Outside of Community, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has had perhaps the strangest road to release of any show this season. Schmidt was ordered as a new sitcom for NBC, riding on the network’s history with creator and writer Tina Fey. However, the NBC of today is quite different than the NBC of 2006-2013, when 30 Rock aired. After the end of The Office and 30 Rock, NBC decided to turn away from their comedies, which had always been critical darlings, in hopes of reaching a much broader and ratings-friendly audience with a focus on dramas. Since then, they have cancelled Community and put an end to Parks and Recreation, and the few broader comedies that they have remaining (such as About a Boy, Undateable, and Marry Me) are almost certain to be cancelled after their current seasons.

This left NBC in a bit of a predicament: here they had a very strange show from a creative team whose past work had never garnered huge ratings, and absolutely nowhere to put it on their schedule. So, instead of cancelling Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt pre-air or leaving it to die in a bad timeslot, they agreed to skip the awkward “will this show get picked up somewhere else?” phase and offer it to Netflix. It was a win-win for everybody…at least until NBC decided to launch a comedy series online subscription service last week with no actual comedies to offer. C’est la vie.

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(Spoilers follow for both seasons of Sleepy Hollow)

Season one of Sleepy Hollow was one of the biggest surprises of the 2013-2014 TV season. Before airing, the series looked like one of the most sure-fire misses on Fox’s slate, a modern-day update of the Sleepy Hollow story involving time travel and a machine gun wielding headless horseman. Just watch the trailer below and tell me that it doesn’t look like the stupidest show you’ve ever seen.

Continue reading Sleepy Hollow Season 2 Review →

Sitcoms are, by design, all about stasis and repetition. The audience is sold a premise, and then the show has to keep telling stories within that premise until it is either cancelled or comes to an end. Character growth is kept to a minimum, and often resets at the end of each episode. Nobody typically becomes more successful than they already were at the start, and if anybody gets married or has children, it almost always has to be with another central cast member.

This makes it difficult for writers to end a show. If any lengthy arc is essentially against the rules, then how do you cap things off? How do you put a definitive point on something when your goal has been to stretch it out for years on end? In the past, these have not been major considerations; most shows just ran until they were no longer popular, and then were cancelled without an ending. This has changed in recent years and, while I’m sure it terrifies some writers’ rooms, it has been used as an opportunity for others.

Continue reading Parks and Recreation: Final Season Review →