Annie Murphy is coming off an Emmy-winning turn on Schitt's Creek that transformed her from a little-known Canadian actor to a household name. But after six seasons on a traditional-style sitcom, Murphy's next project is something just a little different. She's starring in a brand-new series on AMC as a sitcom wife named Allison, married to one of the ubiquitous schlubs on TV named Kevin. But these Kevin Can F**k Himself details suggest Murphy's new project is nothing like the sitcoms of yore.
When the series was greenlit back in 2018, the logline described it as "the serio-comic POV of the sadly stereotypical TV sitcom wife who must forever put up with her disproportionally schlubby, goofball husband." Based on intel that's been released since then, it appears the series starts in the traditionally brightly lit multi-cam world of the sitcom in which Allison (Annie Murphy) and Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden) are second fiddles to the stars of the show, Kevin (Eric Petersen) and Neil (Alex Bonifer). But then the show steps outside this world, to the modern-day single-cam, "dark and gritty" reality in which the consequences of how these women are treated play out.
But that's only the beginning of the story. Once they have their revelations, Allison and Patty discover their preconceptions of each other, based on the multi-cam reality, are wrong. In this single-cam world, they band together and become best friends to help each other survive.
Here's everything else we know so far:
On Feb 18, 2021, AMC released the first trailer for Kevin Can F**k Himself. The official synopsis says it all:
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.
Kevin Can F**k Himself is headlined by Annie Murphy as housewife Allison. According to the actor, she picked this role because of what a 180 it represented from Schitt's Creek, the show that made her famous. Speaking at the 2021 Television Critics Association panel, she said:
I was so worried that I was going to kind of get stuck in this like blond loopy land. And so, I really, really wanted to do something significantly different... I get to do things like kick over a garbage can angrily and fry an egg angrily. And, you know, do cocaine in an alleyway angrily. And these are all just such opposite things from what I was doing in Schitt's Creek. So, it just felt like exactly the right thing to do.
Inside the sitcom world, Eric Peterson (Kirstie) plays Allison's husband Kevin, Alex Bonifer (Superstore) plays Kevin's best friend Neil, and Brian Howe plays Kevin's father, Pete.
There's also Inboden (The Real O'Neals), who plays Patty, the stereotypical "next-door neighbor" and Neil's sister. But like Murphy, her character also exists outside the sitcom world, where Kevin and his ilk do not hold sway. There, she and Allison are BFFs plotting to kill Kevin. They're joined in the outer world by Raymond Lee, who plays Allison's potential love interest.
The series begins when Allison exits a sitcom world where she's spent her life trapped as the wife of an obnoxious man-child husband. Inside that world, everything revolves around him. Outside, she plots the only means of escape she can fathom: killing him.
But fans may have heard the series has been linked in the press to another sitcom, Kevin Can Wait. This series starred comedian Kevin James, who first hit it big in The King of Queens. Both of these sitcoms were criticized for centering around an obnoxious man-child who had an improbably good-looking wife. Leah Remini played the wife in The King of Queens and Erinn Hayes played her in Kevin Can Wait.
Those complaints became louder when Kevin Can Wait decided to kill off Hayes' character after the first season and replace her with a new love interest, played by Remini. When James admitted they killed Hayes' character off because the show "ran out of ideas" and killing her off made his character more interesting, it set off a firestorm of criticism. The show was canceled after Season 2. A scant few months later, Kevin Can F*** Himself was greenlit.
Whether or not the new show will directly reference Kevin Can Wait, or if it remains a mere implied connection via the title, remains to be seen.
Kevin Can F**k Himself does not yet have an official release date. The show, which will run eight episodes, is expected to premiere in the summer of 2021.
