Review: Kevin Can F**k Himself Questions Treatment Of Female Characters On Sitcoms

The television series Kevin Can F**k Himself, starring Annie Murphy, Mary Hollis Inboden, and Eric Petersen, is back with its second season. The dark comedy follows Murphy’s character Allison Devine-McRoberts, who realises that her husband Kevin (played by Petersen) secretly depleted their bank account and fantasises about killing him. Allison’s neighbour Patty (played by Inboden), who tells her about how her husband spent all of their money, eventually ends up joining her in her revenge scheme.

Kevin Can F**k Himself asks, what happens when a sitcom wife who is neglected, overrun, and constantly pushed to the sideline snaps? Enraged by her husband squandering their lives' savings and not even bothering to inform her, Allison decides to turn her fantasies of killing Kevin into a reality.

Kevin Can F**k Himself merges the classic trope of a scorned woman who seeks revenge with criticism of sitcoms and how their female characters are treated.

Kevin Can F**k Himself Review

One of the most notable things about the dark comedy, besides Annie Murphy’s stellar acting, is the setup of the show. It starts off as a classic sitcom multicamera setup with Murphy playing the role of Allison, a wife who serves no purpose other than cleaning up after the men and is the butt of the jokes.

As soon as Allison’s boorish man-child husband Kevin is off the screen, the lighting gets darker, the laughter track disappears, and Allison's fake smile fades away. For Kevin, life is a sitcom, bright and filled with wacky plotlines and low stakes and everything revolves around him. If he makes a mistake, somebody else will suffer the consequences or fix it themselves. And the person constantly forced to clean up after him is his long-suffering wife Allision. For Allison and everybody else, the world is gritty, bleak and bland which is reflected in the cinematography.

While Allison and her neighbour Patty (played by Mary Hollis Inboden) switch between the genres of sitcom comedy and dark comedy, the male characters (especially Kevin) remain blissfully unaware of the realities of the world and are only seen when the sitcom facade is in place.

Allison sums up the male privilege both on and off the camera with this one line-This whole world is designed for guys like Kevin.

While the pacing of the television series is a bit slow, it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being trapped in a small town with no prospects of escape.

Suggested Reading: Darlings Presents A Spectacle On The Consequences Of Domestic Abuse

Representation Of Women In Sitcoms

Kevin Can F**k Himself’s title alludes to another sitcom Kevin Can Wait, where the lead character’s wife was suddenly written off the show and killed off. The character of Donna Gable was killed off and barely mentioned again. Yet another example of television shows treating women as disposable.

The dark comedy shines a light on how television shows and society itself view women and how the issues and prejudices they have to battle are often trivialised. This is often seen in media, where even gruesome topics like rape and abuse can be turned into a punchline and are often normalised. If a female character puts herself over the men in her life, she is projected as an evil temptress. Besides, sitcoms also sells us this flawed idea of a "perfect woman" who put up with neglect, unfair division of labour in marriage and diluted individual agency all in the name of love.

Older sitcoms often had stereotypical female characters that reinforced outdated and sexist gender roles. While improvements have been made over the years and more female-led shows are now gaining popularity, representation of women in film and television is nowhere near that of men. And this holds true even for entertainment space in our country.

A report about the status of female representation in Indian films revealed that women only received 25 percent of the talk time in promotion trailers. Even in the limited time that women characters have, they are mostly shown to viewers as unpaid labourers who exist only to serve men. More often than not, their character arc exists only to push the male character's narrative forward.

Kevin Can F**k Himself flips that expectation around and then makes the audience desire more of Allison and Patty on the screen, rather than Kevin, his gang and their problematic jokes. In doing so, the show is actually urging the viewers to see beyond superficial comedy. There are better narratives on offer. There are stories out there which don't reduce women to two dimensional caricatures of housewives and working women. All viewers have to do is to shift their focus, and something bigger and better soon catch their attention.

The views expressed are the author's own.