Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: “Kimmy Has A Birthday!”/”Kimmy’s In A Love Triangle!”
Adulthood is one of those things that sneaks up on you, gradually. You don’t know that it’s happening, but by the time you blink your eyes and awake first thing in the morning, you’re in your thirties with a mortgage and a (gulp) day job. And what you realize is that all the time you’ve had to make the mistakes of your twenties were very important to turning you into the grownup that you are.
So what about Kimmy Schmidt, who didn’t have any of those important life experiences and fumblings that make your thirties more manageable? Or at least whose formative years were spent in near-isolation under the impression that the world had ended? That is one of the central themes of this new sitcom and one that the writers have been doing a great job both mocking and handling tenderly. You can’t really have one without the other.
One of the more important aspects of growing up is trading in your actual family for a surrogate one, whether that is a bunch of co-workers, BFFs or a marriage of your own. Sometimes that’s just a matter of growing your network of loved ones, but in other instances, it is because you need to essentially replace the awful people that raised you.
The latter is certainly the case with Kimmy. Especially because, as we learn in “Birthday!,” her mom pretty much moved on. She remarried the lead detective in the missing persons case (played here with brio by Tim Blake Nelson) and they had a kid together, Kymmi (Kiernan Shipka, or Sally from Mad Men, in full on teen angst mode). With Titus and Lillian and Jacqueline in her life, why should she have any reason to look back and be reminded of the awfulness of the past 15 years? Well, another “fun” aspect of being an adult is truly understanding empathy, which leads to Kimmy embracing these family members she never knew and, in one of the show’s most heartfelt moments of the show, deciding to share her mother’s old heart pendant with her half-sister.