Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

The Rise of Women with Mental Illness in TV Series

With the sleeper success of ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ the increased focus on Kimmy Schmidt’s PTSD this season on ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’ and Rachel Goldberg’s mental illness on ‘UnREAL,’ there seems to be a rise in depictions of mental health — in particular, women’s mental health — on television.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

With the sleeper success of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the increased focus on Kimmy Schmidt’s PTSD this season on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Rachel Goldberg’s mental illness on UnREAL, there seems to be a rise in depictions of mental health — in particular, women’s mental health — on television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deals perhaps most explicitly with mental health. Unfortunately, the series has an awful, ableist title. Unhappy in her high-powered career as a New York lawyer, Rebecca Bunch bumps into her summer camp boyfriend Josh Chan in the street and decides to follow him to West Covina, California, though she repeatedly claims that’s not the reason for her sea change. There we see her transition through depression, anxiety, and “smidges of [obsessive] compulsive disorder” in her quest to win back Josh, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s co-creators Rachel Bloom (who plays Rebecca) and Aline Brosh McKenna told Vulture.

The hormones in play when you’re falling in love — increased dopamine levels and a decrease in serotonin — mirror those released when taking a hit of cocaine and having obsessive compulsive disorder. Not only is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a commentary on Rebecca’s mental health struggles but it covertly examines the general absurdity of romance in our society. Romantic comedies, the glorification of violent couples such as Sid and Nancy and Harley Quinn and The Joker, and excusing playground bullying as affection all equate intense passion, and at times even abuse, with true love. Bloom and Brosh McKenna told Vulture that many characters in rom-coms exhibit extremely unhealthy or destructive behavior and they differentiate Rebecca’s behavior from this.

That brings us to UnReal, created by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, which finished its second season on Lifetime. Despite its well–documented problems this season regarding race and its depiction of people of color, the show is another that portrays a woman living and working with mental illness to varying degrees of success. As Alyssa Rosenberg writes at The Washington Post:

“The most interesting element of UnREAL, though… is the idea that mental illness is an appropriate response to certain social conditions and expectations for modern women. The Bachelor-style show Rachel works for pushes the women who appear on it to their absolute limits, forcing them to adopt artificial personas and suppress their feelings to compete for the affections of a man who’s appearing on the show only to boost his business. Being the person involved in manipulating other women is a highly unpleasant task. And an on-air meltdown Rachel suffered shortly before the events of the first season of UnREAL may actually be the sanest and most humane possible reaction to the job.”

Though UnReal hasn’t done Rachel — nor most of its other characters, for that matter — justice this season, she manipulates people to get what she wants and struggles with mental illness internally in equal measure, showing that a woman with mental illness doesn’t have to be a traditionally sympathetic character.

On the other hand, though, Kimmy Schmidt is a character we can more easily empathize with due to her jovial, almost childlike (which is another trope of women with mental illness in itself) demeanor. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt took us by surprise this season as it dealt savilly with the fallout from Kimmy’s imprisonment by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. Bread crumbs like Kimmy’s stress burping, her behavior around war veteran Keith, and her involuntary responses to getting intimate with Dong are scattered throughout the earlier parts of season two, which lead to Kimmy seeking therapy from Dr. Andrea (Tina Fey, who also co-created the series) in later episodes. Kimmy’s reluctance to see a psychiatrist is realistic, as is the turmoil she increasingly sees her life devolve into as she ignores her problems. For so long, Kimmy played the role of therapist in her friends’ and fellow captives’ lives that she can’t see how much she herself needs one.

By bringing mental health issues to the forefront — along with other complex portrayals, such as those in Being Mary Jane, You’re the Worst, Bojack Horseman, Girls, Lady Dynamite, and Homeland — television is changing the perception of women with mental illness from fetishized objects to more nuanced and realistic portrayals, at once granting greater representation to women with disabilities and hopefully reducing the stigma of mental illness.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer based in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris and read her previous published work at her website The Scarlett Woman.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

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#FilmHerStory: 10 Female Biopics That Desperately Need to Happen by Elisabeth Donnelly at Flavorwire

Ava DuVernay: Focusing the Lens on Equality by Kitty Lindsay at Ms. blog

The Workplace Is Even More Sexist In Movies Than In Reality by Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight

13 Gay Things You Can’t Miss at South By Southwest by Neal Broverman at Advocate

SXBlog: The Future of Film Criticism: Diversify or Die by Erik Paschall at mxdwn

“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is Funny, But Has Its Flaws by Parker Marie Molloy at Bitch Media

India’s Daughter: Can a Movie Change a Country’s Attitude Towards Women? by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

Kerry Washington Will Play Anita Hill in HBO’s Movie About the Clarence Thomas Sexual Harrassment Supreme Court Case by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

‘Walking Dead’ Producer Sets Out to Tell Wilma Mankiller’s Story at Indian Country

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Black Women Don’t Need Another Diversity Initiative by Nneka M. Okona at For Harriet

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In the Documentary ‘GTFO,’ Female Video Gamers Fight Back by Robert Ito at The New York Times

Univision Race Gaffe Shows Culture Gap by Maria Murriel at NPR’s Code Switch

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11 Shocking Stories Of Everyday Sexism, As Told By Women In Entertainment by Candace Lowry at BuzzFeed

For Some Women in Hollywood, Movie Roles Are Getting Better With Age by Eliza Krigman at takepart

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Is a Feminist and Comedic Triumph

White men are background players in the world of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ (and, of those who do appear, there’s scarcely a one who isn’t either comically inept or flat-out evil). As the lyrics of the theme song state, “White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes, but females are strong as hell, unbreakable. They alive, dammit!” The show is fundamentally about the collective trauma of growing up female in a woman-hating world.

Written by Max Thornton.

Like sitcom enthusiasts all across America, I spent my weekend mainlining my latest obsession, Tina Fey’s new show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. NBC’s critical darlings – The Office, 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Recreation – have all trickled off our screens over the past few years, and Kimmy was to have filled the void; but NBC can’t let itself have anything nice without self-sabotaging, and passed the show on to Netflix. Someone in the network’s upper echelons has presumably spent the whole weekend in bitter self-recrimination for throwing away what would have been NBC’s best new show since 2009.

This poster promises to upend How I Met Your Mother's yellow umbrella and its white, heteropatriarchal norms. — This poster promises an inversion of *How I Met Your Mother*‘s yellow umbrella and the white, heteropatriarchal sitcom norms it represents.

A cynic might suggest that NBC’s cold feet had less to do with the show’s premise (a young woman adjusting to life outside the underground bunker in which she has spent the last 15 years as the captive of an apocalyptic cult) than with its profound lack of interest in the white men who so dominate the television landscape. The opening credits make this abundantly clear: only one white man’s name appears, that of co-creator Robert Carlock. White men are background players in the world of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (and, of those who do appear, there’s scarcely a one who isn’t either comically inept or flat-out evil). As the lyrics of the theme song state, “White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes, but females are strong as hell, unbreakable. They alive, dammit!”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYNbp0u8WjA”]

All of the reviews I’ve seen have lauded the show for handling its dark premise so pitch-perfectly, attributing the comedic transmutation to the showrunners’ biting 30 Rock-honed wit or to Ellie Kemper’s wonderful performance as Kimmy. The real reason it works so well, though, is because the show is fundamentally about womanhood in general. Kimmy’s specific trauma is a reflection of, and metaphor for, the collective trauma of growing up female in a woman-hating world.

The underground bunker, into which Kimmy is forced as a newly pubescent 14-year-old, represents the constraints of heteropatriarchal gender norms, which are most fully embodied in Jon Hamm’s creepy cult leader. He emotionally abuses and manipulates the women he has imprisoned, gets inside their heads, interprets the Bible in a way that supports his lies, and – once he’s on trial – charms and dazzles everyone around him into accepting his nonsense. The bunker-as-patriarchy metaphor is made explicit more than once: in the pilot episode, when Matt Lauer observes, “I’m always amazed at what women will do because they’re afraid of being rude”; when Kimmy realizes her wealthy employer’s loveless marriage is a bunker in its own way; when a certain upscale fitness trend is revealed to be yet another way to keep women in a dark room doing what a man tells them to.

This robot is much more sympathetic than most white men on TV (and off it).

The women of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, who have all been victimized by heteropatriarchy, use an assortment of coping mechanisms. Cyndee exploits her victim status to get free stuff from all the people who feel sorry for her. Donna Maria keeps her skills close to her chest and doesn’t let on that she’s savvier than the rest put together. Gretchen goes deep into denial. Kimmy tries to put her past behind her and get on with life. These different coping mechanisms sometimes bring them into conflict with one another; however, it’s only by working together that they can confront and defang their aggressor. This idea, of people who aren’t white men banding together to pull back the curtain and reveal the patriarchal Wonderful Wizard as a sham, is a major theme of the show. It’s as though Tina Fey took on board certain feminist criticisms of 30 Rock‘s tendency to be male-dominated and decided to do something very different.

The show addresses manhood, too, in a wonderful plot where Kimmy’s magnificently queeny roommate Titus takes classes on how to pass as a straight man. Hilariously, his mentor is Hank from Breaking Bad, a show which was also about the destructiveness of white male patriarchy, but which – because it chose to portray this from the perspective of the said white male patriarch – was dangerously susceptible to misreadings from misogynistic fanboys who found Walter White’s badassery admirable. No such danger with Kimmy, in which the reveal that Entourage 2 will not be happening causes a bar full of strangers to break out into cheering and applause. What Titus learns about heterosexual masculinity is that he possesses the ability to fake it, but it’s aggro, destructive, and (contra the sexist mythos of heteropatriarchy) more artificial than the fabulous femmeyness that comes so naturally to him.

It’s worth mentioning that this show can be read as a metaphor for trans womanhood specifically, an idea suggested by the last line of the theme song: “That’s gonna be, you know, a fascinating transition.” Consider: after many years of being lied to about the world and her place in it, Kimmy moves to the big city, changes her name, and conceals her past for her own safety and peace of mind. She is an adult who is still to some extent an emotional adolescent, temporally out of sync with the world around her, which is not wholly unlike the experience of beginning transition as an adult. Again, it’s not a huge leap to read this as a deliberate correction of some of 30 Rock‘s missteps.

There are also ongoing threads skewering wealth and class, the immigration system, and white supremacy – Titus realizing he is treated far better on the streets of New York as a werewolf than a Black man is on the nose, but it’s timely and it’s very funny. I realize I haven’t said much about the actual comedy aspect of the show, but rest assured that it is absolutely hilarious. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt succeeds as a work of intersectional feminism, and it also succeeds as a comedy. It’s everything I want in my entertainment, and I can’t wait for season two.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. A Buzzfeed quiz pegged him as Kimmy, but he feels like more of a Titus.