It has to have been six years ago or thereabouts. The math gets fuzzy after a certain point, when there isn’t a handy sports championship or painfully memorable (read: extremely expensive) ER visit pin to put in it.
Mouse was a toddler still, of this much I am fairly certain, and she was sick something awful. Inconsolable, in pain, in a world of hurt. I was a relatively new stay at home dad and didn’t have all the answers I pretend to have today. And then a gift appeared, something akin to whatever frankincense and myrrh was, and even more useful in a musky old stable: a brand new DVD. It was the pilot episodes of the Dirty Sock Funtime Band TV show and it was manna from above. My girl and I were hysterical — real life LOL stuff — as we laid in bed together watching the absurdity play out on the laptop screen. She forgot about her discomfort for the duration and I learned two valuable lessons: 1) stay far away from donut brain aliens and 2) hilarious TV shows can trump over the counter medicine.
Fast forward a number of years, replace a sickly toddler with an in-pain old man, swap the campy Dirty Socks for the earnest (and campy) Kimmy Schmidt, and that’s my Friday May 29th 2015. I remembered those giggles and the temporary absence of illness and I wanted a piece of that painfree pie.
I woke up with some…something wrong with my ribs/mid-back/non-heart-side chest area. A muscle pull from extended upper body weight work at the gym on Wednesday morn? A funky sleep position Wednesday night? The work of an evil sorcerer? An arch enemy with a Jeff Bogle voodoo doll? I dunno, but I know that I like to laugh and I like to not feel any pain ever so I dialed up the vast Netflix media library and (finally) tried Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on for size. I mean, every single human on Twitter was going gaga over it/her a couple months ago. There must be something worth seeing, right?
Oh holy hell, yes. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s ridiculous and ridiculously funny take on the ‘unfrozen caveperson enters modern society’ trope is both over the top and grounded in something pretty amazingly real: kindness. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is not only good in a ‘hey this is a pretty good show’ sense but it is also good in a ‘goodness cures all’ sense. I freaking loved every second of the first 6 episodes I binge watched today in bed while I pounded Ibuprofen in hopes that the combination would ease my broken body. Success. I am broken yet unbreakable.
Maybe Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is old news for you or maybe, like me, it’s been on the fringes of your media landscape. Well, widen your lens and take it in because Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt will make you laugh, cry, and give you a reason or two to be hopeful and hey, you might just forget — for a little while at least (I mean, there are only 13 episodes) — about something that ails you.
OWTK is a member of the #Netflix #StreamTream
