Extremely clever premise. So far the first episode has been a really effective send-up of the tropes of the inner genre. The husband is horrifyingly unlikable. Take the shallowest/worst bits of Kevin James, Ray Romano, but no redeeming good side.
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Wife is sardonic wisecracking shallow type in inner show, but in outer show, a deeper, well-crafted character plotting to kill the husband. Star is woman from Schitt’s Creek.
Writers are getting really good at simulation/false consciousness based liminal narratives.
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Simulationist shows and movies have gone from sci-fi to frame narrative to code-switching in 30y. Show within a show doesn’t even need excuses like VR or dreamworld or magical illusion. Audiences are now literate enough you can simply use visual cues.
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Shakespeare did play-within-a-play and Asian folktales often use 2-3 levels of frame storytelling (Panchatantra, Arabian Nights), but this is arguably a genuinely new mode that began with Total Recall in 1991. Or possibly Blade Runner 1982 if you admit self-sims into genre.
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The Kevin show is a serious innovation. It relies on audience television literacy. It would make no sense to a 1980s viewer. The cuts from cheery 2-camera stage to 1-camera would seem jarring and arbitrary.
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2 episodes in, though the story is getting meh, I’m enjoying the sheer efficiency of the narration. No fussing around with tech or fantasy premises or even contrivances like a literal show within a show, like the time Homer played Pookie on Itchy and Scratchy.
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Just cut straight to the central conceit using 2 distinct filming styles. In this case, a 90s mediocre-white-male sitcom running in a container within a 2020s cringe 5th-French-feminist tragicomedy. Whether or not you agree with the auteur editorial subtext, the technique works.
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You can imagine any kind of show running inside any other kind. A subset of characters inhabits only the interior, quoted-genre show. It’s a highly effective form of erasure. In this show Kevin literally doesn’t exist outside the bubble maintained by Allison’s emotional labor.
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Vast potential here. I think Wandavision, Westworld, we’re the baroque peak of the “explicit premise simulation” type show. Rick and Morty parodies it to the extent possible, but as Borges (iirc) noted, the baroque can’t be parodied.
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This is narrative multi-tenancy. A multitemporal narrative form that’s implicitly pluralist and subjectivist. I’m guessing there’s high-culture signs of it in Pynchon or something, but that shit is too much work for me. I’m so here for the middle-brow version though 🥳😎🍿🥃
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I doubt it’ll truly take off though. Ironically it’s a bit too demanding of the Kevins of the world.
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Yep. Maybe all evolutions end with this kind of implicit level spawning.
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Maybe a good comparison is with the nineteenth century novel - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights - the novel form had reached maturity, increasing rates of literacy. Frankenstein’s epistolary frame also similar in that it’s formally distinct, not just two levels of storytelling.
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PKD kinda invented the genre in its overwrought full-Godelian form and they’ve been simplifying it since then. The only actual PKD book I’ve read is Maze of Death. It’s more sophisticated than anything made so far for screen I think.
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2x2 of narrative premises:
Viewpoint character inner world is/is-not real
Viewpoint character outer world is/is-not real
Story can reveal or leave ambiguous…
Note that straightforward portals between worlds (Harry Potter, Narnia) are not simulationist
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“My inner world is not real” stories are harder to pull off… as in I’m a clone/robot. Doing the Kevin… style implicit version of that would be tough. Multiple personality movies do that kinda. Like that John Cusack mobile Identity. But that still has an explicit premise.
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In the Kevin show, Kevin never comes alive. The show achieves a permissioning effect where Allison’s witnessing of Kevin in inner show, where she plays cliche sitcom wife, is given so much depth via her outer “real” life, we’re not allowed to watch Kevin except through her hatred
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To get an idea of the effect, imagine one character being portrayed as live action in some scenes, animated in others, but other characters are *only* in animated scenes and never appear in live action scenes. You can only watch the cartoons through crossover live character eyes.
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Except the inner show isn’t a cartoon, just different camera work and lighting.
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