays Patty in both the sitcom scenes and the drama scenes. She transitions between the broad comedy and the emotional drama as well as Murphy does.

Most Pilot-y Line: It’s hard to cite a goofy line when the sitcom scenes are purposefully chock full of lame gags.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kevin Can F**k Himself quickly moves past its high concept to show the picture of a woman in crisis, and we’re excited to see how she tries to improve things through the first season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Kevin Can F**k Himself At AMC.com