Thank God NBC passed on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and we got a full 13-episode order from Netflix. The show is too good and too smart to attract an audience on NBC and it would have been shelved after three or four episodes to make way for “Dateline: Peoria.” NBC’s strategy apparently is to see if it can build an audience on Netflix and then maybe bring it to the network with the second or third season. The show comes from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, two of the people behind “30 Rock.” And “TUKS” has a “30 Rock” feel to it with snappy one-liners, call backs, flashbacks and absurd scenes. It’s a showcase for Ellie Kemper, who I know little about. She seems to be the perfect choice for the role of a rescued cult member. Somehow Kemper projects a manic, almost psychotic, joy through her character, who is rebuilding her life from scratch in New York after being freed from underground in Indiana. I loved how the show began. There was some anger about Oscar snubs for the movie “Selma,” especially for its director, Ava DuVernay. “Selma” was a good and important movie, but one problem I had with it was the soap operaish way it moved the plot along in a couple of scenes by having Martin Luther King Jr. recite big fat paragraphs of dialogue as narration to update the audience. An Oscar-worthy director would have found a more creative way around that, I thought. I remembered “Selma” when “TUKS” moved the audience through the whole set up for the sitcom in a few minutes. I’ve only binged on the first five episodes so far, but the writing is smart all the way through. They have gag on Febreze (they call it Bubreze) that is woven into the first episodes and pays off with a plot point. It’s a relatively minor point, but there’s something satisfying about honoring the intelligence of your viewer and not dumbing everything down. Jane Krakowski from “30 Rock” is back playing a character in the same zip code as her “30 Rock” character if not the same block. Both she and Tituss Burgess, who plays Kemper’s black, gay roommate, have their moments. Carol Kane seems wasted as the landlord. In a sense she’s kind of broad, like a Kramer, to everyone’s more sane characters. Only one of her lines has made me laugh so far. So I guess I have to finish the first season to get the full sense of the series, but it’s shown no signs of running out of gas yet.
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