When the CBS series Kevin Can Wait killed off its wife character several years ago and then made her death into a cheap punch line, it felt like a nadir for the traditional family sitcom. Playing the matriarch on these shows often relegated actresses to dowdy purgatory as the resident killjoy who “serves sandwiches and nags a little bit and is the constant butt of jokes,” said former Schitt’s Creek star Annie Murphy. In her forthcoming series Kevin Can F**k Himself, Murphy gives the genre the finger.
Designed as a televisual mindfuck, the hour-long AMC series (which premieres this summer) toggles between an old-school multicam network sitcom and a gritty, single-camera prestige streaming drama. In the laugh-tracked scenes, Murphy’s working-class Massachusetts heroine, Allison, cheerfully absorbs the humiliations that life (and her husband) have in store for her. But outside the sitcom camera’s gaze, she goes rogue, consumed by rage.
Kevin Can F**k Himself stars Annie Murphy and Eric Petersen
By Jojo Whilden/AMC.After six seasons of total immersion in the gentle world of Schitt’s Creek, Murphy leapt at the chance to play someone so different from debutante-with-a-heart-of-gold Alexis Rose. For one thing, Allison is utterly unconcerned with her physical appearance, which opens the door to a lot of ugly crying.
“I get to do a lot of ugly in this show!” Murphy crowed. She remembers the day she and costar Mary Hollis Inboden got their first glimpse of the dailies: “We started trying to kind of bribe the lighting guys to just give us a little brighter light so you don’t see quite as many wrinkles or pores, but we had no luck with that. It is a very, very gritty looking show. We had to just put our pride away for a minute.”
Allison is also very, very angry—something Murphy didn’t think she could relate to, until she stepped on set. “It has been a little concerning how quickly and easily I can smash a glass on the wall and kick over garbage cans while screaming,” she said bemusedly. “I think as women we’re all kind of suppressing a lot, so it is really lovely to have a smashing-things outlet for that.”
One of the things that infuriated Murphy in real life was Kevin Can Wait, which unceremoniously ejected actor Erinn Hayes—who played Kevin’s wife of 20 years—because it was “literally just running out of ideas,” according to star Kevin James.
When I asked Murphy if she watched that sitcom in order to satirize it, she sighed. “I did watch an episode here and there of Kevin Can Wait, but it just gets to a point where you’re like, FUCK this. Like, getting angry as opposed to getting any source of entertainment out of it. I got the gist of it pretty quickly.”
Kevin Can F**k Himself was created by Lodge 49 writer Valerie Armstrong, and Murphy was delighted to be surrounded by women writers and directors on the set. (Rashida Jones is an executive producer.) “In the sitcom world, so much sexism and misogyny and racism and homophobia and bigotry is cloaked by this laugh track,” Murphy said. The new show draws attention to “the impact that these ‘jokes’ have on human beings…. to take a step back and just be able to say: What have we been laughing at all of these years, and is it funny?”