They are, like cop shows, one of TV’s most renewable resources, enduring perhaps because viewers see more of themselves than they’d like to admit in one half of those couples or the other.
These are the questions at the core of AMC’s strange and sometimes fascinating new experiment Kevin Can F**k Himself.
Murphy’s having a moment thanks to Schitt’s Creek, but it’s also fun to imagine if they’d cast Erinn Hayes, a.k.a.
Kevin and Allison are constantly fighting over the condition of a Pottery Barn table that she bought at Goodwill, for instance, and when she objects to him putting his coffee mug on it without a coaster, the mug is clearly empty; when he exits the room and we shift to drama mode, there seems to be liquid in it, in a way meant to confirm that this is real and the sitcom stuff is not.
Kevin apparently made a mess of the whole situation, in a manner which sounds criminal when Allison describes it, even as Patty admits, “It seemed… harmless.” When you are a character on a bad sitcom — even if you don’t know that’s what you are — you get used to waving away all kinds of extreme behavior as routine shenanigans.
The self-awareness is smart, and the series as a whole will change the way you look at the next Kevin Can Wait-esque tomfoolery.