Where to Stream: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

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The early ’00s were a turning point for television comedy. As long running hits like Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Frasier came to a close, new comedies like The Office and Arrested Development emerged—and their impact is still felt today. The Office and Arrested Development finally made single-cam sitcoms—as in, sitcoms without a laugh track—work on TV. Fast forward a decade later and pretty much every comedy—be it on a network, cable, and streaming service—is modeled after those two shows (or their immediate successor Modern Family).

Sitcoms are now shot without an audience and jokes are crafted in the editing bay rather than onstage. This has led to a diverse lineup of situations for comedies since these shows can go places that can’t be recreated on a soundstage. Single-cam shows can also deliver more jokes since they’re not waiting for an audience to pipe down. Still, there’s one single-cam show that could benefit from adding more cameras and an audience. That show is Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and I know it would be unstoppable in front of multiple cameras.

Multi-cam comedies are not hot right now and audiences are deeply divided on them. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone that loves The Big Bang Theory just as much as they love a lo-fi Netflix original like Love. Over the last 10 years, most multi-cam have been riffs on the schlubby guy/hot wife situation. I think it’s a shame that the multi-cam format is called unoriginal just because the original voices are opting for single-cam shows. This is the format that gave us Seinfeld, NewsRadio, The Golden Girls, Friends, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I Love Lucy! It’s an art, one that’s sadly been crushed under the weight of a hundred dumb husbands. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt could change all of that by going multi-cam in Season Four–at least for an episode.

It’s a crime that a show with Ellie Kemper, Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski, and Carol Kane has yet to go live in front of a studio audience. All four of them have years of experience in performing live. Carol Kane is a bona fide sitcom legend. She performed live in front of an audience every week on Taxi in the early ’80s, winning back-to-back Emmys for her role as Simka Dahblitz-Gravas. Kane, then a creepy and quirky 30-year-old, more than held her own against Andy Kaufman! She then went to Broadway, playing Madame Morrible in Wicked.

Kane isn’t the only Schmidt cast member with Broadway experience. Before breaking into TV on Ally McBeal, Jane Krakowski spent the ’90s keeping Broadway stages hot in productions of Grand Hotel, Company, and Once Upon a Mattress. More recently she appeared on Broadway in She Loves Me. Similarly, Tituss Burgess’ pre-30 Rock claim to fame was a quartet of Broadway musicals: Good Vibrations, Jersey Boys, The Little Mermaid, and Guys and Dolls. These two are veteran performers with the precision and fearlessness that comes with commanding a live crowd multiple times a week.

Unbreakable lead Ellie Kemper isn’t a Broadway star and she hasn’t done a multi-cam show before, but I can personally vouch for her live cred. Prior to landing her breakout role on The Office, Kemper performed regularly at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City with the Harold team fwand. I got to see Kemper perform with fwand—arguably the best improv team ever, if you ask someone that was at the UCB in 2007—on a near weekly basis. The Kemper you see in Kimmy Schmidt is the Kemper you get on stage. She’s that committed of a performer, able to deliver hilarious and confident comebacks to whatever is thrown her way.

How do you have these four performers on one show and not let them loose in front of an audience? The real reason for doing a show in front of laughing humans is not to, as people disdainfully claim, “tell you when to laugh.” Sitcoms are performed in front of an audience to capture energy, to supercharge the performances, and make you—the viewer at home—feel the way you feel when you’re caught up in theatrical magic.

Multi-cam and single-cam setups are tools you use to execute different kinds of comedy. Single-cam shows are great at catching intimate moments and playing them for laughs. They also add cutaways to the arsenal of jokes. Multi-cam, with its use of longer takes and wider shots, can capture physical comedy—particularly with an ensemble—and establish a real sense of space. The best multi-cam episodes are ones where the cast presents what’s essentially a one-act play, where the characters bounce off of each other in a confined space. If you doubt the validity of multi-cam, watch Cheers’ “An Old-Fashioned Wedding,” Friends’ “The One Where No One’s Ready,” Frasier’s “The Innkeepers,” or Seinfeld’s “The Chinese Restaurant.”

Kimmy Schmidt can do that. They could put four killer live performers together in one set and let them loose, with that live energy and momentum adding more fuel to their comedy fires. Season Three came close to doing this in the Hurricane episode “Kimmy Does A Puzzle!,” and Titus and Jacqueline got up to some farcical hijinks with Josh Charles’ lecherous character in “Kimmy Is A Feminist!” Kimmy already works with the madcap rhythm of a great multi-cam show. I want to that rhythm unobstructed by edits and cutaways. I want to see this fantastic foursome pull off the intricately choreographed comedic chaos that I know they’re capable of. Just imagine how much more Titus-ier Tituss could be if he was taking a studio audience on a face journey with him.

This can work, too, even if it’s just for one episode. Tina Fey’s previous show 30 Rock went multi-cam twice. Those episodes proved that there’s a real sense of energy that comes from taping in front of a bunch of excited tourists and aggressive New Yorkers. By not ditching the cutaway jokes it was known for, 30 Rock even proved that the strengths of single-cam can be added to the energy of multi-cam. The same can—and should—be done on Kimmy Schmidt.

The multi-cam format—the format that gave us some of the all-time greatest TV shows—is stagnant. If there’s one person that can perk it up and drag it out of the doldrums, it’s the enthusiastic and energetic Kimmy Schmidt.

Where to stream Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt