Unbreakable

If you’re anything like me, when a show isn’t interesting at the beginning, you don’t want to continue watching it. I told myself I was going to watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for this blog post so I had to keep watching. Now I tend to watch reality shows or shows that are set in the past, but Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a show set in the present about, you guessed it, Kimmy Schmidt. She was just rescued from a bunker in the ground in Indiana, along with three other women, all who are referred to as “The Mole Women.” They were lured down to the bunker by their reverend who has brainwashed them into believing that there was a nuclear apocalypse and they are the only ones who survived. While it is a good plot line, it just isn’t something I would usually choose to watch. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a show that I would watch if I had finished all my other Netflix series.

Kimmy and the other Mole Women are brought to New York and interviewed on the Today Show by Matt Lauer and then put back on a bus to Indiana. Kimmy stops the bus and wants to stay in New York, as she would only be remembered back in Indiana as one of the Mole Women. While this seems like a good idea, she only has a middle school education and is pretty naive to things. She ends up finding an ad in the newspaper about an apartment and accepts the place within one minute of meeting her roommate and new landlord.

After the landlord, Lillian, tells her the place is hers if she comes back with a job, Kimmy finds a job as a nanny at a rich woman’s house. When she goes back to let her landlord and new roommate, Titus, know she has a job that “pays $17 an hour under the tables,” they let her move in. All she has is a backpack with a few books she had in the bunker and the cash that was given to her from the fund for the Mole Women. Her bag gets stolen from her, which is a big deal because that was basically all she had, plus it had all her money in it.

Throughout all these things, Kimmy keeps telling herself that she is unbreakable and keeps going. The word unbreakable is part of the theme song for the show. A neighbor of the man who held the women captive is interviewed when they are rescued. His interview is turned into a song and is used at the beginning of the episodes.

A couple of interesting things to point out are how Kimmy is naive and how sheltered she was down in the bunker. Both of these are sort of tied together in that she is so naive because she was sheltered down in the bunker. The women wore fully covered dresses and used each other for mirrors down there; they were forced to literally sit in front of each other and describe the other woman, pretending to be her mirror. Being sheltered like that, Kimmy, of course, didn’t know a lot of the technology of the day when she was rescued. This is an issue because she wants to hide that she is a Mole Woman. In one scene, Kimmy is in a public bathroom and laughs hysterically after finding out how to use the automatic sink and automatic hand dryer, things we take for granted. She goes to a candy store and decides she will have candy for dinner. She only buys one bag of candy in the entire candy store though, which is interesting because she somehow has the willpower to not splurge on a ton of candy. When she comes across a Chanel store, she comes out wearing a pair of sequined, embroidered, light-up pink shoes- something a middle schooler would have worn like ten years ago, which is fitting for Kimmy since she only has a middle school education.

As she continues exploring New York, she comes upon a horse that is tied up and let it free, probably because she was tied up down in the bunker and then let free (not literally tied up though). At one point she is giving her roommate, Titus, a pep talk when he was down on his luck and tells him he will sing at the Grammy’s one day with Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, both of whom have passed away but she wouldn’t know that. These little tidbits throughout the show kept me interested and added a little bit of humor. As I did end up enjoying the show, I loved seeing and hearing those little pieces as Kimmy was trying to keep her being a Mole Woman a secret.