Tina Fey And Race: ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Has A Straight, White Male Problem

When I finished the thirteen episodes that made up the first season of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, three things crossed my mind. The first: holy cow, how did I watch thirteen episodes of anything so quickly? The second: what a goddamn delightful show! And the third: boy, people are going to have some issues with this. As with Tina Fey and her co-creator Robert Carlock’s previous work (Carlock was a showrunner on Fey’s acclaimed 30 Rock), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt uses racial humor often, creating some cringe-worthy comedic moments that could for some viewers seem, for lack of a better word, “problematic.”

And like clockwork, I found on Monday morning an essay on Medium by Meghan O’Dea that lamented the uncomfortable moments in which the show tried to tackle racial issues. Yes, there’s the character of Dong — a Vietnamese immigrant who the titular character, herself fresh out of an underground bunker where she was imprisoned in a doomsday cult for fifteen years, meets in a GED prep course (and who, by the end of the first season, becomes a love interest). There’s Kimmy’s roommate Titus, a gay black man whose sexuality and race are commented upon often throughout the thirteen episodes, and Kimmy’s boss, Jacqueline Voorhees, who, we learn, is a bleach-blonde Native American reservation expat who shunned her heritage in order to pursue the American dream of bedding, and eventually marrying, a rich white dude. There are also two minor Latina characters: Donna Maria, the sole non-white woman trapped in the bunker with Kimmy and her po-dunk Hoosier cohort, and Jacqueline’s housekeeper Vera, who mostly issues barbs directed at Kimmy’s cluelessness and resemblance to the illustrated mascot of Wendy’s. (She refers to Kimmy, quite hilariously, as “chica hamburguesa.”)

Before I go any further, I want to say that I’m a big fan of political correctness — I think it’s important to consider the humanity of others, as marginalized groups are too often reduced to stereotypical portrayals in popular media and meant to be the butt of every joke delivered by the typically white, middle-class, straight characters who utter them. But I don’t think, despite O’Dea’s valid points, that Tina Fey or Kimmy Schmidt have a race problem. In fact, I think what Fey and Co. do with race is quite commendable and revolutionary.

For me, it’s all about context and intent. For the latter, I can certainly recognize that often people are insensitive without meaning to be (the road to Hell being paved with what it is and all). But context is the most important factor when analyzing how Fey and her fellow writers invoke race to make a larger point. Are they playing on stereotypes? Absolutely. Titus (played wonderfully by the remarkable Tituss Burgess, a Broadway veteran), is over-the-top and effeminate, cited as being too gay for a role in The Lion King. But those qualities don’t make him someone to laugh at; on the contrary, these characteristics, which are often seen as comic flaws, are his calling card, his strengths. His flights of fancy, his musical asides with that bombastic tenor, his unabashedly feminine nature: these are not what makes him a comic character — they make him lovable and a blessed subversion of the gay best friend character trope we so often see in film and on television. That he goes to the extreme of hiring a coach to make him pass for straight is reminiscent of the excellent work from Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, and don’t get me started on the perfect commentary on race the show gives us when strangers treat Titus with more dignity when he’s dressed as a werewolf for his job than when he’s out of horror makeup.

Jane Krakowski‘s Jacqueline, who could essentially be described as Jenna Maroney with an Upper East Side address, is a stereotype of the status-obsessed Manhattan trophy wife. When she isn’t obsessed with herself, she’s focused on keeping her marriage intact — not because she loves her husband, but because she knows how vulnerable she would be if he left her for a younger woman. But critics of the show aren’t concerned with those facets of her personality, which are cartoonish stereotypes of a woman who is conditioned by the society that surrounds her to behave the way she does. Instead, it’s Jaclyn’s backstory: that she has Native American roots, and literally white-washed her heritage to achieve what she considers to be the loftiest status — that of a rich, vapid white woman. The season ends with her reconciling her heritage, true to Fey’s typical brand of humor, in the most absurd way possible: using her “heritage” to maneuver her way to Indiana (by recognizing that the sun sets in the west) and by joining in a college athlete brawl in which she tramples a Native American-inspired mascot and howling like a wolf.

And then there’s Dong, played by Ki Hong Lee. Yes, even I felt trepidation about the character’s name — that is until the joke immediately paid off. When Kimmy introduces herself, Dong immediately bursts into giggles and says that her name means “penis” in his language. Casual, childish dick joke aside, Dong is a powerful character solely for the fact that he’s a rarity in American pop culture: the Asian leading man. And sure, it seems simple enough, but watching Dong and Kimmy interact is something really special, because the two are on equal footing and actually have a lot in common. The show is about outsiders, with Kimmy being as much of a fish out of water as the rest of the characters. And it’s exhibiting a certain kind of otherness that brings these characters together and keeps them on equal standing. While there are at least two network shows this season that examine the comic nature of otherness through a non-white lens (the excellent Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat), those shows are rooted in reality; there isn’t much about Kimmy Schmidt that doesn’t feel like a live-action cartoon, but its one realistic characteristic is that the aforementioned characters are aware of their otherness just as Tina Fey and her writers purposefully wrote them to be who they are. To have their characters and those around them ignore that for no reason other than to avoid so-called problematic humor would be just as dishonest comically as it is intellectually.

While the criticisms of the way the show and Fey has historically dealt with race is valid, it seems a bit distracting from what the show actually accomplishes quite well: bringing the forefront minority characters and keeping them all on an equal, farcical playing field. And not only does the show give even its supporting minority characters surprising inner lives (even Donna Maria, who spends the near entirety of the series speaking Spanish, is revealed to be not just fluent in English — she also used her otherness to her advantage, to avoid the insipid dramas of the teenage white girls she was trapped in a bunker with, and then used her fifteen minutes of fame to make herself into an entrepreneur), but it presents an alternative to what is too commonly seen as the default American identity: the straight white male.

If anything, the show saves its utmost derision for the straight, white male characters: Martin Short‘s Sydney Grant; a plastic surgeon whose obsession with outer beauty (and his propagation of preposterous beauty standards) is as ludicrous as his silly-putty face; Adam Campbell’s faux British playboy and self-professed Daddy’s Boy Logan Beekman, whose entitlement only matches his loyalty to the most ridiculous loyalty to the patriarchy, Nick Kroll‘s Tristafé, the trainer at a Soulcycle-esque boutique fitness center who’s revealed to be even more self-hating than his customers; and Jon Hamm‘s Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, a charlatan whose idiotic prophesies and worldview are convincing solely because he’s outspoken, charismatic, and handsome. These are the real villains of the show, the men who take advantage of those whose emotional vulnerabilities despite being, at their core, complete and utter frauds.

Yet I haven’t seen a single think piece arguing that the straight, white male characters are stereotypical. And it’s a shame, because what it shows to me is that those of us who do not identify as such spend more time tearing down the revolutionary work of the show by projecting bad-faith assumptions about Tina Fey’s “white feminism” and falling into the trap that we always fall into: assuming that the those who do not fit into that “default” identity must, in turn, stand as a representative of a community as a whole. That’s not just a lot of pressure to put on the show’s writers, it’s also a lot of pressure on the actors who play those characters — the actors whose perspectives, by the way, are rarely considered when we criticize the characters that they had a hand in crafting.

Luckily for all of us, we have a second season headed our way, and it’ll be interesting to see how these characters develop. I, for one, would like to see more of Dong and, sure, less of the easy Asian stereotypes that come with his character, as he was used this season as a folly in a love triangle. I guarantee we will see more characters of various ethnicities, and the show will likely push those comic boundaries (while refraining from making its characters’ ethnic and cultural backgrounds the butts of the jokes). But if this silly show continues to spark a discussion about race and the intricacies of on-air representation, is that really a bad thing? I have a feeling that Tina Fey knows exactly what she’s doing with her show, and I believe that she’s doing it well.

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Photos: Netflix