‘ Kimmy Schmidt’ returns to a wider, wackier world
Learn more about our sunny heroine and her friends as Season 2 arrives
It’s always a holiday on the set NEW YORK of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
On one side of the Brooklyn soundstage the Netflix comedy calls home, fake cobwebs and orange streamers cascade over stacks of baked beans and toilet paper — remnants of a kids’ Halloween party hosted inside the show’s apocalypse- shelter set. “The bunker almost doesn’t need to be decorated — it’s already terrifying,” says Ellie Kemper, who plays the contagiously optimistic title character.
Nearby, the cast is filming in Kimmy’s apartment, furnished for Christmas with striped stockings and a small tree topped by a Barbie doll’s head. In this scene, “everyone from the world of Kimmy is in one apartment, and a lot of things are going wrong,” Kemper says. Mimi ( Amy Sedaris) is passed out on the couch; Titus ( Tituss Burgess) gets a visit from his Santa- clad boyfriend ( Mike Carlsen); and Kimmy is under attack from a jealous rival ( Suzan Perry), who’s now married to her onetime love interest, Dong ( Ki Hong Lee).
“The Jews took my painting!” shrieks Jacqueline ( Jane Krakowski) as she bursts through the door.
“Now it’s a party,” cackles Lillian ( Carol Kane), sipping a cocktail amid the chaos.
It’s a colorful window into the erratic, irreverent universe of Unbreakable Season 2, streaming on Netflix Friday. Still at the heart of the episodes is Kimmy, who has gone from living in a cult to working in New York City. “One fun thing this season has been Kimmy and her different jobs,” Kemper says, which include a costumed elf in a year- round Christmas store.
Supporting players are more fully real- ized, too. “The world is getting three- dimensional. I will have an ex- husband,” says Kane, who plays Kimmy’s loopy landlady.
Meanwhile, viewers find ex- trophy wife Jacqueline where we left her: trying to reconnect with her Native American heritage in South Dakota, “but it is suggested to her that we all have our own tribe, and perhaps her tribe is back in Manhattan,” Krakowski says. Struggling to live on her meager $ 12 million divorce settlement, “she feels incredibly broke, although she isn’t. It is her struggle to live below what she considers the ‘ poverty level.’ ”
As for Titus — revealed as a Mississippian named Ronald Wilkerson who ran away from his marriage — “we find out a great deal about why he left,” Burgess says. “It explains a lot of his eccentricities and vulnerable spots, and how he’s felt so hardpressed to hide them with this flashy exterior that he puts on. He’s nothing like that on the inside.”
Titus also has more chances to sing, after his ludicrous anthem Peeno Noir went viral last year. In one episode, the smitten thespian finds himself breaking into fake showtunes. And in a potentially controversial half- hour, Titus sings a mournful ballad dressed as a Japanese geisha, a persona from his past lives.
If any new song were to take off like Peeno, “it would be that,” Burgess says. “It’s a tad jarring, but also very funny and sweet. For all the things for him to have been, he was a geisha. It’s a little ridiculous.”