Annie Murphy Destroys the Sitcom Wife Stereotype in Kevin Can F**k Himself
Ew Kevin.
Ever since the series finale of Schitt’s Creek, we’ve been dying to see what Annie Murphy will do next. And today, we finally get a sneak peek at what the erstwhile Alexis Rose has been up to. AMC has dropped the first trailer for Kevin Can F**k Himself, a dark meta comedy which stars Murphy as Allison, a prototypical sitcom wife: gorgeous, stressed, and married to Kevin (Eric Petersen) a thankless slob whom the show revolves around. The synopsis reads, “This is a story about a woman who keeps playing a perfect housewife. Then, one day she realizes what she wants: to kill her husband.”
The series is a welcome deconstruction of the sitcom wife stereotype, a supernaturally gorgeous creation who is inexplicably married to an oafish boor of a man. She is frequently either the set-up or the butt of his jokes, and often acts as the nagging voice of reason to her whimsical mate. It’s a thankless role in the fictional relationship, and an equally thankless role for the actress who gets saddled playing the humorless straight man.
It’s also an exhausting portrayal of womanhood that relegates women to supporting roles, with no storyline of their own. Series creator Valerie Armstrong (Lodge 49) said she came up with the idea for the show after listening to two actresses discuss sitcom roles on a podcast. Armstrong thought, “The job of the show is making that wife, that beautiful, put-upon, supposedly naggy wife, a real person. How did that woman actually get stuck in this situation? And how does she get out?”
The title, a play on the Kevin James sitcom “Kevin Can Wait”, not only pokes fun at that series, but at the controversy surrounding the show when actress Erinn Hayes was fired and her character killed off so she could be replaced with Leah Remini.
Armstrong said of the title, “It’s still the title because it’s actually, in my head, a very good encapsulation of the format of the show itself. It starts out sounding very familiar, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you.”
Armstrong described the series “about a woman who we all grew up thinking that we knew, the sitcom wife, and she is surrounded by these people who prop up her husband. She is the butt of most of the jokes and seemingly fine with it… But on our show, we follow her out of that sitcom world where there is no laugh track. Her dramatic life is full of grit and emotion that she’s not afforded in that sitcom.”
The trailer pivots between the cheery sitcom set of Allison’s home life and the more harsh world she walks into once she leaves the confines of home. Armstrong described the world saying, “It’s like a lens. It’s a metaphor for the benefit of the doubt we’ve given men like Kevin forever. Men who get to like walk through life with a sitcom audience cheering them on all the time.”
It’s an exciting look at pop culture and gender politics that is long overdue, and with Murphy taking the lead, the series is quickly climbing up the list of our most anticipated series of 2021.
Kevin Can F**k Himself premieres on AMC sometime this summer.
(via Entertainment Weekly, featured image: Jojo Whilden/AMC)
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