Don’t Trust The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Why the B____ in Apt. 23 Was Better
I liked Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt a lot more back when it was called Don’t Trust the B—— in Apartment 23.
Tina Fey’s instant Netflix sensation owes a lot to Nahnatchka Khan’s own fish-out-of-water sitcom, which barely lasted two seasons on ABC before getting the axe with Hulu picking up the unaired episodes. Both shows feature a doe-eyed girl from Indiana who arrives in New York City with nothing to her name (Ellie Kemper’s Kimmy in Unbreakable, Dreama Walker’s June in Don’t Trust the B), a dramatic black gay man who’s fast approaching middle age (Tituss Burgess’ Titus in Unbreakable, Ray Ford’s Luther in Don’t Trust the B), and a status-obsessed Manhattan socialite (Jane Krakowski’s Jacqueline in Unbreakable, Krysten Ritter’s Chloe in Don’t Trust the B).
Granted, Don’t Trust the B’s June has more than an eighth-grade education and she never lived in a bunker, although you might not know it based on the way that television depicts people from the American Midwest. And Jacqueline is admittedly quite a bit older than Chloe in her role as a stepmother and trophy wife. Unbreakable also lacks the magic of James Van Der Beek playing James Van Der Beek in the “meta-role of a lifetime.” But beyond that, it’s hard to chalk the similarities between the two shows up to coincidence.
There’s a reason that Netflix reportedly recommends Don’t Trust the B right after you watch Unbreakable. No Netflix algorithm has ever been more accurate than the one they used for that pick.
I’m not suggesting that Tina Fey plagiarized Khan’s show outright but maybe she binge-watched it on Netflix over a weekend like I did, forgot it existed, and then created Unbreakable a year later while fighting off a case of déjà vu. The Midwest to New York City migration tale may be as old as time but the character types are too uncannily close to ignore. I wouldn’t mind Fey and her team citing Don’t Trust the B as inspiration—I’d even be happy to call Unbreakable a “spiritual successor” to that beloved and prematurely cancelled show—if they had executed on the concept in a more entertaining way. But they didn’t. Don’t Trust the B still outshines its copycat in every way.
Let’s start with Jacqueline (Krakowski) and Chloe (Ritter), the queens of Manhattan. The Unbreakable writers can’t decide which hat they want Krakowski to wear: the sheltered Upper East Side housewife, the woman scorned, the self-hating Native American reconnecting with her past—wait, what? Yes, Krakowski’s ample talents are wasted on a bizarre backstory and a fractured character that feels more like connective plot tissue than a definable person. In the season finale, Jacqueline says that she’s “hoping to find out” who she is. It’s a telling line—I’m not sure the writers know who she is, either.
Jacqueline is at her best when she’s providing the stark, overprivileged contrast to Kimmy’s spartan bunker ways: throwing out an unopened bottle of water, teaching her what a selfie is, introducing her to plastic surgery under the knife of a Frankenstein-esque physician (Martin Short). As soon as Jacqueline’s character devolves into a stereotypical divorce subplot and an overwrought joke about casting white actors in non-white roles, that initial spark between her and Kimmy gets lost in the shuffle. Kimmy’s unique backstory is largely an excuse to make her a blank slate; she loses that all-important contrast if the supporting cast wanders too far afield.