July TV Roundup: Loki & Kevin Can F**k Himself

The theme of this post is TV shows that started out strong but kind of fizzled out at the end, in my humble opinion. You will be sure to find many other opinions online (as is the Internet’s wont), and I certainly am down to watch the next seasons of these shows, but what follows is a dissection of what worked and what didn’t. Your mileage may vary.

Loki: I mean, it’s Loki. This was probably the only Marvel TV show I was excited about when Disney+ first announced it was going into the business of generating Marvel content. I love me some Tom Hiddleston, and what with throwing Owen Wilson into the mix, the show started off like some kind of zany True Detective-esque satire. It was funny, inventive, and the plot was filled with twists and turns as Loki and Mobius (Owen Wilson) tried to find a variant who was hopping through time and wreaking havoc with the sacred timeline that was maintained by members of the mysterious Time Variance Authority. The time traveling allowed for some fun set pieces: my personal fave was a quick jaunt to Pompeii, where Hiddleston at long last got to make use of his Cambridge Classics degree by yelling at some Romans in Latin.

Unfortunately, as someone who is not interested in the comic books and the wider Marvel mythology, the show got a bit too heavy on the fan service and a bit too light on the light entertainment. This is my recurring complaint about the Marvel TV shows - the movies understand they only have two hours and change to tell a story and compel an audience with different levels of interest, so they tend to sprinkle in the Marvel lore as Easter eggs for the fans, while the rest of us casual moviegoers can just enjoy some quippy action and let the plot breeze through our empty heads. But TV shows have more episodes, and while Loki was only restricted to six, it still managed to stuff a lot of goofiness in there that was utterly delightful to hardcore fans and utterly bewildering to me. I shan’t spoil any further than to say that they lost me at the alligator. 

So should you watch Loki? Sure! It’s interesting, features some strong performances, and if you pay attention to the plots of these things, it’s probably deeply absorbing and fun. It might actually be better as a binge now than as a week-to-week show, which is how I watched, promptly forgetting everything by the time the next episode aired. Do you want to watch the god of mischief rustle up some more trouble? Do it!

Kevin Can F**k Himself: Now with a title like that, we all knew I was going to watch this show, right? Toss in the fact that it stars Annie Murphy from the beloved Schitt’s Creek, and I was sold. The show has an absolutely brilliant premise: Murphy plays Allison, a housewife who appears to be in a typical American sitcom where the star is her schlubby man-child of a husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), who has reckless adventures with his dad and next door neighbors, while Allison is the humorless nag who is always trying to keep the house clean and plan for their future. Whenever we see Allison and Kevin together, the lights are bright and there’s canned laughter from the studio audience, chuckling away at Kevin’s jokes and the scrapes he gets himself into. But as soon as Allison is away from Kevin, the lights dim and we enter into a Breaking Bad-esque drama, where she gradually realizes that she hates her husband and will take dramatic steps to escape.

I won’t spoil anything further because this is definitely a ride you want to take with as little information as possible. Again, this might be a show where bingeing is more effective than weekly viewing, as each episode has a cliffhanger that will leave you itching to press play on the next installment. Unfortunately, the problem here is that as brilliant as the premise is, it works a little too well. Kevin’s sitcom shtick that is driving Allison up the wall, also drove me up the wall as an audience member. The show is almost evenly divided between the sitcom and the behind-the-scenes drama and after the initial thrill of seeing how cleverly they were playing with these two genres, the gimmick became a bit tiresome. The show was ratcheting up the tension and went into a lot of fun areas, but overall, I didn’t feel like they quite nailed the landing on that final eighth episode.

Of course, I will definitely watch season 2 because I want to see how they tinker with this format and perhaps figure out a way to tell this story without having sections of it become quite so tedious. Murphy is doing such excellent work on this show and bringing to the fore the plight of all those harridan women who were doomed to be supporting actors in sitcom hell for decades prior. For that alone, I want this show to right the ship and sail forth - they’ve got a good thing going, they just need to figure out how to get there.