The trailer for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s third season is here, and the unlikely group of friends living in Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s cartoon Manhattan reunites. There’s a big new development this season: Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) is going to college.
It’s fairly common for series about teens (Gilmore Girls, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Boy Meets World) to disorient their audiences by carting their characters off to college once they graduate high school. But those shows aren’t about teens who’re actually in their mid-30s, because those characters haven’t been held captive in a bunker where they were sexually traumatized by an opportunistic apocalypse cultist with a striking resemblance to a sexy-but-troubled ’60s ad man. Somehow, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has managed to handle its absurd-with-serious-undertones plot with a good balance of buoyancy, nonsense, and underlying depth. (Well, for the most part.)
The second season got funny-serious in its back half by introducing a plot in which Kimmy begins therapy, with Tina Fey playing her very drunk shrink. From the just-released trailer for the show’s upcoming season (which will be available to stream on Netflix on May 19), it looks like the series will continue forth with the next logical step in Kimmy’s path out of stunted adolescence and repression.
“After high school, most white girls go to college,” Kimmy’s landlady, Lillian Kaushtupper (Carol Kane), tells her when she asks what she should do now that she has her G.E.D. And so she begins school again, where’s she’s confronted with hard truths like the fact that college doesn’t have recess. Oh, and she’s also going through a divorce with her jailed preacher/ex-captor (Jon Hamm).
Meanwhile, Titus (Tituss Burgess), Kimmy’s roommate and perennially underemployed musical theater actor, is now making money by literally making money: illustrating counterfeits. He just has to hone his ear-drawing skills. He’s also concerned that his boyfriend is sleeping with another man — a fear that leads him down a Lemonade-inspired, baseball bat-swinging, sundress-wearing rampage through the New York City streets, bashing the windows of his Tilda Swinton-decorated truck.
Lillian, meanwhile, has broken up with “Bobby Durst” (Fred Armisen), and has lived to tell the tale.
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