'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt': EW review

Kimmy Schmidt is a product of her times—those times being the premillennial era. She quotes Billy Madison, confuses The Breakfast Club with St. Elmo’s Fire, and still thinks light-up Skechers are, like, totally awesome. Kimmy might have progressed into the 21st century if she hadn’t fallen into an apocalyptic cult, forced to live in a bunker for more than a decade. Now liberated, this “Indiana Mole Woman” is free to move forward in the capital of reinvention, New York City. Created by Tina Fey and longtime 30 Rock partner Robert Carlock, this wise, wicked comedy offers an offbeat riff on the Single Woman in the Big City sitcom and smart satire about “self”-obsession, from self-improvement to selfies. At first, it comes off smug: Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) is a naive rube, and the rich witch for whom she nannies (Jane Krakowski) is an outrageous narcissist. But the characters quickly gain depth, and by episode 3, you realize the show is about a culture that reduces people to caricatures and the folly of capable souls who underestimate themselves. Kemper leads a fantastic ensemble that corrals the chaotic elements of broad characters into coherence. The more they convert their cartoony personas into real humans of New York, the stronger Kimmy Schmidt becomes. A-