How Kevin Can F**k Himself Helps Defend Skyler White and TV’s Other Unfairly Hated Wives

With the release of Kevin Can F—k Himself on AMC, a genre-bending dark comedy drama that takes deliberate aim at the misogyny that sits at the heart of our most popular and enduring pieces of pop culture, it seems that perhaps the time has finally come to publicly reckon with the way we view wives—sitcom and otherwise—on the television shows we watch. Even the show’s name is a play on the CBS sitcom title Kevin Can Wait, whose narrative storytelling was so lazy that they killed off Kevin’s wife Donna between its first and second seasons because they were “literally just running out of ideas,” and then barely mentioned her death onscreen.

Kevin Can F—k Himself openly acknowledges that the advantages Kevin McRoberts receives—constant adulation, an almost preternatural ability to luck his way out of ridiculous situations, a devoted wife whose hard work and constant presence he simply accepts as his due—only exist because the rules of the show he stars in require it. In the gritty prestige drama half of the series, which presents his wife as a character with interiority and her own necessary point of view, Allison realizes that she deserves better than a life cheerfully accepting uncomfortable period jokes as her lot. And her rage feels like a revelation.

It’s worth noting that AMC has something of a history with unfairly-hated TV wives. While Breaking Bad is frequently hailed as one of the best television series ever produced, the series is also memorable for something far less laudable. On the one hand, its complicated tale of a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher turned vicious drug kingpin is a harrowing watch, as Walter White descends into the worst sort of darkness and drags viewers right along with him. Its scale was somehow both grand and immediate, a morality play that carefully tears apart its characters’ lives on the way to an ending that still stands as one of the few examples of a prestige drama really sticking its landing.

And yet, for all the areas in which it excelled, Breaking Bad was never a show that really knew what to do with its female characters, and Skyler White—Walt’s put-upon wife who spent multiple seasons living in ignorance of his illicit and illegal extracurricular activities before being forced to become a co-conspirator whether she wanted to be or not—often seemed to exist solely as an object for viewers to despise.

Given that Breaking Bad is a story full of generally vile, reprehensible people doing everything from committing petty theft to engaging in torture and murder, it’s never really made a ton of sense that Skyler somehow emerged as the series’ most hated character. Unfairly maligned by many viewers for what essentially boils down to harshing Walt’s buzz, Skyler was constantly labeled a nagging killjoy for simply having the nerve to dislike the fact that her husband repeatedly lied to her about the most basic facts of their lives.

Narratively speaking, Skyler is meant to serve as Breaking Bad’s moral compass, a figure whose presence tarnishes Walt’s ambitions by reminding him that, actually, cooking crystal meth is both bad and illegal. Her unique point of view as the woman who has known Walt at his most normal and average helps puncture the fantasy he creates of Heisenberg, the badass one who knocks. Instead, she reveals him as he is: a delusional, ultimately pathetic man whose good intentions became monstrous in the end.