Nested within each hour-long episode is a spot-on impression of a typical story arc from The King of Queens or Kevin Can Wait-the short-lived James sitcom notorious for unceremoniously killing off Erinn Hayes’ wife character. Allison leaves him in his delusional sitcom-land, and in sitcom-land he stays. This is where the drugs and the violence come in, though for the majority of the four episodes sent for review, Kevin remains blissfully unaware that anything is amiss. Allison, who has no friends of her own, bustles around fetching beers and enduring endless jokes at her expense. To schlubby loudmouth Kevin, this place is a castle, and its door is always open to his neanderthal dad Pete ( Chicago Fire’s Brian Howe), his idiot best friend Neil (Alex Bonifer from Superstore) and Neil’s sarcastic sister Patty ( The Real O’Neals’ Mary Hollis Inboden, in the show’s best performance). Theirs is a home we’ve seen before, decorated in the same chintzy style that art departments have projected on working-class families for decades, from All in the Family to Roseanne to James’ long-running CBS hit The King of Queens. Set in the post-industrial environs of Worcester, Mass., Kevin the multicam sitcom hovers around the living room and kitchen of Allison and Kevin McRoberts (a perma-bellowing Eric Petersen).
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Premiering June 20 on AMC and already available to stream on the AMC+ app, Kevin Can F**K Himself certainly does what it has been promising to do since the project was announced, in 2018: Murphy stars as Allison, a “ beauty paired with a less attractive, dismissive, caveman-like husband who gets to be a jerk because she’s a nag and he’s ‘funny.’” If only the show crafted a worthwhile plot around this eternally disrespected character or meaningfully interrogated the messages TV sends about gender and class, instead of getting bogged down in faithfully recreating the thing it’s critiquing. It made sense: here was a beloved TV comedy actor starring in what looked to be a formally innovative, potentially quite dark parody of the very worst kind of TV comedy. The clip generated quite a bit of anticipation, among people who care enough about television to devour trailers for shows that don’t even have release dates yet, anyway.