The Netflix series, created by 30 Rock’s Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, brought audiences a nuanced (and hilarious) black gay man, but its Asian-American and Native-American characters are far from perfect, as are the jokes about them.
Nbcu / Eric Liebowitz / NBC
Anne Helen Petersen: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is funny, it has a lot of potential, it's highly, highly watchable (I, for one, mainlined it over the course of a weekend), and yet, it deals with race in an almost cavalier way. But let's start at the beginning: What were your first impressions of the show?
Alex Alvarez: I definitely enjoyed, like you said, mainlining it the weekend it came out. And I will watch anything Jane Krakowski does, ever, so my very first impression was "YES" and "I'm going to be singing this theme song all month."
Ira Madison III: I loved it. I'd been missing 30 Rock like whoa and there's only so many times you can watch Mean Girls or see Tina Fey host an awards show before you want some new scripted comedy from her. I binged the entire show in about four days, trying in vain to space it out.
AHP: I've been thinking back about how 30 Rock deals with race: There are so many moments when you think, Wait, is that actually racist, or drawing attention to racism through satire? It's a very, very fine line — and I think that show got away with a lot that it wouldn't have otherwise almost entirely due to Tracy Morgan's inclusion. Is Kimmy Schmidt treading that same line?
AA: One thought I kept having as I was watching Kimmy Schmidt was, This feels like a very white writers room. I have no idea whether every person in that room was actually white, but the writing felt like it was written from a perspective that didn't feel as if we're all talking about a communal experience together. I think satire is an extremely important tool in discussing race and the status quo, but I think the person PROVIDING that commentary is an important factor for the success of that satire.
With 30 Rock, the setting was also so crucial, because a lot of time was devoted to skewering media and this sort of self-congratulatory New York liberal attitude, which is great. Those are fine targets. I'm not sure an undocumented Vietnamese delivery dude trying to put his way through school or a Native American woman who feels the need to change her identity to fit in is as great of a target for that sort of skewering. And it very much felt that the joke was more about them and less about the systems within which they're performing.
AHP: Really good point, Alex. I actually had a moment when I went to go look at the race of the writers on IMDb, as if to tell myself, "Oh, it's not an all-white writers room, so maybe it's OK?" I think the narrative we now tell ourselves goes something like: If it's a diverse writers room, then it can't be racist. But that's not necessarily the case.
Eric Liebowitz/Netflix
IM3: Race was something I constantly struggled with on 30 Rock. There were a lot of instances where I found Tracy's performance funny, but only because of his delivery. As it stands, I'm not really a fan of the stereotype as comedy trope. Tracy was first introduced as one and remained that way for the rest of the series. I've been more optimistic about Tituss on Kimmy Schmidt because I've seen him go through more character development in the span of a season than Tracy did throughout seven seasons of 30 Rock.
There were some really great moments in Kimmy Schmidt where blackness and masculinity were confronted in actual storylines, which is not something I felt like 30 Rock ever truly did well. The only time I seriously felt uncomfortable as a black viewer was the opening, with the Antoine Dodson-esque character singing the theme song. But then I got over it, because the song is catchy, so I don't know if I became comfortable with it or was just Stockholmed into liking it. It's one of those weird cultural things where black people doing something funny becomes humorous to a large group of white people (Antoine Dodson of "The Bed Intruder" viral video fame), but as a black person, you don't feel like they're laughing at it the way you are.
AHP: Yes! And I think that because one of the main characters on Kimmy Schmidt is a black gay (rural) male, and the narrative does something nuanced with his negotiation of the world, many people have ignored the more egregious treatment of Asian and Native American characters.
IM3: I agree. For as much fun as I found Tituss, I was IMMEDIATELY like WTF when Dong showed up on the screen. It felt like more of the same stereotype as a joke that 30 Rock often did poorly, and Dong contrasted with Tituss, who was actually dealing with real issues like having to act straight to get acting roles or being a black man in a gentrifying city. Dong, on the other hand, felt like the brother of 2 Broke Girls' Han Lee.
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