Make Good Choices: How “Kimmy vs. the Reverend” Rewards Niceness (While Letting You Be a Little Bad)

It’s even better than Bandersnatch.

I never wanted Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to end, and now, thanks to its hilarious, interactive, multiple-choice special Kimmy vs the Reverend, it technically doesn’t.

Just as with Netflix’s Black Mirror sorta-revolutionary movie Bandersnatch (which really only used the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' storytelling structure popularised in the 1980s), you get to decide how the story progresses. Throughout, you’re given two or three or four options, and depending on which one you click, Kimmy’s latest story will wind its way down very different roads. Make good choices, and Kimmy will walk the aisle to marry her prince charming. Go a different route and you, umm, might undo the #TimesUp movement. Or die. Either way, you’ll be offered the chance to restart and change tact. I’ve gone through three times already, and I’m yet to find "Kim Jong-un" (apparently played by SNL’s Bowen Yang in the credits), so yes, I’ll be going back.

Written by series creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, along with Sam Means and Meredith Scardino, Kimmy vs the Reverend is just as cartoonishly bizarre as the show; in fact, more so, thanks to the reality-bending concept at its core. (When you reach a dead end, characters emerge to chastise you, and construction worker Mikey, played by Mike Carlsen, starts fixing the broken "fourth wall".) While Bandersnatch had plenty of fun with its narrative device, Kimmy makes mincemeat out of it, and toys more with the viewers. Even opting to skip the opening credits will punish the audience by playing an extended version. It’s actually a beautiful reward.

Just don't mistake Kimmy vs the Reverend for a movie; this special, directed by Claire Scanlon, never feels larger in scope than a typical episode, only longer. No biggie. At least that means more time for jokes!

The special also never betrays the sinister reality burbling beneath Kimmy’s candy-coloured world. This is, after all, the show about a teenager who was kidnapped and kept in a bunker by a madman, and who tries to re-adjust to the outside world decades later while burying her trauma under a façade of positivity. In the show’s fourth season, Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) finally uttered the 'R-word' in reference to her time with Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm). Though she found peace (and wealth) at the end of S4, the Reverend nonetheless lived to keep tormenting her. At the top of Kimmy vs the Reverend, she suspects he has more women in captivity, and then goes on a journey to unearth the remaining "mole women" locked underground in West Virginia. This, despite her being days away from marrying the sheltered Prince Frederick (Daniel Radcliffe, a sporting and very funny addition to the cast).

Of course Kimmy's old pals Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski), Tituss (Tituss Burgess) and Lillian (Carol Kane) are along for the ride, but it’s really up to you how you want to deploy them. Will they accompany Kimmy? Will they throw a bachelor party for Frederick? Or will they keep derailing the mission to eat delicious woodland scrod? You decide, dear viewer!

That’s all super fun. But getting the controls to Kimmy Schmidt is more meaningful than gimmicky. As some characters remark, she might be the only good person alive. So what happens if you give her dastardly directions? Kemper, to her incredible credit, does some of her most moving and heartbreaking work when you force her to do something against her better nature. Hamm’s goofily-evil Reverend also reveals further layers, and when he admits he did all those horrible things to Kimmy simply because he could, you feel a pang of guilt too.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt deserves as much praise as can be heaped upon it for how it perfectly captured this moment—when normalised sexual assault reached the mainstream as, duh doy, 'a terrible thing'—without preaching yet by still being unapologetically prickly. Kimmy vs the Reverend remains uncompromising, while ultimately encouraging the viewer to (eventually) do the right thing. You get to have your cake and eat it too, which is something Kimmy and Tituss would probably love.

4/5

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend will be available to stream on Netflix from 12 May 2020.