Kevin Can F**K Himself invites viewers to take a closer look at the stereotypical sitcom wife. So often the butt of the joke and mostly there to contribute to their husband's stories, these characters (and the actors who portray them) are often shortchanged and denied their own personal narratives. Kevin Can F**K Himself follows one such sitcom character as she walks out of the multi-camera setup and goes on her own journey, uncovering her personal dreams and value and showing just how brutal playing the sitcom role can be. At a roundtable attended by CBR, Kevin Can F**K Himself creator Valerie Armstrong and showrunner Craig DeGregorio discussed the ideas at work in the new series and how they brought the show to life.
To open, Armstrong described the unusual inspiration for Kevin Can F**K Himself. "So the idea came to me, unfortunately, in a way that nothing has before or since, and probably never will again. But I was listening to a podcast with these women comedians, whom I loved and would have killed to write for -- I was an assistant at the time. They were talking about pilot season and going out for the sitcom life and how every year, it's the same meeting. They're always told, 'We need a really funny woman for this.' And then they get the sides and it's all reactions, or they're set-up machines for the men in the room," she recalled.
"I was so mad that that was still happening and that these women were going out for that and not getting it. I thought, 'Well, where's her show? I want to follow her, she must be so angry.' The image of what turned out to be just kind of the germ of the show came to me all at once -- this idea that this woman walks out of her sitcom-lit living room with her funny husband and a laugh-track and walks into the kitchen and for once we follow her," she continued. "We see that she's miserable, that this house is actually not bright and fun, but dank and dark and small. I always imagined her looking into the camera and saying, 'I fucking hate my husband.' That changed, but the germ of the idea has really stuck because, I mean, she was never supposed to be an actor. It's not supposed to be a show within a show. I just wanted people to look a little bit more closely at this woman we've been laughing at forever."
The idea hasn't changed much since this initial inspiration. Kevin Can F**K Himself shows viewers a traditional sitcom-style show, using the standard multi-cam format and laugh track. The show follows the protagonist Allison McRoberts, played by Schitt's Creek veteran Annie Murphy, out of the room and out of the range of the multi-cam set-up. She doesn't say she hates her husband, but the switch to the single camera dramatic style and dark lighting shows that everything is not right in Allison's world, even before she breaks a glass out of frustration.
But just because the idea came easily to Armstrong doesn't mean that the whole process went smoothly. "I didn't have a traditional pitch process," she explained. "AMC asked me to come in for just a general meeting with one executive, and two hours beforehand I got a call from my manager that said, 'I guess they just read your script, now your meeting's about buying it. Do you have anything prepared?' And I said, 'Well, no, not at all, Brandy. This is my third meeting ever.'"
"I went into this meeting, and I thought I blew it. Suddenly, instead of one executive, there were four. And I remember, one of them asked me what I had in mind for a second season. I gave an answer -- I blacked out, I don't even remember what I said. But I do remember her saying, 'Yeah, I was afraid you were gonna say something like that.' And I left that meeting thinking, 'Well, okay, I blew that. But that was interesting.' And then three weeks later, I got a call that they wanted to buy it.
Armstrong describes this chain of events as "obnoxious" for other people in the industry, but chalks it up to being "incredibly lucky, from the beginning, that I had partners who got it, who understood the show. There was no explaining it to them. They read it and they said, 'This is what we want to make.'"
When asked about speculation regarding potential sitcoms Kevin Can F**K Himself was commenting on, Armstrong said, "We're definitely not trying to poke at or point to any specific sitcom. I know the title might seem like we are, but that title stopped being about any other show a really long time ago. To me, the title is sort of telling us that the show's not actually about Kevin -- it looks like it is, but it's not. The title to me also exemplifies the format switch, where it sounds like something familiar and then at the end, the rug's sort of pulled out from under you."
DeGregorio also added that, while Kevin Can F**K Himself wasn't designed to comment on any specific show, "these tropes and these sort of characters have existed in some form or another for so long that it was very easy to sort of do our version of those characters and those stories."
The combination of sitcom and drama also meant that Kevin Can F**K Himself writers had to tackle multiple genres. "It was just important," DeGregorio shared, "that no writer took themselves too seriously, because we want to have people that respected sitcoms and also were willing to sort of open up and write real dramatic things."
Armstrong added, "I think we found, that in terms of the writers of the show, that as long as you had smart people of either sort of genre, they were going to figure out the other one. So there aren't a lot of people walking around with sitcom experience from, I don't know, Joey -- sorry, that was one of Craig [DeGregorio]'s first jobs -- or Big Bang Theory, who also wrote On Becoming a God in Central Florida. It was a hard job to hire for. But what we found is that if you've got a typical kind of sitcom writer who was smart and in touch with their feelings, they could contribute to that drama side. And the same went with the drama writers -- if they had a real appreciation for sitcoms that they didn't look down on them, they were pitching jokes by the end of the season. It was a really fun room to be in. I mean, you know, as fun is writing can ever be."
DeGregorio described some of the difficulties of making a show that is a commentary on sitcoms: "First off," he claimed, "in order to do any sort of commentary on something, we needed to do a real version of the sitcom because if we're trying to comment on sitcoms and just doing not a real sitcom then there's no commentary there. As far as blending tones, we just wanted to stay very true to what each world was and we wanted to make a real multi-camera comedy when that is on screen and when we're witnessing Allison's deeper life, wanted to make it seem very real."
There's a lot that makes Kevin Can F**K Himself a complex show, from this blending of styles to the fact that the protagonist is planning on murdering her husband. "I never wanted to suggest that killing your husband is a super great idea or a sound decision that other people should come to," Armstrong explained. "I think we got very lucky and that Annie -- I find her just to be inherently root-able for. I think that I want to watch that woman succeed at everything she does because she imbues such a humanity into everything. And that's just also who Annie is -- she's a wonderful person."
"I never wanted anybody to watch the show and think like, 'Oh, they're asking me to think that murder is fine.' What I wanted was the audience to understand why Allison thinks that this is what she has to do," she continued. "That, with everything we tell you about that character from the moment you see her, you understand why she's there, why she's still there, how she got there, why she didn't just leave, as she tells the librarian. I think that that makes her -- you're able to root for her. You may think that what she's doing is a terrible idea, and most of the time it is, but I think that seeing her make such mistakes makes her really human and relatable. That means that you can root for her and I'm certainly asking for you to."
"Root for Allison, and you root for Allison and Patty and their relationship," DeGregorio added.
Armstrong and DeGregorio also dove into some very specific features of Kevin Can F**K Himself. For instance, Patty's backstory shows her being offered a library copy of Memoirs of a Geisha from one of her hair salon clients. DeGregorio described Memoirs of a Geisha as "just a normal-ass book that someone kind of should have read." Armstrong added that they "liked Patty being a reader a lot -- somebody who's curious, someone who sort of continued their education even though they didn't go to college. But we also really liked the idea that she wasn't a highfalutin' reader, she read John Grisham and stuff that she enjoyed. And to me, that's Memoirs of a Geisha. It's popular and well known and stuff, but that doesn't mean it's bad."
"It's the perfect example of a book that probably got taken out a bunch and now kind of sits at the library," DeGregorio said as a way of explaining why Patty's client might be able to give her a library copy.
The Worcester setting of Kevin Can F**K Himself was also important to the show. "I definitely wanted it to have a sense of place," Armstrong shared. "I wanted it to be specific. I don't think that this story necessarily is Worcester-specific. But to me, it is New England-specific. It is a bunch of repressed New Englanders walking around who can't talk about how they actually feel, who look down on things like therapy, and have had this real sense of glass-half-empty. If it's nice out now, it's because it's just not raining yet. I think that is inherently a New England sort of quality."
"But what excited me about Worcester was I knew this guy who was my brother's roommate in college and he would talk about Worcester with this real acknowledgment that there was something not right there, that it was backwards and that it was dated and that it had its weird, weird quirks that didn't make sense to him or that he was sort of embarrassed by," she recalled. "But he also had such a such an unfailing pride. To have both of those feelings at once, to hold them in the same person, I thought what a great place to set the show that has these two sides to it -- this glossy veneer and then the rot beneath it. Worcester, I thought, sounded specific and interesting and could speak to that."
Armstrong was quick to add that the typical Worcester speech patterns were a draw as well. "Also that guy just had the best accent and to write to it was really fun. He would say the words 'career,' like your job, and the country 'Korea' indistinguishably. And that always made me laugh," she said.
Created by Valerie Armstrong, Kevin Can F**K Himself stars Annie Murphy, Mary Hollis Inboden and Eric Petersen. The series premieres Sunday, June 13 on AMC+ and Sunday, June 20 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.