TV Review – Kevin Can F*** Himself Season Two

Kevin Can F**k Himself (2022)
Written by Valerie Armstrong, Craig DiGregorio, Sean Clements, Kate Loveless, Grace Edwards, and Jasmyne Peck
Directed by Anna Dokoza

There is a moment the audience should immediately expect after watching the first episode of this entire series. We get that moment in the series finale; it comes in the last 10 minutes. That was a perfect moment. It’s a shame that the journey that led us there was so bereft of interesting characters, captivating storylines, and a complete waste of a premise rich with potential to explore. Television has given us plenty of shows that play with genre & structure conventions, whether a series’ entire premise or one-off episodes that seek to explore a change in perspective. I was very excited about this with season one, but by the time it ended, I was contemplating whether to continue watching. There was only one more eight-episode season to go, so I thought, the hell with it, I’ll finish this thing. What a slog lay before me.

Season Two picks up right where the first left off. Allison (Annie Murphy) and Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden) have just knocked Neil (Alex Bonifer) unconscious. They tie the man up in the basement as he comes to terms with their plan to kill Kevin (Eric Petersen). Eventually, Patty takes Neil to the hospital as his head continues to bleed, and he decides to sit on this information as Kevin’s behavior has started to rub him the wrong way, too. And so the story just goes on; now Allison shifts from trying to end Kevin’s life to faking her own death; perhaps then she can escape the gravitational pull of his asshole orbit. That is filled with a series of uninteresting obstacles balanced with subplots that either drag on without any character development or suddenly feel rushed as the producers realize the show is ending soon.

So many plot threads established in the first season failed to come to fruition, not in any meaningful way but just another thing tossed onto a growing pile of new characters & storylines that just never go anywhere. At no point does this plethora of fluff add up to anything of meaning. The interplay between the sitcom & the gritty world becomes less & less meaningful as the season goes on, with Kevin’s three-camera, laugh-track accompanied portions sometimes failing to tie into Allison’s storyline. It’s just there because they need to pad the running time, and Kevin must do something. In fact, Kevin seems less important than ever (until the finale) as an obstacle in Allison’s life.

We get a lot of side relationships in this season: Patty is in a burgeoning relationship with police detective Tammy (Candice Coke), Pete meets an obnoxious woman named Lorraine, and Neil ends up having a messy affair with Diane, Allison’s aunt. The first relationship lacked all chemistry, and not once did I buy Patty & Tammy as two people authentically attracted to each other. In fact, there’s a flashback to the day of Allison’s father’s funeral, where she & Patty meet for the first time. My reading of this was that there was an attraction between these two that got intercepted by the obnoxious, imposing Kevin. When we reached the series finale, I expected these two would finally admit their feelings for each other and get their mutual happy ending. Nope. Just friends. Yawn. 

Neil’s affair with Diane doesn’t add anything to the series other than giving those characters something to do. I thought the show might draw a more straightforward line between Diana seeing Kevin’s behavior towards Allison as abuse, but it seems unsure if it wants to do that. That’s one of the worst things about this show. It has moments of profound confidence, almost immediately undermined by a seeming worry of shaking things up too much. This felt like a show that could do wonders playing with the fourth wall, and it never does. I’ve read the articles and interviews with the show’s creator, Valerie Armstrong, and her inspiration to create the show sounds like the makings of something fantastic. It was to be a commentary on the domestic sitcom and the way male mediocrity & abusive behavior is softened in the medium. I think this a tremendously fruitful space to explore, but from the final product, it seems like the series wasn’t that interested in exploring the interplay between television formats in a way I found interesting.

When we get that anticipated moment, a break from the sitcom fantasy where reality seeps in, it is gratifying. However, it felt undeserved because of the meandering, ultimately pointless journey that got us here. Leaning into the horror of the situation would have made for a more engaging show. That big moment in the finale vibrates with a horrific tone, and it worked so well. More direct engagement with the sitcom form, posing it as a psychology prison rather than an interruption, would have been the better route. The flashback episode begins to approach this territory, showing Allison as someone who created that false tone when she was around her mother, but then, once again, it’s a thread that the series never does anything with.

There came a point where the show would have been better off focusing on Patty as the main character; she was far more interesting to follow than Allison, who just seemed to be jogging in circles. I think all the actors here are very talented; they just aren’t given material that allows us to see them shine. The closest we get is Eric Peterson as Kevin, who gets to play a buffoonish monster and pulls off one of the most terrifying character switches I’ve ever seen. Again, this was the moment every viewer anticipated, and it worked; we just had to get through approximately sixteen hours of less-than-stellar television to reach it. The show sometimes felt procedural, with characters barely progressing throughout multiple episodes. A character started an episode with a need, went through many challenges, and either got what they had wanted but regretted it or didn’t get it at all. One of the most frustrating executions of an absolutely brilliant concept.